Another Big Lie from the Authorities: Innocent People Don't Plead Guilty

Ten years ago, Brian Banks, a high school football star from Los Angeles with a promising future, pleaded "no contest" to raping and kidnapping classmate Wanetta Gibson in a school stairwell. Despite the evidence to the contrary, Banks' attorney advised the youngster to plead "no contest" (which essentially is a guilty plea) with the assurance that he only would get 18 months, as opposed to a possible 41 years if he was found guilty.

Banks and his family did the math and he pleaded, and five years later, he still was in prison. After being released, the girl finally admitted to having lied, but did not want to publicly admit the truth because her mother had sued the Los Angeles School District and got $1.5 million. Having essentially stolen the money in the first place, they did not want to be faced with giving it back.

The various news stories have turned it into something in the human interest category, as though it were a heart-warming account instead of the cold-blooded lie that essentially took a young man's life from him. As I see it, the media is missing the real story, which is this: the entire system of "justice" in California, despite huge holes in the girl's story, was ready to assume that she was telling the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.

Why? As in the Duke Lacrosse Case, the various players in the system discarded forensic evidence, timelines, and the very Laws of Time and Space to rush to a judgement of GUILTY, but the rush is not simply a psychological event, but also a legal one, and one can trace a lot of the rush to federal law, and specifically the Violence Against Women Act.

In 1974, Congress passed the Mondale Act and the ultimate result was a huge rash of cases in which authorities were REQUIRED to rush to judgment no matter how outlandish the charges of child abuse and molestation. The Mondale Act and Violence Against Women Act were similar pieces of legislation, in that they promised federal help and money (lots of money) to states that were aggressive in pursuing child abuse/molestation charges and charges of rape and sexual assault against women.

Besides the money, Congress also stipulated that states change how they approach due process and how they viewed evidence. Before the VAWA, for example, many states required that with rape charges, there also be corroborating evidence because it was too easy for people to make false accusations. In order to be in compliance with both the VAWA and the Mondale Act, however, states had to just accept the word of a "victim," no matter how outlandish or dishonest the story might have been. In the Wonderland of federal law, the accusation alone is all the proof the authorities need for conviction.

To the feds and all of the activists that were behind these laws, no story would be considered outlandish, because everyone knew that all men were rapists or potential rapists and that all parents actually were secret child molesters (or at least those parents and men who did not have the proper political connections). We know the results, and they are ugly.

To the Progressive mindset that is behind the modern governing philosophy, both child abuse/molestation and rape were "epidemic" until Congress and the U.S. Department of Justice stepped in to put an end to the violence. Thus, any criticism of these laws or any attempt to restore due process of law or to demand that the rules of evidence actually require real evidence is seen as an attack on women and children.

Without the Mondale Act, there is no McMartin Case, no Little Rascals, no Tonya Craft, and no Creative Frontiers. There is no rash of false accusations of abuse/molestation in child custody cases, no Joal Henke and his "I just remembered" perjury, and James Combs does not plead guilty to a felony for something he never did.

Without the VAWA, there is no Duke Lacrosse Case because the investigation would have been very, very different. And Brian Banks would not have spent five years in prison, and thousands -- yes, thousands -- of other people would not have been falsely accused.

In the United States today, defendants face mountains of charges, courtesy of how prosecutors operate, so that conviction on any one of them can result in decades in prison. People come to understand that the system is stacked against them and that in this country, neither judges nor prosecutors nor those that govern consider innocence to be a legitimate defense.

Despite what one might see on the various "CSI" shows or see on TV or the movies, police no longer do real investigations. In cases of accused rape, sexual assault, child molestation or child abuse, police ARE REQUIRED BY LAW to "investigate" as though the charges are true, which means the bias always is toward "proving" guilt. One should not be at all surprised that this federally-mandated method of "investigation" bleeds off into other cases such as robbery and murder, which guarantees not only that there will be a spate of wrongful convictions, but also that the system will be utterly biased toward keeping such convictions from being overturned, no matter how obvious it might be that the defendants were railroaded. 

As for Brian Banks, a number of people engaged in criminal behavior, beginning with Wanetta Gibson. However, the police and prosecutors engaged in false accusations and false charges, people lied to a grand jury that indicted, and prosecutors lied in court. Banks' attorney encouraged him to accept an outcome at odds with justice, and Gibson and her mother stole more than a million dollars from taxpayers, as did their attorney, who got at least a half-million dollars from the theft.

Unfortunately, false pleas are not limited to just these kinds of cases. I have a good friend who pleaded guilty to a number of things that both he and the prosecutors knew he did not do, but did so because had he not done so, prosecutors would have brought vague charges against him in the federal court in Washington, D.C., and he being a Jewish Republican, did not want to face a jury of mostly African-American Democrats.

