I did it! (Well … maybe not)

“Three young men have had 18 years of their lives taken away. To see them get out is a bless­ing from God.”

— John Mark Byers, father of vic­tim Chris Byers

“If I was a judge and some­body done that to a kid I would have prob­a­bly done the same thing. But he was a judge, and he went to school and he was sup­posed to do the right thing.”

— Jessie Miskelley

On May 5, 1993 three eight year-old boys went miss­ing in an Arkansas sub­urb. Rel­a­tives, friends and neigh­bors searched for them through­out the evening and overnight. In the morn­ing, under the light of day, law enforce­ment teams expanded the search. By mid-afternoon the bod­ies of the three boys had been located in a drainage ditch. One of the boys died of exten­sive blood loss. The other two had drowned. They had com­mit­ted no crime, done no wrong. They were the inno­cent vic­tim of the most heinous crime.

The police inves­ti­ga­tion began imme­di­ately and even­tu­ally turned to three young men, two of them minors. One of the men, then sev­en­teen, was inter­viewed by police and admit­ted involve­ment in the crime. He iden­ti­fied one of the other two as the mur­derer and said that he had been an accom­plice. Based largely upon this clear state­ment of his involve­ment, he was con­victed and sen­tenced to life in prison. His two co-defendants were tried together and they were both con­victed as well. One of them was sen­tenced to life in prison and the other was sent to death row.

Ear­lier this month the three men were released from prison after serv­ing 18 years of their sen­tences. Though the State of Arkansas main­tains that they were, indeed, the mur­der­ers, their release brings the case of the “West Mem­phis Three” to con­clu­sion as a result of years of claims that there is really no evi­dence of their guilt and that they are inno­cent men. This is a most curi­ous state­ment, par­tic­u­larly com­ing from Jessie Misskel­ley Jr., who con­fessed to the crime.

It’s a ques­tion that arises more often than peo­ple gen­er­ally think. Why would some­one con­fess to a crime that they did not com­mit? Ear­lier this month The Econ­o­mist took a look at false con­fes­sions and just how often they actu­ally occur, imme­di­ately not­ing that of the 271 peo­ple exon­er­ated via DNA by the Inno­cence Project since 1992 nearly one quar­ter of them had orig­i­nally admit­ted to the crime that sci­en­tific evi­dence later showed they did not commit.

Sev­eral stud­ies have been under­taken to try to fig­ure out just why an inno­cent per­son would say that they had done some­thing that had not, in fact, done. In one Amer­i­can study, unknow­ing par­tic­i­pants were told that they were part of a reac­tion time study but were asked not to press a cer­tain com­puter key because it would crash the com­puter pro­gram being used in the test. The pro­gram was set up to crash no mat­ter what key they pressed and yet a quar­ter of the par­tic­i­pants in the study admit­ted to press­ing the illicit key when con­fronted. In another study out of the Nether­lands peo­ple were told that they were part of a Super­mar­ket taste test and that they could win prizes. Eight of seventy-two peo­ple admit­ted to cheat­ing even though they hadn’t.

In the com­puter key study sev­eral fac­tors increased the rate of false con­fes­sions. If par­tic­i­pants were told that there was a video of the study that might show them press­ing the wrong key, the false con­fes­sion rate jumped to 50%. If they were told that some­one actu­ally saw them press the bad key, the false con­fes­sion rate was a shock­ing 80 percent.

The dif­fer­ence in many of these sit­u­a­tions is the tech­niques that are involved in the inter­view that brings about the con­fes­sion. Length of inter­view, inter­view con­di­tions and accu­racy of infor­ma­tion pro­vided to the inter­vie­wee are just a few of the fac­tors that affect the reli­a­bil­ity of the inter­view. For­tu­nately, many mod­ern inter­views are recorded so that judge and jury can view them. Most law enforce­ment agen­cies have real­ized that they want a reli­able con­fes­sion, not just any confession.

There were signs from out­set that Jessie Miskelley’s con­fes­sion was ques­tion­able. Miskelley’s IQ is 72. He con­fessed to killing the boys hours before the last time they were actu­ally seen alive. He alleged a sex­ual assault had occurred but the med­ical exam­iner found no evi­dence of that. His story changed frequently.

The West Mem­phis Three agreed to enter a new plea — one that said the pros­e­cu­tion had enough evi­dence to con­vict them even though they claimed inno­cence. They were released with credit for the 18 years they had served — largely because of the pos­si­bly false con­fes­sion of Jessie Miskelley.

David Hej­manowski is a Mag­is­trate and Court Admin­is­tra­tor of the Delaware County Juve­nile Court and a for­mer Assis­tant Pros­e­cut­ing Attorney.