The painful lessons of the Central Park Five and the jogger rape case | Jill Filipovic | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk

13.10.12

The painful lessons of the Central Park Five and the jogger rape case | Jill Filipovic | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk:
What Law & Order and whodunit thrillers won't tell you is that false confessions are startlingly common. According to the Innocence Project, 25% of innocent defendants who were exonerated with DNA evidence made incriminating statements or full-on confessions. A disproportionate number of those who falsely confess are mentally challenged or have mental health problems; children and adolescents also routinely fail to understand their rights during a police interrogation. And false confessions are, sadly, an American tradition: even back in 1692, 50 different women "confessed" to witchcraft in the Salem witch trials.
Police officers want to get the bad guy, but too often they pick what they believe to be the most plausible story and ratchet the facts into it. By the time the police are interrogating a subject, they've determined that the person is probably guilty of the crime. The goal of the interrogation isn't to learn the truth: it's to solidify guilt.