True justice is color blind but the justice system is far from it. But if there was only one thing that an individual could pinpoint as indiscriminate across the realms of the justice system, it would surely be the concept of confessions. More than anything else, the prosecution wants a confession and they want it from the black man, the white woman, the rich, the poor, the young, the old. When the suspect is set there are no boundaries of race, age, sex, not even- the one time I will ever state this- class. Prosecutors love confessions because a confession is supposed to dismiss all elements of doubt. After all, the suspect has stated a confession to the crime, little is left to dispute.
So it would appear to be but confessions, as is the case with everything else, have proven to be faulty in the United States judicial system. The concept of confessions on its own is questionable in a primary light; who, aside from the prosecution, can possibly benefit from a confession? Surely the suspect does not as he or she is declaring involvement in the crime that he or she is being accused of and nothing more. Confessions do not minimize or decrease sentences, pleading guilty does. In essence, the stage in which a confession is made could be deleted from the process and little would change. The suspect could still plead guilty in court and this could potentially result in a lesser sentence.
Let us not confuse confessions with giving information when there are multiple suspects involved. It is pertinent to dismiss such an allegation prior to discussing specific cases as many would mistaken the two as synonymous. Indeed they are far from it as one could still be an informant without confession to any personal involvement in the given crime. With that in mind, a large percentage of confession cases prove such a matter to be irrelevant as they often involve one individual's confession, even when there are multiple people involved.
Once a confession is made in one way or another, there is essentially no way out for the suspect who then inevitably becomes a defendant (Most of the time anyway. A rather isolated incident will be discussed further on in this piece in which a confession does not make a suspect a defendant). It is relatively hard, in fact damn near impossible, for one to convince the courts and the justices that preside over them that a confession was, say, coerced, concocted or simply false. Although there is the supposed presumption of innocent until proven guilty, the judicial system works in the opposite manner, and once there is a confession, the individual can all but assume that he or she is considered guilty in the eye of the courts, regardless of the degree of questioning related to the confession.
Confessions appear to be a rather simplistic way of efficiently handling a case for everyone involved. Yet in reality a confession is merely something that proves to be so strong yet so doubtful in a case. Fabricated and forced confessions are unfortunately not a rarity, yet to declare that such is the case is almost always perceived as a guilty defendant's last hope for a way out. If one can expect anything to set an innocent person assumed to be guilty free, more often than not it is DNA testing.
As is the case with most things, confessions demonstrate various degrees of vulnerability. Furthermore, they extend to both high profile and unreported cases and leave grounds for skepticism in a variety of ways. Sometimes a confession can be used to silence a controversial political figure, sometimes it can be used to close an otherwise leadless case and sometimes it can be truthful, yet still coerced. Regardless as to how a confession arrives, they are an element which should be removed from the judicial process in its entirety.
Fourteen years ago on this very day, Damien Echols, Jason Baldwin and Jessie Misskelley were arrested for the brutal and sadistic murder of three eight-year-old boys who were beaten, tortured and drowned before being tied to a fence with their own shoelaces. Misskelley, a minor at the time with an IQ of 72, waived his Miranda rights and was interrogated by the police without the presence of his parents. Misskelley testified that he did not completely comprehend the Miranda rights which he had waived and that he was afraid of the police. He was interrogated for twelve hours of which only forty-six minutes were tape recorded. Among other faults in his supposedly multiple confessions, Misskelley stated that Echols had raped the boys and that they had been tied with brown rope. As previously mentioned, they were found tied with their shoelaces and no signs of rape were ever noted.
In spite of the obvious questions to the legitimacy of this confession, all three were convicted of the crime- Echols, the supposed leader, to capital punishment while the other two received life sentences. Several questions have arisen as to their guilt and other suspects such as a "Satanic Panic" as the three men convicted were Satanists and the involvement of Mark Byers, the stepfather of one of the murdered boys. Byers had been accused of sexual molestation on his stepson, had his teeth removed after it was reported that there were bite marks on the victims, was the one who reported the boys missing to the police and gave cameramen a knife which could have been linked to the crime. In both the tooth removal and knife cases, Byers has inconsistently changed his story about skeptics' questioning yet has never been tried or interrogated for the crime.
