The answer all too often is coercion, intimidation, deceit and trickery. All of those techniques were employed to obtain the conviction of four innocent sailors for the rape and murder of a woman in Norfolk, Virginia. Danial Williams after only 11 days of marriage was arrested and charged with the crime. After relentless questioning and threats for 11 hours, he confessed. When the confession did not fit the actual facts, he was again questioned and convinced to alter his confession to jibe with those facts.
Because Williams' DNA failed to match any at the crime scene, the police next interrogated his roommate, Joe Dick. Subjected to the same harassment, Dick likewise confessed. For reasons too complicated to recount here, a total of eight men were charged with the gang rape and murder of Michelle Bosko, including two other sailors, Eric Wilson and Derek Tice.
Although one of the eight, Omar Ballard confessed to the crime as the sole perpetrator and that his was the only DNA that matched that at the crime scene, the prosecution of the others proceeded. All four sailors were convicted. Three received life sentences without parole and one was sentenced to eight and half years, and he has since been released. The other three received conditional pardons from Governor Tim Kaine after serving 11 years in prison. Various court proceedings are now underway regarding the convictions and claims of prosecutorial and constitutional abuses. Those, of course, could be obviated by the state confessing error and consenting to vacating the convictions. Doing justice may require conceding wrongdoing rather than clinging to convictions so fraught with injustice.
The detective who obtained the confessions has been convicted of corruption and lying to the FBI. He was indicted and convicted for extorting money from defendants in exchange for getting them favorable treatment. Despite the conditional pardons granted to them, because they were not exonerated as felons or sex offenders, the sailors face varying impediments, such as reporting monthly to a probation officer, drug and alcohol tests, curfews, sex offender registration, limits on job opportunities and the stigma which necessarily follows them. The plight of these individuals and the dedication of their pro bono lawyers will be recounted by Frontline on PBS on Nov. 9, 2010 entitled The Confessions.
In the 261 exonerations based upon DNA evidence, clear evidence of innocence, approximately 20 percent of the convictions set aside were based upon false confessions. There is no more powerful evidence in a criminal trial than a confession by the defendant himself. There is no greater injustice than when those confessions are obtained through threats and intimidation and result in the conviction of innocent persons.
Obviously, instances where our criminal justice system gets it right don't further their meme so they focus on the bad actors and ask if we want our nation's safety dependent upon the flawed procedures of the VERY few they cherry-pick for their arguments.
That said, I think it encumbent upon our criminal justice system to put some automatic triggers in place (not unlike the automatic appeals in death-penalty cases), to compel prosecutors AND judges at all levels to justify prosecutions based SOLELY on confessions (no physical evidence; no witness identification). We don't want to overburden our Justices and prosecutors with red tape. Neither do we want to allow innocent people to serve a single day for crimes they did not commit.
Since the far right four tend to opine as a group, this mean that we may be one court case away from torture for confessions becoming the law of the land, if Kennedy would go along.
I know you probably don't know the answer to this second hypothetical question, but with the founders knowing the history of the inquisition as well as the Salem "witch trials", how could they have failed to not include language to protect against torture to extract confessions?
Justice Scalia may be a bright guy but he certainly has an odd view of the law sometimes.
A good place to start would be reforming traffic fines! When cities turn to these to help bolster the budget--and many are--officers do have a quota, no matter how loudly this gets denied, and corruption is guaranteed.
I'm DESPERATELY hoping that one of these days they'll break the law regarding my kids when I'm around, cause I'll have the corrupt ones fired SOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO fast!!!!!
You want to fight the good fight, but I wonder what kind of parent would hope that his or her own child endure the trauma such an event would inflict. I've handled juvenile defense, and kids who are mistreated by the police are often haunted by the encounter long afterward.
We are lured into thinking that we are all so much more safe because the police are out there finding and convicting all the bad guys and never gets anything wrong. Think of how many times we've read or heard stories just like or similar to this one, where people of color, or the poor and uneducated, are tried and convicted on flimsy evidence, and then 10 or 20 years down the line, DNA shows and proves that they where framed. All those years of freedom gone because someone did a bad job or even worse, someone just made up the evidence.
If it happens so many times that we hear about, just think about all the times that we don't. Or we can turn our backs and believe that we are all so much more safe because the police are out there finding and convicting all the bad guys and never gets anything wrong.
Since most of us have never been put through this kind of torture, we imagine that we would never confess to something that we never did. But the reality is that most of us would, especially when we don't have an attorney sitting in on the interrogation.