Payback, but are we learning anything from this?
You may have heard of the infamous and brutal murder of 11-year old honor-student Ryan Harris in Chicago in 1998. It’s an all-too familiar theme: police, under intense public pressure to solve a hot case, arrest a suspect, get a “confession”, and cease all further investigative leads to focus on the suspect in custody. And then someone complicates things by demonstrating that the “suspect” is factually innocent. Oops! In this case, however, the suspects were a little out of the ordinary: a seven year-old and an eight-year old, two kids whose lives were irreparably altered after they became known as the “kid killers”, the youngest children ever to be charged with murder.
That these two children were factually innocent didn’t stop Chicago Detective James Cassidy, who managed to extract “confessions” that implicated the two in the murder. This wasn’t entirely surprising, since Cassidy had previously managed to extract a “spontaneous” confession from an 11 year-old kid in another notorious case. Never mind that the conviction was reversed when a judge reviewed the case and deemed the confession coerced and inherently unreliable. An eleven year-old, convicted of murder, because of a spontaneous “confession”. And here again in the Ryan Harris case, kids indicted and on their way through the funhouse of the Chicago criminal justice system. And don’t forget that whenever someone is wrongly accused of murder, it necessarily means that there remains a real murderer running free, ready to kill again.
This week the city of Chicago settled with the families of the two falsely accused and indicted children to the tune of over $11 million. It’s hard to know if this will cover the emotional scarring that’s accompanied the last 7 years these kids have had to endure, but it’s something. But the bigger question is “why did it happen”?
There are many reasons, but it can’t be denied that one of the principal things that could have spared these kids their hell, and saved the taxpayers of Chicago $11 million, was technology that was readily available to all parties. There is no reason for any police interrogation facility in any American city to not have a tape recorder on hand, for example. Even better would be video cameras, and it’s not like they’re hard to find or prohibitively expensive. Neither was used in this case and either would have demonstrated to prosecutors the unreliabilty of the coerced confessions. And on the subject of using technology to avoid catastrophic results, here’s the real kicker: if you’re wondering how they finally narrowed in on a real suspect who is now in custody awaiting trial, enabling prosecutors to drop the case against the two kids, guess how that happened?
DNA. Duhhh.
RP
March 8th, 2006 at 8:07 am
How many other confessions have resulted from the detective’s work (James Cassidy) - adult or juvenile? Now that he is retired, what was the sum total number of confessions he obtained? And of these, how many have been questioned or validated?
I suspect that many other confessions generated by the work of Detective Cassidy must be reassessed; many other innocents are likely still in prison due to his unethical performance; or did he cross the line only once or twice?
Underage persons are only one group of persons who might be easily exploited and from whom “false confessions” may be obtained. How about the homeless, the indigent, or substance abusers, among others? A review of confessions obtained in the light of the social position of the confessees could be studied from this point of view.
I suppose the media is unwilling to challenge the detective’s procedures in general. How would the Chicago Police Department survive the possible discovery of the fraudulence of a detective’s entire career? Would this detective be the the first or only one whose career would wilt under scrutiny or could the CPD hold up all other confessions obtained by this detective to the light of day as highly ethical and effective - a model for all other detectives to aspire to? Accountability? To Whom?
Some innocents in prison probably wonder about this every day.
March 11th, 2006 at 9:34 am
[…] As these wrongful prosecution stories become more and more common (see, e.g., this story), all of these costs will continue to mount and it will be clear that they far outweigh the costs of employing better procedures and available technologies. The lessons are there to be learned if authorities will just listen. I would have thought it enough that an innocent man was jailed, or that additional innocent victims were left helpless against the real criminals allowed to go free. But now the hurt is gonna hit our pocketbooks too. Maybe that will wake up a few folks. […]