Imagine being accused and convicted, spending years of your life behind bars, for a crime you never committed. Unfortunately, that is the sad reality for many individuals within the United States. Since 1989, there have been 3,250 exonerations in the United States- totaling 28,171 years lost behind bars by innocent individuals, or an average of 8.7 years per person (National Registry of Exonerations, 2022). We as Americans are expected to put our faith in our judicial system. “Innocent until proven guilty” and “the right to a fair trial,” are what we are taught from the time we are young children. Then how come innocent men and women, boys and girls, are being held accountable for crimes they did not commit? Out of the individuals exonerated by DNA evidence, a shocking 30% played a part in their original convictions by providing a false confession (Innocence Staff, 2017). Many may ask, “Why would anyone admit to a crime they did not commit?”
To examine this issue, we can look at the devasting case of the Central Park Five, rightfully now known as the Exonerated Five. During this now infamous investigation, five young African American and Hispanic boys, aged 14-16, were wrongfully convicted of brutally raping and leaving for dead a women jogger in New York City’s Central Park, back in April of 1989. While gaining worldwide attention during the time of the trial, and more recently becoming a Netflix miniseries, this case has shed light on some of the factors associated with false confessions and subsequent wrongful convictions.
Within this investigation, the Reid Interrogation Technique had been used. This method had been the predominant interrogation method in the United States since the 1960s. While this interrogation method was popular by John Reid, who had a reputation for getting confessions out of criminals, and was taught to hundreds of thousands of law enforcement agents, this method is at fault for initiating false confessions as well (Kozinski, 2017). This technique is characterized by highly confrontational and aggressive suspect interrogation tactics, producing backlash from the social science community for its manipulative nature (Gruman et al., 2017). In the case of the Exonerated Five, all five boys were coerced into giving false confessions after at least 7 hours of brutal interrogations. Based on these confessions, and with no other evidence linking these boys to the crime, they were convicted and sentenced to six to thirteen years in prison. Once these statements were coerced out of these boys, nothing else mattered in this case- not them taking back their statements, not the incompatible DNA sample, or the mismatched details provided within their confessions (BBC, 2019).
Confessions are typically viewed as concrete evidence of a person’s guilt. Who would admit to something they didn’t do, right? The issue with this assumption, however, is the phenomenon known as the fundamental attribution factor. This can be observed when people underestimate the power of external, environmental factors, and instead overestimate internal factors (Gruman et al., 2017). When taking these boys’ confessions at face value, we are neglecting to account for the unimaginable distress these adolescents were put under before finally giving the interrogating officers what they were after.
Fortunately, in April of 2017, Wicklander-Zulawski & Associates, a leading police consultation group in the U.S., announced that they would no longer be teaching the Reid Interrogation Method to police officers. By recognizing and correcting faults within police interrogations, we can hope there will be less people who fall victim to being coerced into submitting false confessions. As for the Exonerated Five, they were awarded $41 million dollars in a civil lawsuit against New York City. However, like the other 3,250 exonerated cases in the United States, they will never get the years back they spent behind bars.
Reference:
BBC. (2019, June 12). Central Park five: The true story behind when they see us. BBC News. Retrieved from https://www.bbc.com/news/newsbeat-48609693
Gruman, J.A. Schneider, F.W. & Coutts, L.A. (2017). Applied Social Psychology: Understanding and Addressing Social and Practical Problems. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage
Innocence Staff. (2017, March 8). Leading Police Consulting Group Will No Longer Teach the Reid Technique. Innocence Project. Retrieved from https://innocenceproject.org/police-consultants-drop-reid-technique/
Kozinski, W. (2017). The reid interrogation technique and false confessions: time for change. Seattle Journal for Social Justice, 16(2), 301-346.
