WEBVTT - S04 Episode 17 Extra: Reid Me My Rights 0:00:10.680 --> 0:00:15.280 Welcome to Unexplained Extra with me Richard McClane Smith, where 0:00:15.320 --> 0:00:18.000 for the weeks in between episodes we look at stories 0:00:18.000 --> 0:00:20.960 and ideas that, for one reason or other, didn't make 0:00:21.000 --> 0:00:25.760 it into the previous show. Last week's episode, appearing as 0:00:25.800 --> 0:00:29.800 being recounted the complex story of five young men and 0:00:29.960 --> 0:00:33.640 one young woman from Iceland who in the nineteen seventies 0:00:33.920 --> 0:00:37.199 were convicted for their involvement in the apparent murder of 0:00:37.280 --> 0:00:43.320 two men, Gudmunder and Geffner Inesen. All six individuals confessed 0:00:43.320 --> 0:00:46.240 to being responsible for the killings to one degree or another, 0:00:46.800 --> 0:00:50.160 but were later exonerated in two thousand and eighteen when 0:00:50.200 --> 0:00:52.879 it was ruled that their confessions were likely to have 0:00:52.920 --> 0:00:56.480 been false. It has long been one of the most 0:00:56.600 --> 0:01:00.960 misleading arguments in the history of criminology that no innocent 0:01:01.080 --> 0:01:04.200 person would admit to being responsible for a crime that 0:01:04.280 --> 0:01:07.920 they didn't commit. It's an idea that many of us 0:01:07.959 --> 0:01:12.080 still cling to that wouldn't be so bad, perhaps if 0:01:12.160 --> 0:01:15.840 it wasn't an idea that law enforcement professionals and in 0:01:15.880 --> 0:01:21.640 many cases judges and juries have historically believed. Also, though 0:01:21.640 --> 0:01:26.400 there are undoubtedly cases of criminal investigators forcing confessions out 0:01:26.440 --> 0:01:30.840 of suspects, or even deliberately pinning crimes on innocent individuals. 0:01:31.640 --> 0:01:34.919 What is perhaps most alarming about many cases of false 0:01:34.959 --> 0:01:39.800 confession is that the interrogators are completely unaware that it 0:01:39.920 --> 0:01:50.160 is their actions that have helped to manufacture them. In 0:01:50.280 --> 0:01:54.440 sixteen ninety two, in the village of Salem in Massachusetts, 0:01:54.480 --> 0:01:57.760 seventy six year old Anne Foster, a widow from the 0:01:57.800 --> 0:02:01.920 nearby town of Andover, confessed that the devil appeared to 0:02:01.960 --> 0:02:04.480 her in the shape of a bird, and that she 0:02:04.560 --> 0:02:08.560 had the gift of striking people down with mere thoughts alone. 0:02:09.680 --> 0:02:14.400 Despite being interrogated and tortured continuously for days, Foster had 0:02:14.440 --> 0:02:19.040 steadfastly denied the accusation that she was a witch. However, 0:02:19.560 --> 0:02:21.680 when it was put to her that her own daughter, 0:02:22.040 --> 0:02:26.200 Mary Lacey Senior, who was also under investigation for witchcraft, 0:02:26.560 --> 0:02:30.320 had accused her own mother of the crimes, Foster finally 0:02:30.360 --> 0:02:34.799 confessed to being in league with the devil. Over two 0:02:34.880 --> 0:02:38.840 hundred people were arrested and wrongfully accused of witchcraft during 0:02:38.840 --> 0:02:42.080 the Salem witch Trials, perhaps one of the better known 0:02:42.120 --> 0:02:47.240 cases of false confession in relatively recent history. However, it 0:02:47.320 --> 0:02:50.520 wasn't until nineteen o six that a label was given 0:02:50.560 --> 0:02:54.720 to the phenomenon. It was in January that year in 0:02:54.880 --> 0:02:58.560 Chicago when a young man attending to his father's horse 0:02:58.639 --> 0:03:01.520 in a barn the