The 2012 Ken Burns documentary entitled The Central Park Five offers disturbing insight into institutionalized racism and the criminal justice system. Co-produced by Sarah Burns and David McMahon, The Central Park Five 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 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 undermine the constitutional rights of citizens to due process. 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 & 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,”...
125). Using actual audio from the confession, Burns shows how incrdibly detailed false confessions can be. The film shows how the police badgered the boys to such a degree that they came to believe that they had in fact committed the crime, which is what led to the false confession.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.
Psychology -- Central Park Jogger Matthew Johnson's The Central Park Jogger Case - Police coercion and secrecy in interrogation (Johnson, 2003), posits the reasonable theory that police interrogation is "ripe for abusive treatment" and the equally reasonable position that custodial questioning should be entirely recorded and preserved. While Johnson was wise to focus on the Central Park Jogger case and place it in historical/cultural context, he focused so intently on race
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