PUBLISHER'S NOTE: This Blog is interested in false confessions because of the disturbing number of exonerations in the USA, Canada and multiple other jurisdictions throughout the world, where, in the absence of incriminating forensic evidence the conviction is based on self-incrimination – and because of the growing body of scientific research showing how vulnerable suspects are to widely used risky interrogation methods such as the notorious ‘Reid Technique.'
Harold Levy: Publisher; The Charles Smith Blog:
------------------------------------------------------------
PASSAGE OF THE DAY: "The boys recanted the confessions and said they had been coerced. This, their lawyers argued, made the statements inadmissible. Prosecutors replied that parents of three of them had been present as their sons admitted to the crime on videotape. How could that be coercive? Not so well understood was that the parents were only sporadically present for interrogations that spread over a day before the camera was turned on. It was during those unrecorded sessions, unseen by anyone outside the room, that the damning statements were first extracted. In the series, the interrogation scenes are presented as a whirlpool of badgering, menace and cajoling. They bear a strong resemblance to real life. Not long ago, confessions were seen as trophies of detective work because they are so hard to overcome in a trial. But the DNA era has revealed that false confessions are behind many wrongful convictions. Especially with minors, they most often are the invention of cornered minds. Bad and wrong confessions are routinely waved into court behind true ones. The judge — specially picked for the case — ruled that the confessions met the legal requirements for voluntariness."
STORY: "The True Story of How a City in Fear Brutalized the Central Park Five, “ by reporter Jim Dwyer, published by The New York Times on May 30, 2019. (Jim Dwyer joined The Times in 2001. He was the winner of the 1995 Pulitzer Prize for commentary and a co-recipient of the 1992 Pulitzer for breaking news. He is also the author or co-author of six books.)
SUB-HEADING: “When They See Us” revisits the case of the wrongfully convicted teenage boys. A writer who covered the original trial looks back on a warped time, and the warping of truth,"
GIST: "This
is a story of the biggest story of its day, a crime that set a
high-water mark for depravity, an urban atrocity that caused existential
hand-wringing for America’s biggest city. It was a story that — over 30 years — changed from solid to liquid to gas, all but vanishing. “When They See Us,” a four-part series premiering May 31 on Netflix directed by Ava DuVernay, is based on the lives of five men who were wrongfully convicted and sent to prison as teenagers for gang-raping and nearly killing Trisha Meili, a woman who was jogging in Central Park in 1989. Their convictions were vacated in 2002, and the city paid $41 million
in 2014 to settle their civil rights lawsuit. Hated by one generation
as brutalizers, they were hailed by the next as the brutalized......................."The
attack had not been a gang rape, but almost certainly an assault
carried out by a serial criminal acting on his own while the five boys
were elsewhere in the park, an investigation by the Manhattan district
attorney’s office concluded in 2002. It is a profound distinction.
Bungling by the authorities had left the real author of the crime
against Ms. Meili, a truly dangerous predator, on the street
for months as he carried out a binge of raping, maiming and murdering
across the Upper East Side of Manhattan. Ms. Meili was the second woman
he raped and beat in the park that week."........................."Unlike
the accurate accounts they gave to police of those events, their
confessions to the assault on the jogger were wrong about where, when
and how it happened. In the series, the police and prosecutors are
portrayed as immediately aware of these discrepancies. That is false.
Chaos does not get its due. Ms. Meili was not identified for nearly a
day, and her movements not established until much later. The tunnel
vision that took over the investigators is rendered solely as amoral
ambition, but the reality of error in the Central Park case, as in most
everything, is more interesting and nuanced than cartoon villainy. Still, it is a fact that in 1989, there was little interest in the weakness of the confessions. This
story — of pitiless teenagers taking turns with a woman, then caving in
her skull — was big enough, terrible enough, to electrify a city grown
numb to its own badness...........................In
those years, the daily pulse of New York life included a murder, on
average, every five hours, every day; rapes nearly twice as often; and
robberies just five or six minutes apart. Yet
the attack in Central Park stood out because, as Mayor Edward I. Koch
said, the confessions by the five teens could have been a chapter of “A
Clockwork Orange” come to life. After
all, it had not been the act of a single, deranged individual, but a
“social and premeditated” crime by a group, The New York Post wrote. That was most staggering of all........................The boys recanted the confessions and said they had been coerced. This, their lawyers argued, made the statements inadmissible.
Prosecutors replied that parents of three of them had been present as
their sons admitted to the crime on videotape. How could that be
coercive? Not so well understood was that the parents were only
sporadically present for interrogations that spread over a day before
the camera was turned on. It was during those unrecorded sessions,
unseen by anyone outside the room, that the damning statements were
first extracted. In
the series, the interrogation scenes are presented as a whirlpool of
badgering, menace and cajoling. They bear a strong resemblance to real
life. Not long ago, confessions were seen as trophies of detective work
because they are so hard to overcome in a trial. But the DNA era has
revealed that false confessions are behind many wrongful convictions.
Especially with minors, they most often are the invention of cornered minds. Bad and wrong confessions are routinely waved into court behind true ones. The judge — specially picked for the case — ruled that the confessions met the legal requirements for voluntariness................................Breathtaking
as her appearance was, it added nothing to the proofs. Later that day, I
watched other witnesses say that for all the intimate violence, not one
iota of scientific evidence linked any of the five to the attack. A
forensic pathologist, the prosecution’s own expert, could not testify
that Ms. Meili had been attacked by more than one person. In closing
arguments, the prosecutor incorrectly said that hairs matching the
jogger’s were found on the clothing of the boys. They spent six to 13 years
in prison. Before parole boards, when a show of unqualified remorse
would have given them a better shot at leaving prison earlier, they
acknowledged witnessing or participating in other wrongdoing in the park
but refused to concede having had anything to do with the jogger. They stuck with their stories. So did the system. Years later, the hair “match” claimed by the prosecutor was discredited through DNA testing. It was part of an exhaustive revisiting of evidence that took place in 2002, when Matias Reyes,
a murderer and serial rapist serving 33 years to life for other crimes,
got word to the district attorney’s office that he — and he alone — had
struck the jogger as she ran, and dragged her off the road to rape and
bludgeon. His was the only DNA recovered. After
months of investigation, Manhattan district attorney Robert M.
Morgenthau concluded Mr. Reyes knew what he was talking about, and that
the five boys had not. Their confessions were a mash of error. Mr.
Morgenthau moved to vacate the verdicts his office had won. The original
story dissolved in a meticulous 58-page report, written by two senior assistants, Nancy Ryan and Peter Casolaro.It documented how Mr. Reyes hunted and hurt women on
his own. Investigators found no connections between him and the five,
or to other teens in the park that night. Two days before the attack on
Ms. Meili, he had raped another woman in the park. In the three months
after, he raped four others, murdering one. He always acted alone. His
admissions in 2002 about the 1989 park rapes came while he was serving
time for the other crimes.'
The entire story can be read 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/charlessmith. Information on "The Charles Smith Blog Award"- and its nomination process - can be found at: http://smithforensic.blogspot.com/2011/05/charles-smith-blog-award-nominations.html Please send any comments or information on other cases and issues of interest to the readers of this blog to: hlevy15@gmail.com. Harold Levy: Publisher: The Charles Smith Blog;
———————————————————————