dead body of a young woman 0:03:01.840 --> 0:03:04.560 lying face down in the muck with a copper wire 0:03:04.720 --> 0:03:10.240 twisted hard around her neck. Police quickly became suspicious of 0:03:10.280 --> 0:03:13.200 the young man who'd found the body, due simply to 0:03:13.240 --> 0:03:15.280 the fact that he looked as though he hadn't had 0:03:15.320 --> 0:03:19.520 any sleep from the previous night. After taking him to 0:03:19.520 --> 0:03:22.720 the police station for further questioning, it was put to 0:03:22.800 --> 0:03:28.359 him immediately that he had committed the murder, having first 0:03:28.360 --> 0:03:32.400 denied the accusation. As the police pressed him harder, telling 0:03:32.440 --> 0:03:35.000 him how they knew he was guilty and the way 0:03:35.000 --> 0:03:38.560 in which he'd done it, the young man eventually changed 0:03:38.560 --> 0:03:42.680 his mind and confessed to the murder. As he went 0:03:42.720 --> 0:03:46.480 on to explain it was roughly six thirty pm when 0:03:46.480 --> 0:03:49.360 he'd taken the woman into the alley and murdered her 0:03:49.480 --> 0:03:54.080 when she tried to escape, and on, he continued retelling 0:03:54.120 --> 0:03:58.120 his story numerous times, with each version becoming more detailed 0:03:58.240 --> 0:04:02.920 than the last. Believing they had their man, the police 0:04:03.000 --> 0:04:06.880 formerly charged the suspect, who was later convicted and sentenced 0:04:06.880 --> 0:04:11.320 to death for the crime. No sooner had he been convicted, 0:04:11.800 --> 0:04:15.640 the young man retracted his confession, insisting that he had 0:04:15.680 --> 0:04:18.560 no recollection of having made it in the first place. 0:04:20.600 --> 0:04:25.280 Intrigued by the case, a local doctor contacted esteemed Harvard 0:04:25.400 --> 0:04:30.080 University psychologist Hugo. Munster Burg for his opinion on the matter. 0:04:31.440 --> 0:04:35.080 Munster Burg replied that for a number of reasons, he 0:04:35.160 --> 0:04:37.960 believed the man was innocent of the crime, and that 0:04:38.080 --> 0:04:41.880 his absurd and contradictory, untrue confession, as he called it, 0:04:42.360 --> 0:04:47.040 sounded exactly like the involuntary elaboration of a suggestion put 0:04:47.080 --> 0:04:51.200 into the man's mind. When the letter made its way 0:04:51.240 --> 0:04:54.840 into the local press, Munsterburg was derided for his so 0:04:54.920 --> 0:04:59.839 called expert opinion, with his interpretation being criticized as harve 0:05:00.040 --> 0:05:04.040 it's contempt of court and nothing more than science gone crazy. 0:05:05.320 --> 0:05:08.839 A week later, despite having a cast iron alibi for 0:05:08.880 --> 0:05:12.000 the night of the murder, the young man, who many 0:05:12.040 --> 0:05:16.080 would later come to believe was entirely innocent, was executed 0:05:16.200 --> 0:05:22.679 by hanging. Are you always taking care of your family? 0:05:23.000 --> 0:05:25.360 Do you often take care of others and not yourself? 0:05:25.960 --> 0:05:28.640 Now it's time to take care of yourself. To make 0:05:28.680 --> 0:05:32.560 time for you you deserve it. 