Mistakes Were Made - Carol Tavris [72]
And now the police offer you an explanation that makes sense, a way to resolve your dissonance: You don’t remember because you blanked it out; you were drunk and lost consciousness; you repressed the memory; you didn’t know that you have multiple personality disorder, and one of your other personalities did it. This is what the detectives did in their interrogations of Michael Crowe. They told him that there might have been “two Michaels,” a good one and a bad one, and the bad Michael committed the crime without the good Michael even being aware of it.
Sure, you might say, Michael was fourteen; no wonder the police could scare him into confessing. It is true that juveniles and the mentally ill are particularly vulnerable to these tactics, but so are healthy adults. In a close examination of 125 cases in which prisoners were later exonerated despite having given false confessions, Steven Drizin and Richard Leo found that forty were minors, twenty-eight were mentally retarded, and fifty-seven were competent adults. Of the cases in which length of interrogation could be determined, more than 80 percent of the false confessors had been grilled for more than six hours straight, half for more than twelve hours, and some almost nonstop for two days.33
That was what happened to the teenagers arrested on the night the Central Park Jogger was attacked. When social scientists and legal scholars were able to examine the videotapes of four of the five teenagers (the fifth was not taped), and when District Attorney Robert Morgenthau’s office reexamined this evidence starting from the assumption that the boys might be innocent rather than guilty, the dramatic persuasiveness of their confessions melted in the light. Their statements turned out to be full of contradictions, factual errors, guesses, and information planted by the interrogator’s biased questions. 34 And contrary to the public impression that all of them confessed, in fact none of the defendants ever admitted that he personally raped the jogger. One said he “grabbed at” her. Another stated that he “felt her tits.” One said he “held and fondled her leg.” The district attorney’s motion to vacate their convictions observed that “the accounts given by the five defendants differed from one another on the specific details of virtually every major aspect of the crime—who initiated the attack, who knocked the victim down, who undressed her, who struck her, who held her, who raped her, what weapons were used in the course of the assault, and when in the sequence of events the attack took place.”35
After long hours of interrogation, wanting nothing more than to be allowed to go home, the exhausted suspect accepts the explanation the interrogators offer as the only one possible, the only one that makes sense. And confesses. Usually, the moment the pressure is over and the target gets a night’s sleep, he or she immediately retracts the confession. It will be too late.
The Prosecutors
In that splendid film The Bridge on the River Kwai, Alec Guinness and his soldiers, prisoners of the Japanese in World War II, build a railway bridge that will aid the enemy’s war effort. Guinness agrees to this demand by his captors as a way of building unity and restoring morale among his men, but once he builds it, it becomes his—a source of pride and satisfaction. When, at the end of the film, Guinness finds the wires revealing that the bridge has been mined and realizes that Allied commandoes are planning to blow it up, his first reaction is, in effect: “You can’t! It’s my bridge. How dare you destroy it!” To the horror of the watching commandoes, he tries to cut the wires to protect the bridge. Only at the very last moment does Guinness cry, “What have I done?,” realizing that he was about to sabotage his own side’s goal of victory to preserve his magnificent creation.
In the same way, many prosecutors end up being prepared to sabotage their own side’s goal of justice to preserve their convictions, in both meanings of the word. By the time prosecutors go to trial, they