Mumia Abu-Jamal, perhaps the most famous of 3,500 on Death Row in the United States, is a political prisoner who was convicted of murdering a police officer in Philadelphia at point-blank range. Among the infinite number of holes in the case is the alleged confession that Abu-Jamal made in the hospital on the night of his arrest in which he has been said to have stated "I shot the motherfucker and I hope the motherfucker dies!" Putting aside that this seems largely out of context for anyone familiar with Abu-Jamal's pre and post-rhetoric since this accusation, this was not reported until February 1982. The incident took place on December 9, 1981. Over a dozen officers were present the entire time at the hospital, all of whom swore in affidavits that Abu-Jamal said nothing. Gary Wakshul, the officer presiding over Abu-Jamal stated that "the negro male made no comments" over the duration of their time at the hospital.
This confession was presented during Abu-Jamal's original hearing in spite of the fact that the first person to mention it took two months to say anything about it. It seems very unlikely that so many police officers would go out of their way to say that Abu-Jamal said nothing after he supposedly shot a comrade in the line of duty. After Albert Bell, the officer who first stated Abu-Jamal made this confession, claimed the confession was made, a hospital employee named Priscilla Durham claimed that she heard the confession as well. During the trial a typewritten, unsigned document was presented as evidence that she had made note of this that December night. Yet she chose not to sign it or say anything about this extremely spiteful statement apparently screamed in a hospital in the presence of a number of what one can only assume to be deaf officers.
Confessions aren't always a high profile or political controversy. The entire city of Chicago came under fire in this contemporary era when their police were accused of large-scale levels of torture for extracting fabricated confessions. Yet even with this highly publicized information, it took years for the individuals who claimed to be victims of such torture to have their sentences overturned. Furthermore, many of them still remain in prison as decisions were upheld in appellate courts.
In Englewood, Chicago, a woman named Kathy Morgan was found by firefighters after she had been sadistically sexually assaulted and murdered. The contents of wooden dowels in her vagina were believed to have caused internal bleeding so heavy that it played no small role in her death. During questioning of an unrelated robbery, an individual named Harold Hill claimed that he and two other men- Dan Young, Jr. and Peter Williams, had raped and murdered Kathy Morgan. Young, a retarded 37-year-old man who could not read and could barely write, had initially affirmed his innocence but then signed a confession stating that he had committed the crime with Harold and Peter.
Peter Williams followed in Young's footsteps and denied any involvement in the crime. Yet he eventually confessed that same day in a sworn and signed confession. When Williams then asked a detective in the department but not involved in the interrogation process the date of the crime, the detective told him that it was a date during which Williams was serving an incarceration sentence for an unrelated crime. In spite of the fact that both Harold Hill and Dan Young, Jr. had said that Williams was the third man before he was ever questioned, they were still tried although, as author Steve Bogira puts it, "they'd confessed to doing the crime with a man who was locked up."
During the trial of Hill and Young, Williams testified on their behalf, stating that he had been beaten and slapped during the period of questioning. He also testified that the officers had continuously told him the details of the case so that the confession would appear to be legitimate. Further testimony from Young indicated that he had been tortured as well through methods of threatening, beating and destruction of property. In spite of this, both Hill and Young were convicted and sentenced for raping and murdering a woman.
Although not in Chicago and not the most noble of men, Stanley Williams also knows a thing or two about alleged confessions where the facts of the case are first presented to informants. Williams, accused of murdering four individuals, was said to have voluntarily confessed to two unrelated people about his crimes. James Garrett, the lead informant in the Stan Williams case, claims that Williams had presented him with a voluntary confession. This was reiterated by a murderer who was in prison and had his sentence greatly reduced after testifying this. It has since been discovered that this second informant had been given the details of the case to study in his cell overnight before declaring that Williams had confessed and, more importantly, what he had confessed to.