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Download the app or visit teledoc dot 0:06:15.240 --> 0:06:19.920 com forward slash Unexplained podcast today to get started. That's 0:06:20.120 --> 0:06:29.840 t e LA DC dot com Slash Unexplained Podcast. Despite 0:06:29.920 --> 0:06:34.240 Munsterberg's recognition of untrue confessions, it would be another ninety 0:06:34.360 --> 0:06:39.799 years before legal institutions began to take the idea seriously. Today, 0:06:40.200 --> 0:06:44.040 psychologists such as Saul Cassin from the John J. College 0:06:44.040 --> 0:06:47.080 of Criminal Justice in New York are working hard to 0:06:47.120 --> 0:06:50.960 put an end to this extraordinary phenomenon, with many believing 0:06:51.000 --> 0:06:54.520 cases such as the Ineson confessions in Iceland to be 0:06:54.680 --> 0:06:58.719 just the tip of the iceberg. In the US alone, 0:06:59.200 --> 0:07:04.320 the nonprofit organization Innocence Project, with whom Cassin works closely, 0:07:04.760 --> 0:07:09.320 has helped overturn three hundred and sixty five wrongful convictions 0:07:09.360 --> 0:07:13.040 in the last two decades, twenty five percent of which 0:07:13.240 --> 0:07:19.480 involved individuals who'd confessed to committing the crime. Much of 0:07:19.480 --> 0:07:24.000 the problem, Cassin believes stems from the Read interrogation technique, 0:07:24.520 --> 0:07:27.960 pioneered in the nineteen sixties in the United States by 0:07:28.040 --> 0:07:34.120 psychologist and apparent lie detection expert John Reid. Read's technique, 0:07:34.640 --> 0:07:37.960 variations of which have been employed by police forces throughout 0:07:37.960 --> 0:07:43.680 the world, involves first surreptitiously conducting a behavior assessment by 0:07:43.720 --> 0:07:48.360 asking various questions, often irrelevant to the case, while watching 0:07:48.400 --> 0:07:52.680 for evidence that the suspect might be lying. For years, 0:07:52.880 --> 0:07:58.040 criminal investigators have been taught that anything from slouching, crossing arms, 0:07:58.160 --> 0:08:03.480 or avoiding eye contact as wrong indicators of deception. Once 0:08:03.560 --> 0:08:07.760 interrogators have been convinced the suspect as being duplicitous, they 0:08:07.800 --> 0:08:12.320 begin to assert more pressure, continually accusing the suspect of 0:08:12.320 --> 0:08:16.120 the crime, while attempting to hone in on specific details, 0:08:17.240 --> 0:08:22.360 Any details or denials that contradict their suspicions are frequently ignored. 0:08:24.480 --> 0:08:28.680 What makes things complicated is that often this technique seems 0:08:28.720 --> 0:08:35.080 to work. However, as Cassin argues, it also leads to 0:08:35.080 --> 0:08:40.839 an unacceptably high rate of false confessions. Furthermore, having been 0:08:40.880 --> 0:08:46.000 schooled in the read technique, criminal investigators understandably believe they 0:08:46.000 --> 0:08:49.000 have become skilled in the art of determining whether a 0:08:49.040 --> 0:08:53.920 suspect is lying or not, which can have particularly disastrous consequences. 0:08:55.360 --> 0:08:58.880 To test whether this was true, Cassin enlisted the help 0:08:58.920 --> 0:09:03.600 of prisoners from Stachusetts Penitentiary to give video recorded accounts 0:09:03.640 --> 0:09:08.200 of crimes they had and hadn't committed. Cassin then showed 0:09:08.200 --> 0:09:11.840 the video to a mixture of college students and police officers. 0:09:12.800 --> 0:09:16.480 What he found was not only did the students perform better, 0:09:16.920 --> 0:09:21.000 albeit only marginally so, the police officers were far more 0:09:21.080 --> 0:09:25.440 certain of their conclusions. In effect, as Cassin put it, 0:09:26.240 --> 0:09:29.440 their training had made them less accurate and more confident. 