The Confessions of an Innocent Man

The Confessions of an Innocent Man

            Mom:   “Did you steal the money?”

            Kid:     “What are you talking about?”

            Mom:   “The banknote on my desk.”

            Kid:     “No, it’s not me.”

            Mom:   “Don’t lie to me. I will forgive you if you tell me the truth, not if you lie.”

            Kid:     “I didn’t.”

            Mom:   “You say that again, you’ll be grounded.”

            The kid broke into tears.

            Kid:     “Sorry, mama.”

            Mom:   “Where’s the money now? You spent it?”

            The kid just kept crying.

            Mom:   “How did you spend it? Who did you give it to? Tell me.”

            Kid:     “I didn’t take the money.”

            Mom gave the kid a stern look.

            Kid:     “Sorry, mama. I bought chocolate with it.”

Did the kid do it?  There’s only one thing I’m sure.  The mom definitely thought so.

Confessions mean a lot to us, and it goes deep into our instincts, and I suspect it’s in the blood of every race. Perhaps, it’s the most primitive way of justice, that is, by way of getting a confession.  In the tribal age, there was no DNA test, no fingerprint database or forensic science of any sort, and there was no law enforcement agents, no detectives, no whatsoever.  How could we establish somebody’s guilt? Words, or more precisely, accusations and confessions. You did it, and now you must admit it! Our ancestors would be satisfied if somebody admitted a killing, he actually did it. They were right, at least most of the time they were.  Why would anyone confess to a crime he did not commit?  We were hardwired to think that, and we still are.  And, our modern legal system still relies on that.

Common practice in case law is that an accused always has a chance to plead guilty, and before he/she is convicted, a set of facts has to be agreed to establish his/her guilt as a measure to rule out false confessions.   The problem is, if someone is determined to plead guilty, he would agree to or even make up stories to incriminate himself.  Think chocolate in the “mom and kid” story. 

As our societies and minds have become more sophisticated now, there can be a lot of reasons for a man to make a false confession. First, the legal system encourages guilty pleas by showing leniency to confessors in the form of a discount in sentencing. Discount is a luring word. You buy something at the original price of $1000, it’s expensive; you buy the same thing marked $2000 in price with a 50% discount, it’s excellent bargain.  So, a calculated person would think that he might as well lose the case, then why not opting for the discount? One-third discount is a lot, psychologically.  The rationale of granting this reduction is pretty dated as well, showing of remorse.  If somebody confesses without being accused, it’s very likely out of remorse.  But when somebody was arrested and taken to court and then he pleaded guilty, that may not involve remorse or regret.  He might just be too tired to fight or defend, or he just bought the discount.  A company gives discounts to boost sales;  likewise, the court gives discounts to boost guilty pleas.  That is an administrative necessity, though.  Our society cannot afford lengthy trials for every petty case, for we never want to spend that much time and resources.  “You’re remorseful, defendant.  I grant you full discount,” says the judge.  “You saved me 20 sitting hours. Now you serve 20 weeks less,” he didn’t say.

Even when a person pops out to admit wrongdoings out of the blues, it doesn’t mean he/she has done what they claimed.  Actually, it can be even more suspicious.  Why would anyone admit to a crime when he/she was undetected? There can be a lot of reasons too, say to cover up for loved ones, or to simply try gaining attention by confessing to a hideous crime. Another major cause of false confession is, as we all already know, interrogation.

The law enforcement always finds ways in getting confessions, and it has been done for centuries. In the old day, they relied on violence and torture.  They just beat the guy until he talked and signed.   As we became more ‘humane’, the cops used non-physical kinds of coercion, and play new tricks on the suspect. They threat and induce and lie to the arrested to get what they want to hear. You think you are smarter than that? Think again. Our minds play a lot of tricks on us when we are emotional. As a bystander, you can calmly figure out the truth and the best response to a situation.  What if you were in the hot seat?  Under all sort of pressure and relentless questioning, seeing the nostalgic “good-cop, bad-cop” act, in the midst of the grotesque air in an interrogation room, will you break down?  No?  Because you know what game they’re playing, right? What if you were arrested in Russia? Held in custody by a junta? What if you were indeed at the crime scene and it happened so fast and were so chaotic that you had trouble remember what exactly you had done?  Could you maintain your innocence?

We don’t have a mind of steel, far from it. Breaking down somebody doesn’t necessarily mean getting the truth.  The police never learned this, or they just care about getting higher detection and conviction stats.  Getting someone to say yes to something doesn’t mean he/she truly agrees to it.  And that’s why “leading questions” are not allowed in court. However, it’s commonplace in a police station.  It gets to its worst with the child victims.

The Danish movie Jagten explores on this. A kindergarten girl for some reason made a phony claim to the headmistress that a school worker showed her his genitals, which opened up a full-scale investigation.  An interviewer would then ask the girl if she saw white fluid coming out from the suspect’s penis, and would take the blank look of the girl as a positive reply. Emergency meetings were held for the parents of all kids in the kindergarten, and the kids were interviewed.  The result was scary.  Many of the kids, male and female, had apparently been molested by this same man.  They even gave the same account of the details of a hidden basement in the man’s house, except when the police raided the house, they found that there was no basement at all.  I imagine the interviews were made up of leading questions after leading questions.  Children are usually inclined to say yes when they are not sure.  Even if they were sure, after a long session of questioning and suggesting they won’t be anymore.  The children were lying, but it was the adults who made them lie. The adults wanted to get answers they wanted to hear, and they got them. And then they heard something they didn’t want to hear, they would think the children are just too embarrassed or scared to tell the truth.

