Commentary: It's too easy to extract false confessions from youths
More than 30 years ago, five Black and Latinx New York City teenagers were wrongly accused of assault and rape by NYPD investigators in a notorious episode that became known as the Central Park jogger case.
The boys – who ranged from 14 to 16 years old when the crime took place in 1989 – were subjected to hours of relentless interrogation by NYPD detectives seeking convictions for the high-profile case. Ultimately, investigators managed to coerce false confessions from four of the teens by lying about nonexistent crime scene evidence and misleading them to believe that if they admitted participating in the attack, they would be allowed to go home.
The boys didn't return home for years. Despite the absence of DNA evidence linking them to the crime, all five teens were convicted in court and spent years behind bars before their convictions were vacated in 2002 – after a known serial rapist confessed to being the sole perpetrator of the crime.
Although the Central Park jogger case exposed the damaging consequences of using coercive police interrogation tactics to extract confessions from youth, police practices for interrogating youth remain unchanged. To this day, the same types of injustice occur – particularly to young men of color.
https://www.timesunion.com/opinion/article/Commentary-It-s-too-easy-to-extract-false-17192328.php