‘Making a Murderer,’ and the Huge Problem of False Youth Confessions
That tracks with a number of high-profile false confessions. The so-called Central Park Five were between the ages of 14 and 16 when they were arrested and charged with raping a jogger in New York City in 1989. After being interrogated for hours, all five confessed to being involved with the crime, with four confessing on videotape. At the time, Donald Trump took out a full-page ad in the New York Times calling for their execution. It’s worth noting that these individuals were all African-American or Latino, and they were all children. And, it turned out, all five were innocent. In 2002, 13 years after their conviction, the Central Park Five were exonerated after DNA testing proved that a convicted murderer and rapist had committed the crime.
“What we know about false confessions is they occur disproportionately in cases involving murder and rape,” says Feld. “Those are the most serious crimes, and the police are under the greatest pressure to try to solve them. Particularly in cases where they have weak evidence, they’re going to rely heavily on eliciting a confession.” Because most of the juvenile false confessions we know of come from this small subsection of juvenile offenders, Feld argues it’s impossible to know exactly how often young people are coerced into false confessions.
Surely, some viewers watched Dassey’s confession in Making a Murderer and wondered how anyone could ever confess to a crime he didn’t commit. His lawyer explains: “You have to think about this from Brendan’s perspective. The interrogation tape that we saw was actually the fourth time he had been questioned by police over the course of 48 hours. They were coming after him and coming after him, not leaving him alone after he said, ‘I have nothing to do with this,'” says Nirider. “In that kind of situation, where you’re being badgered like that, and 16 years old with intellectual disabilities, suddenly it makes a lot of sense to say, OK, I’m going to tell these guys what they want to hear.”
Nirider points to another case, from Virginia, just last month. Robert Davis was arrested when he was 18 years old in connection with a 2003 murder. After five hours of interrogation in a cold room, Davis reportedly asked police, “What can I say to get me out of this?” before falsely confessing. He was exonerated and released this past December.
“[Young people] have a very present sense of time,” says Marsha Levick, deputy director and chief counsel at the Juvenile Law Center. “If they think saying what the police want to hear will end the interrogation, they will endeavor to do that, wrongly thinking they will get to go home.” That’s exactly what many viewers saw happening with Dassey, who asked, after confessing to a brutal murder, if he’d be able to make it back to school in time to turn in a class project. “They are looking for immediate rewards,” says Levick, “not working through the myriad adverse consequences they might encounter in the justice system by implicating themselves.”