Illusion of Justice by Jerome F. Buting

Illusion of Justice by Jerome F. Buting

Author:Jerome F. Buting
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2017-02-05T16:00:00+00:00


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“A defendant’s confession is like no other evidence,” U.S. Supreme Court justice Byron White wrote in 1991. “It is probably the most probative and damaging evidence that can be admitted against him, and, if it is a full confession, a jury may be tempted to rely on it alone in reaching its decision.”

As hard as it may be to believe that innocent people would admit to committing a crime, it has happened consistently throughout history. Trying to reel back a confession is close to impossible. Take the case of Margaret Jacobs, who, like Brendan Dassey, was a teenager who accused a relative of joining her in a heinous crime.

After implicating herself and her grandfather, George Jacobs Sr., in various illicit actions, she tried to recant her confession. Why, she was asked on the witness stand, had she made the original, damning statements?

“They told me if I would not confess I should be put down into the dungeon and would be hanged, but if I would confess I should save my life,” she told the court.

Despite Margaret’s efforts, her grandfather was hanged. The trial of George Jacobs Sr. was held in the town of Salem, Massachusetts, in 1692, an era when Satan was believed to walk the earth. Her grandfather was one of twenty people executed for witchcraft, nearly all on the confessions of self-styled witches. (Margaret’s own trial was delayed because, fortuitously, she came down with a boil on her head; before she recovered, the witch courts had been disbanded and a new court found her innocent.)*

More than two centuries later, in 1932, Edwin M. Borchard published Convicting the Innocent: Sixty-Five Actual Errors of Criminal Justice, which cataloged wrongful convictions, including a number based on false confessions, going back to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Back in those days before reliable mass communications or regular postal service, Borchard notes, it was not uncommon for people to wander off, not be heard from, and then be presumed dead. A suspect would be found, forced to confess, and then convicted of murder. How do we know these were false confessions? In eight cases, the supposed victim later turned up, “hale and hearty,” as Borchard, a professor at Yale Law School, wrote.

Three hundred years after Margaret Jacobs succumbed to pressure from the adults who were questioning her, Brendan Dassey cowered, alone and afraid, in an interrogation room.

Because the act of speaking against one’s own interests seems so counterintuitive, false confessions are extraordinarily dangerous evidence. Juries give confessions a great deal of credence, even when they show signs of being drastically unreliable—as Brendan Dassey’s confession did. It revealed nothing trustworthy about the death of Teresa Halbach but was a living, breathing gauge of the great lengths to which the prosecution team and the Manitowoc County Sheriff’s Office were willing to go in their pursuit of Steven Avery.

From the outset, Ken Kratz’s description of Brendan Dassey’s confession at that press conference on March 2, 2006, which was echoed in the details of the criminal complaint—that



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