In 1989 there was a notorious rape case in which 5 teenagers were convicted of raping and beating a jogger in Central Park. There was no physical evidence linking them to the crime[sup]1[/sup], but they all confessed.
Why would they confess to a crime they didn’t commit? I don’t understand this at all.
[sup]1[/sup]One policeman testified that a sample of the joggers hair was found on one of the defendants’ jacket. This was not true. The untruth of this testimony was uncovered a long time ago, but it was Reye’s confession that reopened the case. When it was discovered that the officer lied, why wasn’t he brought up on charges?
I’ve asked two questions, one that may have a factual answer and one that could only be answered with conjecture. I’m putting it IMHO because, well, I guess I’m seeking opinions.
The explanations I’ve seen in other cases is that the teenagers are intimidated (or simply feel intimidated by the situation) into saying what the cops want so they think they’ll be let go. They might have been interrogated separately with the insinuation that if they say they were involved but rat out the others with them, they’ll get off. Very young suspects or ones with low intelligence might be tricked into confessing because it’s what the police want to hear - saying you didn’t do it makes them mad, maybe saying you did will make them happy and you can go home.
Googling produced examples like this:
http://www.freep.com/news/locway/q5dna26.htm
“The police got the confession by telling Lloyd that he could help “smoke out” the real perpetrator and provided him with details of the crime that he couldn’t have known, Scheck said.” (The man was convicted, but DNA evidence freed him.)
http://www.davidignatius.com/011900WashingtonPost.html
“After nearly 13 hours of interrogation–during which police showed him photographs of fingerprints and other supposedly incriminating evidence, and warned that if he didn’t confess to at least a minor role in the crime, he might go to the gas chamber–Bruce confessed. “I just wanted it to end right there. I wanted to sleep. I was exhausted,” Bruce said in explaining why he confessed to a crime he hadn’t commited.”
According to the first link you posted, it looks like they did in fact beat her and performed a more minor sexual assault on her, and the guy who confessed recently actually did the more serious sexual assault. In this case it’s possible that maybe the cops didn’t go into detail in their interrogations about what exactly they were supposed to have done to her, or maybe the teens figured that was close enough, that the cops obviously knew most of what they’d done, or maybe they had split up at some point and the teens thought that one of them had gone back and done this, and that they’d all be charged regardless, etc.
There is ** NO ** evidence they didn't do it. There is evidence that Reyes DID do it. Big difference. They never said they had all the savages who did this. There is no proof Reyes could not have been one of 6, or 8, or 10 doing it. There is no proof Reyes may not have assaulted her before the pack, leaving her lying there bleeding, and they decided to have some "fun" with this woman lying there - or they may have done the attack and Reyes came later. Your cites put the latter forward. Heck, the first way REYES wouldn't even know they came. Lack of physical evidence they DID do it is not proof they didn't. Place one of them elsewhere during the attacks - oops, can't - they were assaulting 5 other people that night in the park.
The proof does what the cop in your cite said - it implicates Reyes, it does not exonerate the other 5.
and it would be a lot harder to get 5 confessions IN FRONT OF PARENTS AND GUARDIANS (per your cite) that were totally fabricated.
There’s NO evidence that you didn’t do it either lurker. There is NO evidence that these 5 did do it.
Let’s remember how our system is supposed to work and not how some of us wished it worked. Wish so hard for it, in fact, that they will lie in court and undermine the whole system to make it so. Let’s look at the part in the article that was quoted by Shodan.
That they went back (or came first) is only one scenerio that the authorities are working on. They have no proof of this.
That is not to say that this scenerio may not be true, but there is no proof that this is what happened.
No. There is no evidence I didn’t do it. Proving a negative is extremely hard. But you said in the OP that there WAS proof they didn’t.
There is no such evidence. The evidence is that there was another involved. They were convicted without physical evidence.
We have their confessions, made in front of their parents. Confessions have been enough to avoid trials. James Earl Ray tried to recind his. The rifle was not proven to be the one that shot King. Should he have been freed? http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/law/february97/ray1_2-20.html
This story was covered in the not too distant past, by one of the 60 Minutes, 20/20, Dateline shows. I wondered the same thing you did Biggirl, why the heck would the kids confess. In the segments of confession tapes that were shown, the parents were not always present.