National Registry of Exonerations. (2022, October 3). Exonerations in the United States Map. Retrieved from https://www.law.umich.edu/special/exoneration/Pages/Exonerations-in-the-United-States-Map.aspx
The Central Park Five is one of the largest examples of injustices, racism, and coerced interrogation strategies. I agree that the new Netflix documentary is a great example of the reality that happened in this case to spread awareness on the flaws of the justice system. Since this case thank the Reid Interrogation Techniques is not the model that is currently taught to new detectives. This approach of interrogation leads to false confessions, coercion, and inaccurate information regarding the case. Confessions are view in the eyes of the law are concreted evidence of a person guilt until this case. It is hard for our mind to view from the perceptive of these children and what they were going through during the time of these tapes. It’s hard to hear their own voices stating what they did but it is not the truth. Thankfully for this case justice was served and the victims of false imprisonment were compensated finically for the burden of going to jail as a free man. This case needs to be used as a lesson for all that you cannot believe everything at face value. The justice system is nowhere near a perfect system, but they use cases like this one to improve the system.
Reference:
BBC. (2019, June 12). Central Park five: The true story behind when they see us. BBC News. Retrieved from https://www.bbc.com/news/newsbeat-48609693
Gruman, J.A. Schneider, F.W. & Coutts, L.A. (2017). Applied Social Psychology: Understanding and Addressing Social and Practical Problems. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage
Innocence Staff. (2017, March 8). Leading Police Consulting Group Will No Longer Teach the Reid Technique. Innocence Project. Retrieved from https://innocenceproject.org/police-consultants-drop-reid-technique/
Kozinski, W. (2017). The reid interrogation technique and false confessions: time for change. Seattle Journal for Social Justice, 16(2), 301-346.
National Registry of Exonerations. (2022, October 3). Exonerations in the United States Map. Retrieved from https://www.law.umich.edu/special/exoneration/Pages/Exonerations-in-the-United-States-Map.aspx
I have never heard of the Central Park Five until today. It is sad to think these young boys were manipulated and tortured into confessing to a crime they did not commit. It is highlighted in our textbook, “false and possibly incriminating information may be elicited from a suspect in an improperly conducted interview, particularly if the suspect is vulnerable in some way (e.g., due to young age, low intelligence, or anxious mental state) or if the interviewing officer already has made up his or her mind about the guilt or innocence of the person” (Gruman et al, 2016). In the case of the Central Park Five, it must have been all listed factors- they were young teens and of color. It happens all too often and I am glad the Reid Interrogation technique is no longer being taught to police officers. This is a step in the right direction.
Reference
Gruman, J. A., Schneider, F. W., & Coutts, L. M. (Eds.). (2016). Applied social psychology : Understanding and addressing social and practical problems. SAGE Publications, Incorporated.
One of the most interesting parts of being a student of both psychology and history is that you really get an understanding of how true the saying is, ‘the more things change, the more they stay the same.’ It’s easy for us to look at situations like the witch trials in Europe and Massachusetts and understand that the vast majority of confessions were obtained under torture or the threat of it, and yet people look at cases like the Exonerated Five and can’t see an equivalent in the intense pressure and distress the Reid technique causes.
In addition to everything you mentioned, there’s also Elizabeth Loftus’ work on how false memories can be created, known as the ‘lost in a shopping mall’ experiment. In it, she had 24 subjects write down descriptions of four different events, three of which were genuine memories and one of which was a false event; two weeks later, 19 out of the 24 were able to correctly identify the false memory. (Loftus & Pickrell, 1995) With the deception involved in the Reid technique, there are cases where the person being questioned comes to believe the deceptions and creates false memories as a result, even when there’s evidence proving that the person is innocent. (Chapman, 2014) It just adds even more trauma to something that’s already damaging and coercive tactics like the Reid technique have no place in our justice system.
Chapman, F., 2014. Coerced Internalized False Confessions and Police Interrogations: The Power of Coercion. SSRN Electronic Journal.
Loftus, E. F., & Pickrell, J. E. (1995). The formation of false memories. Psychiatric Annals, 25(12), 720–725. https://doi.org/10.3928/0048-5713-19951201-07