The Tragedy Of False Confessions

A new Ralph Nader essay from Common Dreams:

The Fifth Amendment to the United States Constitution protects a person from being a "witness against himself." All too often that is what happens - not on the witness stand but in the police station, and even after a person has been read his rights. The spirit and sometimes letter of the Fifth Amendment are violated routinely as such police cajole and bully innocent people to confess. Prosecutors, judges, and juries usually ratify the error because they can't believe the confessor innocent - only adding to the suspect's Kafkaesque nightmare.

Why would the police engage in outrageous tactics that implicate the innocent? For the same reason that prosecutors, judges, and juries play their roles in this tragedy - they are convinced that no one would actually confess if he were innocent. Since we now know that this intuition is false, we need to take measures that guard against false confessions. Hirsch's website proposes a range of reforms, including mandatory taping of interrogations. But, he suggests, the most important reform is education.

Everyone must recognize that false confessions can and do occur.

Click here for the rest.

This is what comes from having an enforcement system that is institutionally geared toward getting convictions instead of finding the truth. Invariably, the conviction mandate affects the way both cops and prosecutors think--they're looking to make cases, rather than for what actually happened. It's further compounded by the fact that many DA's are elected officials: there is a very tangible pressure to show voters that "justice" is being done, which ultimately translates into waving around high numbers of convictions to show that a given head prosecutor is "tough on crime." Supposedly, this is all supposed to be balanced by impartial judges and zealous defense lawyers. Unfortunately, for most people who are accused, it just doesn't work out that way. Judges traditionally give much more deference to prosecutors and cops, who have vast resources upon which they can draw, and public defenders are often the least experienced lawyers out there, being paid very little, with only a fraction of the resources that their competition has. Our entire criminal judicial system has serious shortcomings. It's a damned shame that so many Americans simply don't give a shit.

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