One thing that clearly stuck out, was the apparent leading of one of the boys in his confession. He was being asked questions about how the woman had been beaten, and he mentioned a knife, a knife used to cut her clothing and her legs. This never happened, or at least there is no evidence for it. It was fairly clear to me that a knife was not what the police were looking for, and so they kept on, and pretty soon, it was a rock used on her head. Not in conjunction with a knife, the knife became a rock.
Some of the boys did have alibis placing them away from the park, but though there is no evidence the alibis weren’t truthful, they were apparently disregarded. The parents of the boys who were interviewed stated they were told their sons were not suspects, rather the sons were potential witnesses wanted for questioning. I should add in the segments I saw of the confessions when the parents were present, the interviewing process seemed much different than the tactics used when parents were not on camera.
One last thing, the boys were all taken to the scene of the crime by the police before questioning. Small wonder that they could describe the scene accurately.
Two men spent twelve years in prison because one of them was badgered into confessing to a murder, despite the fact that there was never any physical evidence. The other man was so badly beaten in a fight in prison that he’s now permanently mentally retarded. If you’re told by the police that you can either confess and get a life sentence or maintain your innocence and get the death penalty, what would you do?
False confessions are common and so is people believing that something happened when in actually didn’t. All of the law enforcement people that were involved in the case have a vested interest to continue to implicate the 5 youths, which is why they are creating the pie in the sky scenario; The youths beat her first and Reyes came along and raped her, or vice versa, quite implausible when Reyes is capable of taking care of the woman all by his lonesome, he even murdered one of his victims.
I had an interesting series of opinions with this case. I should mention that I’m a pretty hard-line guy when it comes to crime. I have zero problem with the death penalty or long, tough prison sentences. But I’m also a hard-line guy when it comes to justice. I think that cops or prosecutors who tamper with evidence or give false testimony or coerce confessions deserve to go to prison too.
That said, when the new evidence surfaced in the CPJ case my first instinct was that the kids had been railroaded. Set them free with a big-ass apology I thought.
Well, just this past Sunday I read a long recap of the case in the NY Times. They mentioned details I never knew or had forgotten. My assumption that these were a bunch of innocent kids swept up in the police dragnet on the way home from a basketball game or something went right out the window. When the Times described the string of “wilding” crimes these kids committed that night – including beating one innocent bystander unconscious – I felt A LOT less sympathy for them, even if they, in fact, had nothing to do with the jogger rape. These kids were mean scumbag thugs, plain and simple.
I can tell you without hesitation that – given the witness testimony of their other victims plus the kids’ confessions – if I were the cops I would have charged them like they were charged; if I were the prosecutor I would have tried them like they were tried; and if I were a juror I would have convicted them like they were convicted. And I would have slept well when it was all over.
Even now, with the knowledge of the new confession, I have a hard time mustering up any sympathy for the little pricks.
Having sympathy for someone doesn’t have diddly-squat to do with whether they should be found guilty or innocent of a crime. Otherwise, you would be saying that a person should be convicted if you generally like them and should be found innocent if you generally dislike them. Whether one has sympathy for someone is as specious an argument for whether they should be convicted as whether you like their face.
WW, what I’m getting at is this: there is a revisionist campaign afoot to make these kids out as innocent bystanders on the night in question. AND THAT IS SIMPLY NOT TRUE.
Even today the DA – in a spell of misplaced guilt or the fear of an already bad public relations fiasco getting worse – recommended that ALL the charges against the kids be voided. That would include the muggings, beatings and rioting that no one disputes they did that night.
I have no problem voiding the rape charges in light of the new evidence, but why should the other crimes go unacknowledged or unpunished (a moot point there, I realize)?
As an aside, everyone who is jumping on The-Kids-Are-Totally-Innocent bandwagon should consider another point that was brought out by the Times piece concerning the timeline of the crimes. Apparently the defense could have cast serious doubt on the prosecution’s rape case by showing that there simply was not enough time for kids to rape the jogger because witnesses indicated that they were mugging other people far away from the rape scene shortly before and after the time of the jogger attack.
THE DEFENSE KNEW THIS AT THE TIME OF THE TRIAL BUT CHOSE NOT TO USE IT. They felt that admitting to the other wilding crimes would have hurt their case. Well that was a choice that the defense made and it bit them on the ass in the end.
The pragmatist in me refuses to get all teary-eyed over the fact that these kids probably didn’t deserve the rape conviction. Our criminal justice system is not perfect, and, when you go out on a wilding spree, beating people unconscious, you DON’T get my benefit of the doubt that you didn’t rape the girl too. Especially when you confess to it on tape.
