In 1989, a woman jogging through Central Park in New York was brutally raped and almost murdered. Until 2002, when convicted murderer and rapist Mathias Reyes confessed to the rape, the police believed that they had solved the crime. They brought in five black or Latino teenagers, aged 14 to 16, and interrogated them. At the time, all five of them confessed to having been involved. But why would all five of them confess to the crime when clearly all five of them did not commit the crime? And why would the police allow this to happen?
There are many reasons why false confessions happen. Sometimes interrogators may promise a lighter sentence to a suspect who confesses. Investigators might also use psychological terror to make someone feel guilty and afraid. The young and inexperienced—like the five boys in question—are particularly vulnerable to these tactics. The police can also tell a suspect that they already have evidence to link that suspect to the crime, leading the suspect to believe it would be in their best interest to confess. When you're a 14- to 16-year-old boy being interrogated by NYC detectives and policemen, however, nothing can prepare you for the psychological torture that thirty hours of interrogation can put you through. Sometimes, confessing might seem like the least stressful option.
According to psychologists who have studied the case, people, especially young people, can become so broken down during these interrogations that they come to the counterintuitive conclusion that confessing is in their best interest. Because many are unaware that interrogators are legally permitted to lie about any and all types of evidence, including DNA evidence, prints found at the scene, and polygraph test results, suspects may end up believing that their conviction is a foregone conclusion and that they should confess to reduce or otherwise improve their sentence. Some may even become so confused and frightened that they confess simply to make the torturous interrogation stop. That the boys in question were young and belonged to minority ethnic groups that have traditionally been subject to prejudice and disproportionate rates of incarceration might be evidence that the boys believed the legal system would not work in their favor—regardless of whether they were innocent or not.
Interestingly, none of them ever confessed to committing the crime themselves; they all implicated the others. They were all coerced confessions in the case of the Central Park Five, because they were led to believe that if they confessed, they could go home. And what teenager doesn't want that? What the police failed to mention before the trial, however, was that the DNA test results came back from the lab, all implicating a single individual that wasn't any of the accused boys. The police believed that they could get a conviction based on the assumption that they were somehow still involved, and that maybe there was an unnamed sixth individual that they didn't catch.
It's very difficult for a judge or jury to look past a confession, no matter what the circumstances surrounding it are. Many times they have no access to the interrogation process. In fact, in his book about the phenomenon of false confessions, law professor Brandon L. Garrett found that
"...in many of the cases the defendants were young or mentally disabled. In none were the interrogations recorded, making it difficult to know what manipulative and coercive measures the police used."
This is a huge issue surrounding our justice system today. According to experts, police exercise an extreme amount of power in these cases—arguably too much power. They can lie about evidence, they can use psychological torture, they don't have to tape the confession, etc. A suspect's only option can seem to be confessing or blaming someone else for the crime while admitting that they still played a part. This is what the Central Park Five did. For these reasons, the Central Park Five were convicted on false confessions and served up to thirteen years in prison for crimes that they didn't commit.
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