Chapter 2 Wrongful Convictions and Criminal Justice in Social Context
| Jurisdiction | United States |
After reading this chapter, you should be able to:
• Understand the importance of social, cultural, and political context for the practice of criminal justice.
• Be aware of the racialized history of criminal justice in the United States.
• Recognize racial and gender disparities in wrongful convictions and critically assess their potential sources.
Just before 9:00 p.m. on April 19, 1989, Trisha Meili went for a jog in New York City's Central Park. Meili, a white 28-year-old investment banker, had made plans with a coworker, Pat Garrett, to meet at 10:00 that evening, giving her enough time to complete her run before meeting him. When Garrett appeared at her apartment at the designated time, Meili did not open the door. Garrett called her phone, but there was no answer.
Around the time that Meili left for her run, a group of about 30 teenagers entered the northern end of Central Park. The group was engaged in what was referred to in the sensationalized media accounts that followed as "wilding." Some members of the group vandalized and damaged cars, harassed joggers and cyclists, and assaulted several people. When police responded to calls about teenagers causing trouble in the park, two detectives encountered a young man named Matias Reyes, whom they knew from the neighborhood. Reyes said he had not seen the group of teens and went on his way. Police arrested several youths in connection with the reported behavior, including Kevin Richardson and Raymond Santana. Three others—Antron McCray, Yusef Salaam, and Korey Wise—were later implicated as participants in the events and brought to the police station for questioning.
In the early morning hours of April 20, Trisha Meili was found unconscious in a secluded, wooded area of Central Park. She had been raped, stabbed, and badly beaten. She had lost more than seventy-five percent of her blood, suffered hypothermia and severe brain damage, and had lapsed into a coma, which would endure for 12 days. Meili was injured beyond recognition; Pat Garrett ultimately identified her based on the ring she wore.
The police investigation into the assault focused on five teenagers: Richardson (14 years old), Santana (14), McCray (15), Salaam (15), and Wise (16). The youths were detained and individually questioned for long periods of time. Detectives used a variety of techniques to encourage the young men to confess their guilt to the rape and assault of Meili. Police aggressively questioned and accused them, and employed the classic "good cop/bad cop" routine. They also used a technique known as the "prisoner's dilemma," whereby detectives told each suspect that the others were talking and had implicated them in the crime (see Norris & Redlich, 2014). Following the lengthy interrogations, four of the five boys confessed to participating in the crime; Yusef Salaam did not, as his mother stopped the questioning by demanding a lawyer.
The teenagers' statements were inconsistent with one another and with details about the crime that were known to the police. In addition, no physical evidence linked the five youths to the assault; in fact, the initial forensic analysis failed to produce evidence matching any of the suspects and appeared to suggest that Meili had been assaulted by a single person. Still, investigators focused their attention on the five teens.
The investigation and ensuing prosecution occurred amidst a cultural firestorm that surrounded the case. In a city struggling with high levels of violent crime and racial tension, brimming with social and economic anxieties, the story of a young, successful white woman who was brutally attacked—supposedly by five Black and Latino teens—sparked local outrage and made headlines nationwide (Burns, 2011).
In this setting, despite the lack of physical evidence linking the teenagers to the attack, all five were convicted based largely on their incriminating statements. Their sentences ranged from 5 to 15 years in prison. The four younger men—Richardson, Santana, Salaam, and McCray—were released on parole after about six years. Wise, the oldest of the young men at age 16, was sentenced as an adult and remained in prison after the others were freed.
While incarcerated, Wise had a run-in with Matias Reyes, who was serving time in the same prison for a separate offense. Reyes eventually told officials that he had committed the rape and assault of Meili alone and that the five teenagers were innocent. Reyes gave a full confession that included details that were unknown to others involved in the case. DNA evidence from the case was tested and came back with a match for Reyes. In December 2002, the convictions of the Central Park Five were overturned. Wise was released from prison after serving almost 12 years. Santana, who had been convicted for selling drugs following his release on parole and sentenced as a repeat offender because of his previous conviction for the attack on Meili, was also released.
