CHAPTER 3 FALSE ADMISSIONS: INTERROGATIONS, CONFESSIONS, AND GUILTY PLEAS
| Jurisdiction | United States |
After reading this chapter, you should be able to:
• Appreciate the similarities and differences between interrogations and plea bargaining.
• Distinguish voluntary, compliant, and internalized false confessions.
• Discuss the three-step pathway to police-induced false confessions.
• List and discuss the situational and dispositional factors related to false confessions.
• Appreciate the influence of confessions on decision-making in the criminal process.
• Discuss U.S. Supreme Court doctrine governing confessions and guilty pleas.
• Discuss the benefits to both law enforcement and defendants of recording custodial interrogations.
• Compare and contrast confrontational interrogation with investigative interviewing.
Just before 9:00 p.m. on the evening of April 19, 1989, Trisha Meili went for a jog in New York City's Central Park. Meili, a 28-year-old investment banker, had made plans with a coworker, Pat Garrett, to meet at 10:00 PM, giving her enough time to complete her run before meeting him. When Garrett appeared at her apartment at the designated time, Meili failed to respond to the doorbell. 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 called "wilding," vandalizing and damaging cars, harassing joggers and cyclists, and assaulting 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 nearly 80% of her blood, suffered hypothermia and severe brain damage, and had lapsed into a coma, which would endure for 12 days. She had been injured beyond recognition. 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). They were detained individually and questioned for long periods of time. Detectives used a variety of techniques to encourage the youths 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 the youth being questioned in the crime (see Norris & Redlich, 2014). Following the lengthy interrogation, 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 statements of the teenagers 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. Nevertheless, based largely on their incriminating statements, all five youths were convicted and given prison sentences ranging from 5 to 15 years. The four younger men— Richardson, Santana, Salaam, and McCray—were released from prison 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 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 eventually 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.
The Central Park Five pursued a lawsuit against the New York City for their wrongful convictions. Their cases were eventually settled in 2014, with the youths receiving a total of $41 million (Weiser, 2014).
The Central Park Tive: The Untold Story Behind One of New York City's Most Infamous Crimes (2012) — a book by Sarah Burns that provides the most in-depth coverage of the Central Park Five case to date. The case featured five teenagers who were convicted of a violent rape and attempted murder in New York City in 1989 after four of them confessed to the crime. The book weaves together the story of the five boys and the officials involved in the case, set against the backdrop of New York City in the 1980s when social upheaval and racial tensions were ubiquitous.
The Central Park Tive (2013)—a documentary based on Sarah Burns's book directed by Ken Burns, Sarah Burns, and David McMahon. The film features interviews with the defendants, as well as their family members, journalists, and others who recall the case and surrounding events.
False admissions are among the most widely researched factors that contribute to wrongful convictions. Still, they remain counterintuitive; after all, why would anyone admit to a crime that they did not commit?
For many people, both in the public and within the criminal justice system, moving beyond this obvious question is difficult. Indeed, a number of officials have made comments suggesting that an innocent person simply would not admit to something he or she did not do. At the heart of this belief is the assumption that people do not act in self-destructive ways (Leo, 2008, p. 197). However, the Innocence Movement has shown definitively that people do sometimes confess to crimes even though they are entirely innocent.
False admissions encompass two related but distinct issues: confessions and guilty pleas. Most (although not all) known false confessions are made in response to police interrogation. Guilty pleas frequently (although not always) are made in connection with plea bargaining, which involve negotiations between the prosecution and defense to reach an agreement about terms important to a defendant's conviction and/or punishment. False admissions of both types occur with some regularity. Of the first 325 DNA exonerations reported by the Innocence Project, 88 (27.1%) involved some type of false confession and 31 (9.5%) involved a false guilty plea (West & Meterko, 2016). According to the National Registry of Exonerations, 241 of the first 2,000 exonerations (12%) involved a false confession and more than 15% of all known exonerations involved a guilty plea, including nearly half of the exonerations that occurred in 2016 (74/166, or 44.6%).
Although interrogations and plea bargaining occur at different points in the criminal justice process, they are closely related in some important ways. The logic behind both is "remarkably similar" (Leo, 2008, p. 31). At their core, each is designed to encourage a person to admit guilt to a crime. During an interrogation, police seek to obtain a confession from a suspect, which will be used as evidence against them going forward. During plea bargaining, the prosecution offers defendants a break on their charge and/or sentence in exchange for an admission of guilt, thereby avoiding a contested trial.
Both interrogations and plea bargaining are guilt-presumptive. That is, police often will not interrogate someone unless they believe the person to be guilty. The goal of the interrogation thus is to secure a confession, rather than simply to collect information (Kassin et al., 2010). Similarly, the state's push to secure a guilty plea is based on the prosecutor's belief in the defendant's guilt. Importantly, the prosecutor's view of the crime and of the defendant is likely to be heavily shaped by the information provided by the police. Interrogations and plea bargaining consequently may be "closely linked in practice, in that the former can strongly influence the latter" (Norris & Redlich, 2014, p. 1013). For these reasons, interrogations have been referred to as "plea bargaining without defense counsel" (Kamisar, 1980, p. 40) and "pre-plea bargaining" (Leo, 2008, p. 32). In effect, both guilt-presumptive interrogations and plea negotiations serve to increase the efficiency of the criminal justice process, but may be at odds with the search for truth that is so vital to the American adversarial system.
Despite their substantial overlap, interrogations and plea bargaining are distinct practices. In the following sections, we discuss confessions and guilty pleas in turn.
Interrogations and False Confessions
False confessions are nothing new. In fact, the case discussed in chapter 1 of Stephen and Jesse Boorn, who were convicted in 1819 and who were among the first known wrongfully convicted individuals in the United States, involved false confessions. As noted earlier, patterns found in modern exonerations suggest that false confessions still occur with some regularity, and...
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