Mistakes Were Made - Carol Tavris [62]
Chapter 5
Law and Disorder
I guess it’s really difficult for any prosecutor [to acknowledge errors and] to say, “Gee, we had 25 years of this guy’s life. That’s enough.”
—Dale M. Rubin, lawyer for Thomas Lee Goldstein
THOMAS LEE GOLDSTEIN, a college student and ex-Marine, was convicted in 1980 of a murder he did not commit, and spent the next twenty-four years in prison. His only crime was being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Although he lived near the murder victim, the police found no physical evidence linking Goldstein to the crime: no gun, no fingerprints, no blood. He had no motive. He was convicted on the testimony of a jailhouse informant, improbably named Edward Fink, who had been arrested thirty-five times, had three felony convictions and a heroin habit, and had testified in ten different cases that the defendant had confessed to him while sharing a jail cell. (A prison counselor had described Fink as “a con man who tends to handle the facts as if they were elastic.”) Fink lied under oath, denying that he had been given a reduced sentence in exchange for his testimony. The prosecution’s only other support for its case was an eyewitness, Loran Campbell, who identified Goldstein as the killer after the police falsely assured him that Goldstein had failed a lie-detector test. None of the other five eyewitnesses identified Goldstein, and four of them said the killer was “black or Mexican.” Campbell recanted his testimony later, saying he had been “a little overanxious” to help the police by telling them what they wanted to hear. It was too late. Goldstein was sentenced to twenty-seven years to life for the murder.
Over the years, five federal judges agreed that prosecutors had denied Goldstein his right to a fair trial by failing to tell the defense about their deal with Fink, but Goldstein remained in prison. Finally, in February 2004, a California Superior Court judge dismissed the case “in furtherance of justice,” citing its lack of evidence and its “cancerous nature”—its reliance on a professional informer who perjured himself. Even then, the Los Angeles District Attorney’s office refused to acknowledge that they might have made a mistake. Within hours, they filed new charges against Goldstein, set bail at $1 million, and announced they would retry him for the murder. “I am very confident we have the right guy,” Deputy District Attorney Patrick Connolly said. Two months later, the DA’s office conceded it had no case against Goldstein and released him.
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On the night of April 19, 1989, the woman who came to be known as the Central Park Jogger was brutally raped and bludgeoned. The police quickly arrested five black and Hispanic teenagers from Harlem who had been in the park “wilding,” randomly attacking and roughing up passersby. The police, not unreasonably, saw them as likely suspects for the attack on the jogger. They kept the teenagers in custody and interrogated them intensively for fourteen to thirty hours. The boys, ages fourteen to sixteen, finally confessed to the crime, but they did more than admit guilt: They reported lurid details of what they had done. One boy demonstrated how he had pulled off the jogger’s pants. One told how her shirt was cut off with a knife, and how one of the gang repeatedly struck her head with a rock. Another expressed remorse for his “first rape,” saying he had felt pressured by the other guys to do it, and promising he would never do it again. Although there was no physical evidence linking the teenagers to the crime—no matching semen, blood, or DNA—their confessions persuaded the police, the jury, forensic experts, and the public that the perpetrators had been caught. Donald Trump spent $80,000 on newspaper ads calling for them to get the death penalty. 1
And yet the teenagers were innocent. Thirteen years later, a felon named Matias Reyes, in