As with all human endeavors, context is key when considering criminal legal practices and the outcomes they produce. In the United States, systems of justice are fundamentally political in nature. The actors and organizations that compose those systems exist as an element of, rather than being insulated from, our broader culture. Thus, sociopolitical factors and cultural forces play key roles in shaping the formation and practice of law and the administration of criminal justice. While many of these forces can be difficult to measure with precision—it is challenging (if not impossible) to accurately measure the direct effects of racism on wrongful convictions, for example, or how a suspect's socioeconomic status influenced a police investigation—we can draw upon the available data and research to raise important questions about how broad social and cultural factors influence miscarriages of justice.
Contextualizing Wrongful Convictions
In chapter 1, we noted that wrongful convictions are not new; to the contrary, they have existed as long as there have been systems of criminal justice. Throughout most of this volume, we nevertheless focus on errors of justice in the contemporary United States. Miscarriages of justice do not occur in isolation, and we must understand the broader social context in which they take place. As Lofquist (2014, p. 23) explains, discussions of wrongful convictions (as with many other topics in criminal justice) "must proceed from the recognition of three closely related and defining features of [the American criminal justice] system: that the United States has the largest penal system in history; that approximately 90% of all felony defendants are represented by indigent counsel; and that more than 95% of all felony convictions are produced by guilty pleas."
The United States incarcerates more people, and more per capita, than virtually any other country in the world. The Bureau of Justice Statistics reports that, in 2019, more than 1.4 million people were incarcerated in prisons (Carson, 2020) and more than 730,000 in jails (Zeng & Minton, 2021) throughout the United States. In addition, nearly 4.4 million people were under community supervision (Maruschak & Minton, 2020). Collectively, this means that approximately 6.5 million people, or roughly 1 in 47 individuals in the U.S. over the age of five, were under correctional supervision.1
It was not always this way. Fifty years ago, fewer than 200,000 people were imprisoned in the U.S. (Lofquist, 2014). Since the 1970s, a series of conscious decisions made by federal, state, and local lawmakers led to policies that have dramatically increased the size of the incarcerated population. The history of mass incarceration does not begin in the 1970s, however. Rather, the current era is the product of historical processes, including systems of racial control in the post-Civil War era, concerns about immigration and urbanization, political rhetoric that capitalized on the fear and unease of citizens, and more (e.g., Alexander, 2010; Beckett, 1997; Beckett & Sasson, 2004; Garland, 2001; Hinton, 2016). These processes and the policies that grew from them were not simply innocuous and organic, but instead were strategically developed. In the wake of the American Civil Rights Movement, politicians and cultural commentators took advantage of the concerns and fears of citizens, particularly whites, that involved race and social upheaval. They drew on historical stereotypes about Black criminality and developed a "social construction of crime" (Lofquist, 2014, p. 25) as a major threat to white society. This was part of what has been termed the "Southern Strategy," which involved racialized images of not just who commits crimes, but also who depends most heavily on welfare and who benefits most from government support. The Southern Strategy became a core element of the political movement to redirect resources from social support to law enforcement and criminal justice, and was a driving force behind the wars on crime and drugs (Lofquist, 2014; Simon, 2007).
From the 1970s through the 2000s, criminal justice in the United States became increasingly punitive; law-and-order and crime control came to the fore, while the rights and protections of criminal defendants were cut back and social support systems seemingly fell to the wayside. From stepped-up police practices to criminalization of marginalized populations and harsher sentencing laws, including expanded use of the death penalty, the states and the federal government significantly enlarged the scope of the criminal legal system. As part of this process, issues that arguably are best considered as social, economic, and/or health problems — for example, drug addiction, homelessness, and mental health — were defined as criminal justice...
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