The Central Park Five: Race, False Confessions, and Justice

Introduction: The Central Park Five Documentary

The 2012 Ken Burns documentary The Central Park Five offers disturbing insight into institutionalized racism and the criminal justice system. Co-produced by Sarah Burns and David McMahon, the film is about five children of color—teenagers—who were wrongfully convicted of multiple charges including sexual assault. In addition to illuminating the way the media can feed into racial stereotypes about criminality, the documentary also shows how law enforcement uses unethical tactics of interrogation to secure a conviction at all costs. Pressures to arrest and convict are shared among all members of the law enforcement team, even though individual officers will claim that they were simply following orders. Therefore, The Central Park Five is also instructive for the way it shows how police organizational culture needs to change. The practices and tactics used by New York police undermined the constitutional rights of citizens to due process.

False Confessions and Coercive Interrogation Tactics

Essentially, the five teenagers referred to in the film's title were treated as if they were guilty and were manipulated and coerced into a false confession. As Drizin and Leo (2004) point out, false confessions elicited in cases like the Central Park Five are a matter of procedural injustice. Thankfully, DNA evidence now exists to exonerate the five young men and scores of innocent people like them. Yet the police interrogation techniques used on the Central Park Five planted suggestions into the minds of the suspects, causing them to "internalize guilt" and "confabulate details in memory consistent with that belief" (Kassin & Kiechel, 1996, p. 125). Using actual audio from the confession, Burns shows how incredibly detailed false confessions can be. The film demonstrates how police badgered the boys to such a degree that they came to believe they had in fact committed the crime, which is what led to the false confession.

Juvenile Vulnerability and Wrongful Convictions

The fact that the boys were still teenagers is also critically important, because juveniles are far more susceptible to police pressure and are, as the film shows, particularly vulnerable to false confessions (Drake, Gonzalez, Sigurdsson, et al., 2017). Were it not for DNA evidence and the actual perpetrator miraculously having leaked his confession to a fellow inmate, the five boys would still be in prison. Wrongful convictions are a miscarriage of justice. To reduce instances of wrongful convictions, it is critical that police improve their interrogation techniques, even if doing so means slowing down an investigation.

Racial Bias in Media Coverage and Law Enforcement

In addition to the issues surrounding police interrogations, adolescent vulnerability, and false confessions, The Central Park Five also directly addresses the issue of racial bias and media coverage. As Duru (2004) points out, the Central Park Five case is one of a litany of cases built around the "myth of the bestial black man" (p. 1315). The filmmakers show how the five boys were portrayed in the media as part of a "wilding" "wolf pack," essentially providing the American public with propaganda that played directly into the prosecution's hands. Even if jurors could be truly neutral—which they can never be—their prior exposure to similar cases involving young men of color would have created biases about what criminals look like. Media coverage can make or break a case, influencing public opinion, placing political pressure on the police to make arrests and secure convictions hastily, and shaping the perceptions of jury members.

Conclusion: Lessons for Criminal Justice Reform

The Central Park Five is therefore important on many levels: showing how the media impacts criminal justice procedures, decisions on whether to prosecute, and the pressure placed on police to use unethical tactics. The film directly addresses racial bias within society and within law enforcement in particular. Likewise, the film showcases prevailing interrogation tactics, including the planting of information that can mislead a witness or a suspect. These interrogation techniques "work" in the sense that they get results; the results may occasionally lead to actual confessions, but far too often cause an innocent person to self-incriminate. Not all cases can be resolved using DNA evidence, and it is critical that law enforcement reconsider its priorities and focus more on the principles of ethics and justice when prosecuting.

References

Drake, K. E., Gonzalez, R. A., Sigurdsson, J. F., et al. (2017). A national study into temperament as a critical susceptibility factor for reported false confessions amongst adolescents. Personality and Individual Differences, 111(2017), 220–226.

Drizin, S. A., & Leo, R. A. (2004). The problem of false confessions in the post-DNA world. 82 N.C. L. Rev. 891 (2003–2004).

Duru, N. J. (2004). The Central Park Five, the Scottsboro Boys, and the myth of the bestial black man. 25 Cardozo L. Rev. 1315 (2003–2004).

Kassin, S. M., & Kiechel, K. L. (1996). The social psychology of false confessions. Psychological Science, 7(3), 125–128.