That is the system we now have, and it cannot and will not be fixed. No "reforms" will work because too many people make too much money and the voices of justice and responsibility are drowned out by those who dominate our political and legal institutions.

The False Confession Industry

When questions arose about whether or the teens that allegedly assaulted and raped a female jogger in Central Park years ago were wrongfully convicted, conservative columnist Ann Coulter remarked that of course the convictions were correct. Why? Police had the teens' confessions, she wrote, which should have eliminated all future questions regarding justice in that case.

Indeed, most people believe that a confession is the Gold Standard of criminal evidence, and that a confession should trump everything else, including forensic evidence (such as DNA matches) and even the Laws of Time and Space. Author David K. Shipler has an intriguing article on the New York Times op-ed page that goes into some detail about false confessions and the smarmy tactics police and prosecutors use to get them.

Beginning with the interrogation of a juvenile police tricked into confessing to a crime he didn't commit (it seems that the boy was in juvenile lockup when the murder of a policeman was committed, although that little fact did not stop police from trying to get him convicted), Shipler notes that jurors don't like to believe that innocent people would falsely confess, and judges don't want to believe it, either. Yet, they do. Writes Shipler:

False confessions have figured in 24 percent of the approximately 289 convictions reversed by DNA evidence, according to the Innocence Project. Considering that DNA is available in just a fraction of all crimes, a much larger universe of erroneous convictions surely exists. If nearly a quarter of overturned convictions involves a false confession, police interrogations are creating an epidemic of injustice.

And who confesses? He notes:

If you have never been tortured, or locked up and verbally threatened, you may find it hard to believe that anyone would confess to something he had not done. Intuition holds that the innocent do not make false confessions. What on earth could be the motive? To stop the abuse? To curry favor with the interrogator? To follow some fragile thread of imaginary hope that cooperation will bring freedom?

Yes, all of the above. Psychological studies of confessions that have proved false show an overrepresentation of children, the mentally ill or mentally retarded, and suspects high on drugs or drunk on liquor. They are susceptible to suggestion, eager to please authority figures, disconnected from reality or unable to defer gratification. Children often think, as Felix did, that they will be jailed if they keep up their denials and will get to go home if they just go along with the interrogator. Mature adults of normal intelligence have also confessed falsely after being manipulated.

One of the most egregious cases of false confession involved the wrongful conviction of Martin Tankleff, who at age 17 was alleged to have brutally murdered his parents. Tankleff was in prison for 17 years until his conviction was overturned a few years ago, and it turned out that police and prosecutors hid exculpatory evidence in order to better secure a conviction.

The Tankleff case hits home because I am good friends with a person who was working with the lawyer who finally was successful in securing Tankleff's release from prison. Legal documents that I read long before they became public were quite chilling.

First, there was another suspect who clearly had motive to kill the Tankleffs and he had a reputation for violence. Second, had personal ties with a police detective who just happened to be involved with the Tankleff case and was in a good position to lead investigators away from the real killer. Third, the nature of the evidence itself demonstrated that Martin was not the likely killer.

Yet, none of that mattered to police and prosecutors. They wanted a conviction, and Martin was a convenient target. Writes Shipler:

A cunning lie generated a false confession from Martin Tankleff, 17, who found his parents one morning in their Long Island home slashed and stabbed, his mother dead, his father barely alive. The boy called 911 and was taken for questioning. Getting nowhere, Detective K. James McCready decided on a trick. He walked to an adjacent room within hearing distance, dialed an extension on the next desk, picked up the phone and faked a conversation with an imaginary officer at the hospital. He went back to the son and told him that his father had come out of his coma and said, “Marty, you did it.” In fact, Seymour Tankleff never regained consciousness and died a month later.

Martin soon confessed to the killing (and he managed to get the details of the murder wrong, but that didn't matter to police and prosecutors), and although he quickly recanted, the confession was allowed during the trial and the jurors dutifully convicted an innocent man.

As is often the case in American life today, where there is government wrongdoing, often there is someone to make money from it. With false confessions it is John E. Reid & Associates. One of the "tricks" that Reid teaches is how to slip in a Miranda warning without the person being interrogated realizing what is happening. In other words, Reid teaches police and other "interrogators" who to manipulate and lie, knowing that these things often bring about false confessions. However, convictions, not truth fills the bottom line for Reid.

While I would agree that most people in prison are guilty, nonetheless the realization that probably thousands of people languishing behind bars are innocent is not something that decent people should tolerate. Once upon a time, we depended upon police and prosecutors to be the agents that would investigate and find out what the truth really was.

Unfortunately, those days are long behind us. Truth no longer matters, and it no longer matters with the people who claim always to be telling the truth, and whose lies have horrible and bloody consequences.