Bottom line is this: Did those kids deserve to do ALL that hard time for the rape of the jogger? Probably not, given the new evidence. Did they deserve to do SOME hard time for their crimes that night. IMO, yes they did.
Bottom line is this stuyguy, you don’t know what your talking about. None of the victims of the other crimes in the park that night, picked any of these kids, at the time, out of a line up.
Here’s the quote from The NY Times article you refer to Sunday 12/2/2002:
I’m assuming you were skimming when you got to this part of the article. You missed a critical piece of information, which is this:
"In fact, none of the five teenagers charged in that assault were ever identified by the other victims"
I would also argue that Manhattan DA, Robert M. Morgenthau, knows a hell of a lot more about the facts in this case than you and has filed court papers that all of the convictions be thrown out. But hey, you’re entitled to your opinion even if it isn’t based on anything factual.
Phil, you make a valid point and I’ll concede it: okay, no positive face IDs on the five kids in question.
But do you then presume that the prosecution has ZERO wilding case? That the kids were convicted of the non-rape assaults based on no valid evidence at all?
How about these excerpts of the very article you quoted?:
“But though investigators no longer can be sure whether the youths raped the jogger, few of those reviewing the case question whether the teenagers were involved in the other crimes.”
<snip>
“…There was a certain consistency to the statements when it came to the [non-rape] assaults. Three of the youths recalled the encounter with the tandem bikers. Four recounted an attack on a jogger [not the rape victim] who had been hit with a pipe, a weapon that resembled Mr. Loughlin’s description of the hard, smooth instrument he had been struck with…”
I confess that I’m no expert here, but I’m willing to wager that procecutors bring thousands of cases to trial without the benefit of face ID’s. The jury balances the evidence that does exist and renders a verdict. This evidence (and there’s plenty more if you read the article), IMO, is pretty convincing that the kids participated in the non-rape wilding.
And as for “what Robert M. Morgenthau knows,” maybe all he knows is this:
"If prosecutors decide the confessions were inaccurate about the rape, as some prosecutors now believe, legal experts said the statements would no longer be suitable evidence for the other crimes — even if investigators remain convinced that those portions were factual.
And finally, as to the revisionist campaign I spoke of, there’s this quote:
““Our clients are innocent,” said Michael W. Warren, a lawyer for Mr. Richardson, Mr. McCray and Mr. Santana. “There has not been anything demonstrated to the contrary.””
All I can say to that is, “Yeah, right!” [Rolly eyes here.]
[BTW, the Times article I read that formed by opinion was NOT the one you (and I) quoted. It was a substantially longer one from 12/1/02 by Dwyer and Flynn. I suggest you read that one too. Even if it doesn’t change your opinion like it did mine, it is absolute must-read for anyone interested in this case.]
I’ve read the 12/1/2002 article, and it relies on the premise that these 5 youths were involved in the wilding attacks that night, for which I mentioned earlier, none were ever ID for even though they were in a line up. Other than the confessions which we know are in error, how credible is it that any of the things that they confessed to were true? The article makes reference to “The Boys”, but who were “The Boys”, these 5, or the 35 or so that were allegedly wilding that night. Without a positive ID, I don’t know what “Boys” they’re talking about. Do you?
Phil, quoting from the 12/1 Times piece (regarding the boys that confessed, meaning at least 4 – maybe all 5 – of the kids that were charged and convicted):
"No one can dispute that the videotapes made by four of the five teenagers are a chronicle of muggings, misdemeanor and gang rape.
Nor is there any serious dispute that parts of the tapes, particularly those dealing with the rape, are broadly inaccurate on where, when and how it took place. "
<snip>
“On the other crimes, the teenagers’ accounts are broadly consistent with the versions offered by the [non-rape] victims. Even more telling, a few of the incidents described in the confessions — attacks on runners or bicyclists who got away — had not yet been reported to the police when the teenagers mentioned them.”
Based on the above, I contend that the boys’ confessions of the non-rape crimes are valid. Surely those portions could not be concocted if they described details that even the cops did not know at the time.
As for the positive face ID argument that you keep bringing up, again I would contend that plenty of cases go to trial without positive face IDs – and plenty of criminals get convicted on the weight of the other evidence presented. Without meaning to be flip, every criminal who wears a ski mask would be immune from prosecution if positive face IDs were the only evidence that mattered.