Chapter 6 in the Wrongful Convictions Reader covered false confessions.

Most people

think false confessions are a myth or very rare. But with the flawed interrogation techniques used

by many police departments, they are actually quite common. Perhaps the most famous example

of false confessions is the case of the Central Park Five, teenagers who were originally detained

for causing mild trouble in Central Park one evening. Then detectives found out about the jogger

who had been horrendously beaten and raped and decided that the young men must have been

the ones who did it. This kind of tunnel vision is so dangerous because it can lead to law

enforcement believing that their assumption is correct and that they just have to get the kids to

admit it. They spent hours interrogating the Central Park Five, yelling at them, calling them liars,

insisting that they would be allowed to go home as soon as they confessed, and even going as far

as slapping the boys. They eventually all confessed to the crime, repeating details the police had

been telling them over the hours long interrogation session. Even more frightening is how much

weight confessions carry in court. All five of these children were convicted based on their

confessions, even though the DNA samples from the rape kit excluded them as the sources of the

DNA. These boys were sent to prison for something they did not do, based on statements they

were coerced into making. Our current president took out a full page ad in the New York Times

calling for all five to be executed. Children. He called for children to be executed. It took thirteen

years for the actual perpetrator to come forward and force the DA’s office to take a closer look at

the confessions, something they should have done initially. They realized what had been there all

along: the boys could barely provide any details, could not agree on the sequence of events, and

could not say where in the park the supposed attack occurred. One of the defendants was able to

correctly state where the jogger was attacked, but only after the police took him to the crime

scene and showed him multiple photos of the area. The Five were eventually released, but their
case remains one of the most famous and outrageous cases of wrongful conviction in recent

memory.

Chapter sixteen of the Wrongful Convictions Reader looked at the intersections of race,

gender, sexual orientation, and wrongful conviction. They examined a case of wrongful

conviction in the same Alabama town that the author of one of the most beloved stories of

wrongful conviction, To Kill a Mockingbird, was from. That unfortunate irony is not lost on me.

The same people who celebrate Atticus Finch for his defense of one black man sent another to

death row. After a trial of only a day and a half, Walter McMillan was sent to death row in a case

where there was no tangible evidence against him. He had three alibi witnesses who all testified

that he was working at a church fish fry, but because they were black their testimony was

ignored by the jury in favor of the state’s witnesses who were white. McMillan’s innocence

lawyer was able to show that the prosecution illegally withheld exculpatory evidence and that

their star witnesses had lied on the stand. He spent six years on death row until his conviction

was overturned in 1993.

These are more examples of how our justice system is dangerously biased against

minorities and people of color. The African American percentage of the prison population is

higher than the percentage of African Americans in the country. That is not right. I guess people

assume that poor black people make the easiest suspects in their cases I learned about a case last

semester where a police chief in Florida was convicted for ordering his officers to round up poor

black people off the street in order to close their open burglary cases. That is a more egregious

example, but subtle biases exist and impact people every day.