STORY: "Why Do Innocent Women Confess to Crimes They Didn’t Commit," by Amanda Marie Knox, published by Vice on December 13, 2016;
GIST: Very little is known about how different
genders experience criminal investigations differently—but is it time
for this to change? "What we think in this situation," said the
first detective, "the other babies are screaming, crying, whatever.
You're taking care of them by yourself. You have Ben in your hands, he
starts acting up and, you get mad at him and you throw him on the
floor." "You threw him on the floor?" asked the second detective. Transfixed by her accusers, Melissa Calusinski nodded. "Yeah." On
January 14, 2009, 16-month-old Benjamin Kingan was discovered
unresponsive in his bouncy chair at the Illinois daycare where
22-year-old Calusinski worked. Initial examination showed he had
suffered a traumatic brain injury. Two days later, detectives George Filenko and Sean Curran walked out of a nine-hour interrogation
at the Lake Zurich police department with a detailed videotaped
confession. Calusinski first denied knowledge of how Kingan could have
sustained his injuries, but eventually admitted, under sustained
questioning, that Kingan had a habit of flinging himself backwards and
hitting his head on the floor. Eventually, Calusinski confessed to
throwing Kingan violently to the ground. Footage of Calusinski,
alone in a police squad car, shows her recanting her confession. "No,"
she mutters, sitting forward in the back seat, wrists handcuffed behind
her back. "Innocent." Despite this, her confession helped secure her
conviction for Kingan's murder in November 2011. Calusinski continues to
profess her innocence from prison, though her requests for a new trial have been denied. "Melissa's arrest, prosecution, and conviction relied exclusively
upon her false confession," Kathleen Zellner, Calusinski's
post-conviction attorney, explains over email. Zellner highlights how
physical evidence from the scene contradicts the confession. Kingan's autopsy
showed no skull fracture, abrasions, or bruising: all of which you
would expect to see on a small child thrown violently thrown against a
tile floor. In February 2016, when asked by CBS correspondent Brad Edwards why she confessed, Calusinski struggled to explain: "The only way for me to get out of there was basically what they wanted." Reams have been written about why she confessed
to a crime many believe her to be innocent of—was she subject to
questionable interrogation tactics? Did her low IQ play a part?
(Neuropsychologist Dr. Robert Hanlon testified in court that Calusinski
tested as "highly suggestible", with a very low verbal IQ—something proven to increase an individual's likelihood to confess to a crime they didn't commit.) What
hasn't been discussed is whether Calusinski's gender had anything to do
with it. According to the National Registry of Exonerations, women
represent 11 percent of exonerees involving a false confession compared
to nine percent of exonerations overall. This may suggest that women are
slightly more likely to be convicted of a crime they did not commit
based on a false confession. We are all of us social animals,
conditioned to please and comply with authority figures—such as police
officers. But compliance and suggestibility aren't hardwired traits:
We're taught them. "Men hold higher status in society, so have more
power," Alice H. Eagly,
a psychology and gender studies professor at Northwestern University,
tells me. "Women are commonly in roles that involve caring and
cooperation. Expectations are formed for men to be more influential and
women more easily influenced." Women are raised under a different
social incentive structure than men, where attitudes of compliance and
deference to authority are more encouraged. This finds its most damning
realization in the interrogation room, a situation designed to amplify
the absolute control and authority of investigators—an experience I know
only too well. One 2011 paper
from the University of Bristol, based on interviews with 50
incarcerated British women, found that women are more vulnerable to
coercion and threats to family responsibilities—making it more likely
they'll falsely confess. Aside from this, little research exists
exploring whether women are more likely to admit to crimes they didn't
commit. Professor
Saul Kassin, a leading false confessions researcher, explains why scant
evidence exists in this area. "The vast majority of suspects for
violent crimes are men. Often we do analyze for gender and nothing comes
of it―at least not in our laboratory experiments." Quite simply, the
proportion of women committing violent crimes is too low to allow for
statistical modelling. I ask Kassin if there are dispositional
characteristics that render certain people susceptible to coercive
interrogation tactics. "There are two personality traits that can
dispositionally increase a person's vulnerability: high levels of
compliance, and scoring high on measures of suggestibility―which
increases a person's susceptibility to misinformation and false
memories." And
women are also more likely to be the victims of false memory
syndrome—that is, believe something to be true that did not actually
happen to them—than men. Ninety-two percent of those affected with false memories are female,
and they're usually implanted with false memories as a result of
suggestive psychotherapy (though, as women are more likely to seek
treatment for mental disorders, this can skew the results.) "Women go into therapy for depression and eating disorders," explains Elizabeth F. Loftus,
a false memory expert at the University of California, Irvine, "and
come out of it thinking they were raped as a child." Loftus' research
advocates against repressed-memory therapy, where therapists seek to
treat their patients' symptoms of psychosis by encouraging them to
"remember" repressed traumatic experiences, but in fact implant false
memories, often of childhood sexual abuse. She tells me that in her
laboratory experiments, she's able to implant entirely false memories into "an average of 30 percent of normal, healthy people (of both genders.)" If Loftus is able to implant false memories in 30 percent of the
normal population, women such as Calusinski—socially compliant, and with
a low IQ—stand little chance in the face of aggressive police
techniques. Women are also far more likely to be convicted of
crimes that never occurred―that is, accidents or misfortunes mistaken
for crimes, like suicides judged to be homicides. That's the case for 66.6 percent of female exonerations; it's 28.7 percent for men, according to my own calculations based on the National Registry of Exonerations. Like Kristin Bunch, wrongfully
convicted in 1996 of killing her three-year-old son by setting fire to
her home, only to be exonerated 17 years later when previously
undisclosed evidence indicated that the fire was accidental. Or Sabrina Butler,
wrongfully convicted in 1990 of killing her nine-month-old son by
crushing him, only to be exonerated after five years on death row when
it was found that her son actually died from a hereditary kidney
condition. More recently, Elizabeth Ramirez, Kristie Mayhugh, Cassandra
Rivera, and Anna Vasquez (the so-called San Antonio Four) were finally exonerated
in November, after being wrongfully convicted of sexually abusing
Ramirez's two nieces based on the children's coerced testimony.