Every time we finish off a sentence for someone, we are putting words in his/her mouth. The interrogators think the children can’t articulate, so they help them to put their thoughts into comprehensible words.  The problem is, the interrogators are prejudiced. They often have their version of ‘truth’ before asking the alleged victims.  Then with tactful question, they get what they want to hear from the children’s mouths. Essentially, the children spoke the interrogators’ minds instead of their own.  And that means disaster to the accused.  Most people think children don’t lie despite that fact that they know their own children are quite capable of lying to them, say about a missing coin, or a broken vase.  When it comes to sophisticated claims like seeing some white fluid, it just cannot be a lie.  Then it becomes a piece of bullet-proof evidence.  Nobody would believe in the accused. His family might also begin to doubt him. What can a man do when he is condemned by all? Will he keep denying when he feels he’s already crucified and nobody will ever believe in him anymore? Maybe he would just kneel down and beg for mercy, and then all doubts would be gone. He’s the guy. He may actually begin to think he might have done it.  In deep despair and depression, his mind would play tricks on him, conjuring up memories that had never existed in his brain before.  Our minds are weak. When we feel all people are pointing their fingers at us, we begin to doubt ourselves. An experienced interrogator is just capable of giving you this exact feeling.  And then he will make you think confession your only salvation.

           

           

The Prejudiced Man

The Prejudiced Man

How well do you think you can detect a lie?  How well do you think you can read people?  If you think you are good, beware!

In very early stages of our lives we found out that other people didn’t think the same like us, and we wondered what were in those brains attached to other bodies.  And on those occasions when we were teased and tricked by another kid we learned to our dismay that we never knew what’s in the other kid’s mind.  Then we lived with that.  We slowly picked up those subtle clues about the emotion and the true intention of somebody else.  When she had that look, she was happy, upset, angry, sympathetic, jealous, indifferent, contemptuous, or… deceitful.  We also learned how to read between the lines, how to decipher body languages, and what were the ‘tells’ when somebody didn’t speak the truth.

And then we have some success.  “I always know she’s up to something.  She’s acts dubiously.”  “I’ve told you he admired you.  Now you know what I meant.”  “That guy was lying.  I could tell it in his eyes.” And so on and so on.  It seems like in the blinding mist we have somehow found our bearing, and the most remarkable is, we’ve found it by ourselves, our wit, our experience, our wisdom.

And that, is a huge bias, my friend.  We all want to be in control, at least in our own lives.  It would drive us nuts if everything were unpredictable like a dice roll.  That’s why fortune telling is one of our oldest businesses, along with prostitution, and it never faded away.  We want to be in the know, in a world vastly governed by randomness.  People are largely unpredictable, sometimes even by themselves.  It’s really comforting now that we can read them somehow.  The success we had in this respect brings us too much satisfaction that it blinded us from our equally frequent failures.  We ignored those times we misread people, unless we paid big prices for our failures.  If we are unpunished, we forget. 

Yes, our selective memory works this way.  We’re getting better and better, reflecting on the successful reads, while cheerfully ignoring misreads.  Soon we became over-confident.  Arrogance slipped in.  I am the complex and subtle being in this world, and you are skin-deep, nothing more than your facial expression or words suggest.  If you don’t understand me, you are stupid, or I am complex.  If I don’t understand you, you are stupid, or too complicated. It’s something like the “if I win, I’m good; if I lose, I’m unlucky” mentality.  That’s prejudice.

Ironically, our justice system relies on this same prejudice.  Judges think they can read people.  They say they can tell somebody’s lying by his demeanor.  They say an alleged victim is credible because she wept genuinely at the witness stand.  Judges and juries are seen as some effective lie detectors.  Truth is, people behave very differently when facing the same situation.  Some may be always uneasy speaking out, and that doesn’t necessarily mean he’s lying.  Some may be exceptionally calm when being framed up, and that doesn’t mean he’s guilty.  One of the most respectable judges in the territory once said, “I accept her evidence because if she was acting, she would have been a phenomenal actress.”  It looks like there was one judge who knew the game of justice and his own limits, and more remarkably, he was willing to speak it out. 

Judges are professional liars in a way.  They pretend that they can read people. But they have to.  At the end of the day they will be the ones saying “guilty” or “not guilty”, and they can’t vote “abstention”.  It’s not their fault.  They also have to make a living, and all the society can best have is some justice.  Complete justice is naivety.  We can’t complain.

However, as a common man, outside the court of law, I implore you this. Don’t be a goddamned judge.  Try not to judge people that readily.  We are getting better with time, but not quite as good as we think we are.  Wrong judgments cost us, dearly sometimes.  Stay foolish.  For the moment we think we are wise, foolishness begins.