Garrett was also in trouble with the law, under investigation for murder. The murder charge miraculously withered away after he informed the police of Williams' confession. Blood and fingerprints at the scenes of the crimes do not match that of Williams but one bullet does match a shotgun that he was the licensed owner of. Interestingly, this shotgun was found under the bed of James Garrett. Garrett had also interestingly robbed a local gun store of both guns and ammunition, which was one of only two local stores that sold the shotgun shell found at the scene of the crime.
Back in Chicago, a man named Gregory Banks signed a confession in which he stated that he had committed murder and armed robbery. His interrogation process was a lengthy thirty-one hours, during which he has testified he was stricken with a flashlight, repeatedly kicked and threatened. Threats included the placement of a gun in his mouth and an officer placing a plastic bag over his head saying "We have something for niggers." Upon his arrival at the Cook County Jail, Banks displayed numerous signs of beating yet he was sentenced to fifty years in prison.
Leroy Orange had also confessed to murder yet claimed that he was electrically shocked and had his testicles squeezed to derive a confession. He too had been the victim of plastic-bagging for suffocation purposes and testified that he had been shocked so hard that his front teeth had cracked. It has been proven that his front teeth are indeed cracked yet his appeals were turned down and he was perceived to be one of those desperate criminals looking for any way out of conviction.
These kind of things don't have to take place in major cities and they occur on a daily level; oftentimes they don't even make it to the local news. In Neptune, New Jersey Travis Lane has testified that his confession was the result of his attempt at cooperation largely derived from fear of the police and that he did not understand the Miranda rights which he had waived either. He has also testified that the police involved in his interrogation engaged in threatening language and actions. His trial continues for murder allegations.
I myself have witnessed firsthand experience of the process which leads to a confession. Regardless of whether or not one is guilty for the crime that he or she is being accused of, police questioning is not a comfortable situation to be involved in. You are surrounded by those who assume your guilt and there is no way out. Many of the above individuals as well as myself feel that you will not leave the environment that you are trapped in until you give them what they want which is inevitably a confession. There is no opportunity to successfully request the reformation of words and you cannot just walk out of a closed room with at least two detectives present during the period of interrogation.
The last option is to fight it in the court system but the odds of that doing anything are worse than slim to none. Judges don't like defying the word of prosecutors or police officers and when crimes are along the extremity of murder laced without extenuating circumstances, the system often forgets about the suspect and pays the majority of its attention to the getting what some view as justice for the victims and their families. After the initial hearing it is all but impossible to revoke or question a confession as it is an uphill battle in the appellate courts where one can do little but dispute something about the trial- not the case- itself and end up with the decision being upheld anyway.
Confessions don't prove anything but they seem to be held on higher grounds than video cameras of a crime with the individual pointing the gun, getting blood all over his or herself and then standing there waiting for the arresting officers. This detrimental procedure should be eradicated from the judicial system entirely; it only allows room for corruption and the elimination of justice. The police are a unit which cannot be trusted anyway, it hardly seems reliable to base an individual's life situation on what is stated in an intimidating atmosphere in the presence of some of society’s most notorious men and women.
Perhaps there will be a day when swearing to tell the truth means more than saying you will, when signing an affidavit or a statement means that every word by the individual's name means that he or she did in fact state those words verbatim. But in the current state of affairs, we cannot afford to base court decisions on confessions. Were the case to be that contemporary times were better off, it still seems that confessions are inapplicable to a system of true justice.
A confession means nothing, nothing, that is, but a statement that may or may not have been said, may or may not be true and may or may not have been forced in one way or another. Let the case speak for itself during the span of the trial and disregard all that has supposedly already been confessed. Speaking is such a simple action and although he meant this in quite a different way, it seems appropriate to quote Jose Marti on this matter: "Doing is the best way of saying."