Women
are particularly vulnerable in cases involving the death of a child. "A
noticeable difference in women's cases is that, when a child is hurt or
dies under mysterious circumstances, the caregiver (mother or
babysitter) is usually blamed," argues Judith Royal,
the co-director of the Women's Project at Northwestern University's
Center on Wrongful Convictions. And women's desire to be solicitous and
assist the police in their investigations can have tragic consequences,
as Royal explains to me. "The mother or caregiver would be very
motivated to cooperate with the police to try to figure out what
happened and might not be aware that they are being targeted as the
cause of the death and should have an attorney.".........This motivation to cooperate, without legal assistance, is
exactly the kind of mentality that renders people susceptible to
coercion, and unshackles agenda-driven interrogators to implement their
most powerful persuasion tactics, outlined in this 2005 study.
Investigators may isolate and "manipulate a suspect into thinking that
it is in his or her best interest to confess." They combine positive and
negative incentives to "increase the anxiety and despair associated
with denial and reduce the anxiety associated with confession." It's a
perfect storm that disproportionately affects women where crimes are
imagined when they don't actually exist. "When
a woman is accused of child abuse or murder after the death of a child
she is judged both societally and legally through stereotyped ideals of
womanhood and motherhood," writes Andrea Lewis, of Northwestern
University's Center on Wrongful Convictions, in the Albany Law Review.
"When no explanation can be found she faces both our cultural
predisposition to find the woman responsible and our historical need to
believe babies do not just die." After all, what is less womanly and
more monstrous than a woman failing to live up to her reproductive role
as caretaker? Investigators
look for criminal intent. When in doubt, they can erroneously assume
it, and subsequently use all their authority and means of influence to
solicit confirmation. A vulnerable and mentally-challenged woman like
Melissa Calusinski stood little chance against dedicated investigators.
As her defense-appointed neuropsychologist Dr. Robert Hanlon testified
at Calusinski's trial, "[she] demonstrated a degree of vulnerability to
suggestion both to leading questions and then to feedback regarding the
inaccuracy of her responding. During
the interrogation, every time Calusinski professed her innocence,
Detectives Curran and Filenko came back with variations of, "We know you
were there," "These stories are not helping you," and "It's
mathematically and physically impossible for [Ben] to have sustained
those injuries based on [your] story." In the interrogation room, they
theorized that Ben Kingan died at the hands of his caretaker rather than
at the hands of natural misfortune, and as a result, Calusinski made a
confession that many legal observers believe to be false. Throughout
history, our ideas about justice have repeatedly failed women in this
same, special way. We imagine criminal intent where it doesn't exist.........If you believe—as many do—that Melissa Calusinski is innocent,
then her case raises important questions about how our criminal justice
system treats vulnerable women, and whether gender should be a factor in
prosecutorial interrogation strategies."
The entire article can be found at:
https://broadly.vice.com/en_us/article/amanda-knox-why-do-innocent-women-confess-to-crimes-they-didnt-commitThe entire article can be found at:
PUBLISHER'S NOTE: I am monitoring this case/issue. Keep your eye on the Charles Smith Blog for reports on developments. The Toronto Star, my previous employer for more than twenty incredible years, has put considerable effort into exposing the harm caused by Dr. Charles Smith and his protectors - and into pushing for reform of Ontario's forensic pediatric pathology system. The Star has a "topic" section which focuses on recent stories related to Dr. Charles Smith. It can be found at: http://www.thestar.com/topic/
