PASSAGE ONE OF THE DAY: "Until modern-day DNA technology began proving hundreds of confessions false around the country, few believed that anyone rational would ever falsely confess. We know better now: Hundreds of proven false confession cases have been documented. Indeed, false confessions are the leading cause of wrongful convictions in American homicide cases. Even the ability to glimpse inside the interrogation room is new. Twenty years ago, interrogations were recorded in only two states; today, that number sits at 26. The recording phenomenon is new enough, indeed, that the law has yet to catch up with coercive interrogation tactics that the world has only recently had a chance to see. Dassey sits in a Wisconsin prison to this day because a court held that the law does not clearly prohibit the tactics used against him — even though viewers around the globe were outraged by what they saw on his interrogation videotape. If coercive interrogations are outrageous enough to mesmerize — and horrify — millions of viewers, then they should be at the forefront of criminal justice reform agendas."
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PASSAGE TWO OF THE DAY: "Many of today’s most-watched true crime shows are not straightforward “Law and Order”- style procedurals in which the good guy gets the bad guy. Rather, they deal in thwarted justice. They’re stories of wrongful conviction — and, increasingly, of false confession. “Making a Murderer,” after all, shows intellectually disabled teen Brendan Dassey confessing on videotape to a murder he can’t even accurately describe. “When They See Us” dramatizes the real-life wrongful convictions of five teenagers — Korey Wise, Antron McCray, Kevin Richardson, Raymond Santana and Yusef Salaam — all of whom were coerced into admitting to a brutal rape that DNA later proved they didn’t commit. And Netflix’s “The Confession Tapes” features nine separate cases in which videotaped interrogations yielded highly questionable confessions to serious crimes. So why is the true crime genre fascinated with the false confession. On a gut level, there’s an emotional potency to false confession stories that makes for compelling, if disturbing, viewing. Watching an interrogator manipulate someone into giving a confession that turns out to be false is like watching a person get duped into becoming the instrument of his or her own destruction. After seeing such an interrogation unfold, one begins to understand why our constitutional framers were so disturbed by forced self-incrimination that they felt compelled to adopt a constitutional amendment — the Fifth Amendment — to guard against it. False confession stories also were, historically, relatively novel. Until modern-day DNA technology began proving hundreds of confessions false around the country, few believed that anyone rational would ever falsely confess. We know better now: Hundreds of proven false confession cases have been documented. Indeed, false confessions are the leading cause of wrongful convictions in American homicide cases.
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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 (as well as false identification and jailhouse informants) – and because of the growing body of scientific research showing how vulnerable suspects (especially juveniles) are to widely used interrogation methods such as the notorious ‘Reid Technique.’" Harold Levy: Publisher: The Charles Smith Blog;
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COMMENTARY: "False confessions drive the true crime TV craze, but it's time to end the spectacle - Chicago TribuneLaura Nirider and Steven Drizin are lawyers and professors of law at Northwestern University who study interrogations and confessions. Their client, Brendan Dassey, was featured in the Netflix series “Making a Murderer.”)
PHOTO CAPTION: "Brendan
Dassey appears in court in Manitowoc, Wisconsin, in April 2007. At
least 20 million Netflix accounts streamed the first season of “Making a
Murderer,”a docuseries that questioned the intellectually disabled
teen's murder conviction.)
GIST: A global groundswell of fascination has surged in recent years around the so-called “true crime” media genre. It took off in 2014, when the “Serial”
podcast’s coverage of Baltimore teen Adnan Syed’s murder conviction
garnered more than 175 million downloads. The following year, at least
20 million Netflix accounts streamed the first season of “Making a Murderer,” a docuseries that questioned two Wisconsin murder convictions. And just last month, “When They See Us”
creator Ava DuVernay tweeted that 23 million Netflix accounts have
watched her retelling of New York’s Central Park jogger case since the
show’s release on May 31. But
this is a trend with a twist. Many of today’s most-watched true crime
shows are not straightforward “Law and Order”-style procedurals in which
the good guy gets the bad guy. Rather, they deal in thwarted justice.
