Photo Credit: Funny Junk

In response to my article My Court Stenography-To-Text Project Constant reader MakesOwnWeather wondered if I would still be opposed to the death penalty, "If there is indisputable direct evidence from a dozen sources with no connection to the perpetrator or the victim AND DNA evidence AND admission of crime?"

So, do these three independent bodies of facts relieve me of any doubts as to the guilt of the accused?

For the first two, let me dispose of them summarily: in the case of indisputable direct evidence, this requires a future article where I will cover instances where such evidence was fabricated by overzealous police and corrupt prosecutors against the innocent accused.

In the case of DNA evidence: in my article DNA Does not always Catch the Guilty we saw that DNA is not available in 80% of murder cases; neither to catch the true criminal nor to exonerate the truly innocent. But what about the 20% of cases where the DNA irrefutably points to the accused? Would that make me feel better about the death penalty in that case? Again, that question requires a future article of it own where I will link to news reports where DNA evidence was fabricated by forensic investigators against the innocent accused.

So now we come to admissions of guilt. Although I already covered false confessions in my article Many Innocent People Take Plea Deals To Avoid the Death Penalty, allow me to once and for all put to rest the notion that confessions mean anything at all.

Consider the case where four accused perpetrators confessed in writing and a fifth made verbal admissions to attempted murder and rape:

Wikipedia, Central Park jogger case

The Central Park jogger case involved the assault and rape of Trisha Meili, a female jogger in New York City's Central Park, on April 19, 1989. Five juvenile males—four black and one of Hispanic descent—were tried and convicted for the crime and served their sentences fully.

...

Four of the juveniles charged—Antron McCray, Kevin Richardson, Raymond Santana, and Kharey Wise—officially confessed to the rape and to other attacks that night, and each implicated the others. A fifth suspect, Yusef Salaam, made verbal admissions, but refused to sign a confession or make one on videotape. Salaam was, however, implicated by all of the other four and convicted.

The confessions withstood intense scrutiny at pretrial hearings and at two lengthy public trials. Would 5 people make admissions to such a crime if it weren't true? Seems open and shut, doesn't it? Except for one thing - they didn't do it. In 2002, Matias Reyes declared that he had committed the assault when he was 17, and that he had acted alone. He provided a detailed account of the attack, corroborated by other evidence.

Here we see that even five confessions to the same crime don't mean diddly squat. I believe that confessions, since they are worthless indicators of crime, should not be used as evidence at trial. What happens is that such admissions color the other evidence. That is, after hearing such confessions juries will, in their minds, turn circumstantial and weak evidence into non-circumstantial and strong evidence. Once they hear that the defendant already confessed - why should they waste time considering anything else? Let's go straight to the lethal injection.