They’re stories of wrongful conviction — and, increasingly, of false
confession. “Making a Murderer,” after all, shows intellectually disabled teen Brendan Dassey confessing on videotape to a murder he can’t even accurately describe. “When
They See Us” dramatizes the real-life wrongful convictions of five
teenagers — Korey Wise, Antron McCray, Kevin Richardson, Raymond Santana
and Yusef Salaam — all of whom were coerced into admitting to a brutal
rape that DNA later proved they didn’t commit. And Netflix’s “The
Confession Tapes” features nine separate cases in which videotaped
interrogations yielded highly questionable confessions to serious
crimes. So why is the true crime genre fascinated with the false confession. On
a gut level, there’s an emotional potency to false confession stories
that makes for compelling, if disturbing, viewing. Watching an
interrogator manipulate someone into giving a confession that turns out
to be false is like watching a person get duped into becoming the
instrument of his or her own destruction. After seeing such an
interrogation unfold, one begins to understand why our constitutional
framers were so disturbed by forced self-incrimination that they felt
compelled to adopt a constitutional amendment — the Fifth Amendment — to
guard against it. False
confession stories also were, historically, relatively novel. Until
modern-day DNA technology began proving hundreds of confessions false
around the country, few believed that anyone rational would ever falsely
confess. We know better now: Hundreds of proven false confession cases
have been documented. Indeed, false confessions are the leading cause of
wrongful convictions in American homicide cases. Even
the ability to glimpse inside the interrogation room is new. Twenty
years ago, interrogations were recorded in only two states; today, that
number sits at 26. The recording phenomenon is new enough, indeed, that
the law has yet to catch up with coercive interrogation tactics that the
world has only recently had a chance to see. Dassey
sits in a Wisconsin prison to this day because a court held that the
law does not clearly prohibit the tactics used against him — even though
viewers around the globe were outraged by what they saw on his
interrogation videotape. If
coercive interrogations are outrageous enough to mesmerize — and
horrify — millions of viewers, then they should be at the forefront of
criminal justice reform agendas. To
start, we need videotaped interrogations in all 50 states and at the
federal level. Without a recording, there’s simply no way to reconstruct
what happened in the interrogation room — whether coercive or not. But
transparency, while crucial, is only a first step. Reform efforts must
aim to improve interrogation tactics too. Psychologists have long
identified certain common interrogation tactics as risk factors for
false confession, including lying about evidence and misleading a
suspect by minimizing the consequences of confessing — both tactics that
courts too often permit. Indeed, watching such misinformation take root
in a naive suspect’s mind is part of what makes viewers squirm. In
one of the most wrenching scenes from “Making a Murderer,” special
education student Dassey asks his interrogators to take him back to
school after he implicates himself in a murder. If one rewinds his
interrogation videotape, though, it’s easy to understand why Dassey
thinks he’s going back to school: Earlier, police had falsely assured
him that he’d be “all right” and have “nothing to worry about” as long
as he told them a story that fit their own theories. But after he
parroted back his interrogators’ theories of guilt, Dassey was arrested,
not released. Such
lies and false assurances of leniency are seen repeatedly in false
confession cases. It’s time for state legislatures to start prohibiting
these tactics — especially with children and other vulnerable defendants
— and it’s time for courts to start excluding confessions extracted by
these tactics. Indeed, select police departments around the U.S. are
already piloting less coercive interrogation techniques that don’t
extract confessions by falsely dangling freedom; and those departments
are still solving crimes. If
reforms are adopted in the interrogation room, we might take real steps
toward making the true crime obsession with false confessions obsolete —
by reducing the prevalence of these terrible miscarriages of justice in
the first place. And that’d be a real-life victory worth seeing."
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;