0:09:29.720 --> 0:09:39.880 At the same time, we might think that as forensic 0:09:39.960 --> 0:09:44.520 techniques and DNA analysis become increasingly more precise at identifying 0:09:44.559 --> 0:09:48.959 a suspect that the inconvenience of false confessions will eventually 0:09:49.040 --> 0:09:53.600 become a thing of the past. Conversely, however, it seems 0:09:53.600 --> 0:09:57.079 in some cases that the perceived accuracy of modern day 0:09:57.120 --> 0:10:01.120 forensics has actually contributed to the making of a false confession, 0:10:01.840 --> 0:10:05.319 with recent evidence suggesting that suspects may confess to a 0:10:05.400 --> 0:10:10.040 crime just to escape a harrowing interrogation, hoping that material 0:10:10.080 --> 0:10:15.559 evidence will exonerate them later. In reality, it's been proven 0:10:15.720 --> 0:10:20.640 that a confession will often supersede any evidence to the contrary. 0:10:20.760 --> 0:10:25.080 More worryingly, it appears that exonerating evidence can also be 0:10:25.160 --> 0:10:28.800 corrupted when the prevailing narrative that the suspect is guilty 0:10:29.160 --> 0:10:34.280 is considered strong enough. In nineteen eighty seven, twenty four 0:10:34.320 --> 0:10:38.319 year old Barry Laffman was arrested by Pennsylvania State police 0:10:38.720 --> 0:10:43.560 and accused of raping and murdering an elderly neighbor. Lachmann, 0:10:43.679 --> 0:10:46.600 who was considered to have the intellectual capacity of a 0:10:46.600 --> 0:10:49.760 ten year old, was told the lie by police that 0:10:49.880 --> 0:10:53.360 they'd found his fingerprints at the scene. Faced with this 0:10:53.480 --> 0:10:58.920 supposedly insurmountable but entirely fabricated truth, Lachmann felt he had 0:10:59.000 --> 0:11:02.760 no other choice but to confess. When evidence was found 0:11:02.800 --> 0:11:05.440 to the contrary, such as the blood found at the 0:11:05.480 --> 0:11:09.760 scene being type A when his was type B, outlandish 0:11:09.840 --> 0:11:13.400 theories were concocted to suit the narrative. In this case, 0:11:13.880 --> 0:11:18.920 a forensic expert suggested that bacterial degradation had somehow changed 0:11:19.000 --> 0:11:23.720 the blood type from B to A. Lochman would spend 0:11:23.800 --> 0:11:28.400 sixteen years in prison until DNA evidence finally cleared him. 0:11:29.480 --> 0:11:33.280 In fact, in a study published in two thousand and sixteen, 0:11:33.840 --> 0:11:37.520 Seawan Cassin demonstrated that if juries were presented with a 0:11:37.640 --> 0:11:41.760 simple choice between DNA evidence and a confession, they would 0:11:41.800 --> 0:11:47.000 judge the case under DNA evidence. However, if a prosecutor 0:11:47.160 --> 0:11:49.560 were to offer a theory as to why the evidence 0:11:49.640 --> 0:12:01.360 might contradict the confession, the jury overwhelmingly sided with the confession. Unexplained. 0:12:01.400 --> 0:12:04.680 The book and audiobook, featuring ten stories that have never 0:12:04.720 --> 0:12:07.480 before been covered on the show, is now available to 0:12:07.559 --> 0:12:11.480 buy worldwide. You can purchase through Amazon, Barnes and Noble, 0:12:11.600 --> 0:12:16.800 and Waterstones, among other bookstores. All elements have unexplained, including 0:12:16.840 --> 0:12:19.960 the show's music, are produced by me Richard McClain smith. 0:12:20.360 --> 0:12:22.800 Please subscribe and rate the show wherever you listen to 0:12:22.840 --> 0:12:25.640 podcasts and feel free to get in touch with any 0:12:25.640 --> 0:12:28.600 thoughts or ideas regarding the stories you've heard on the show. 0:12:29.200 --> 0:12:31.280 Perhaps you have an explanation of your own you'd like 0:12:31.360 --> 0:12:34.720 to share. You can reach us online at Unexplained podcast 0:12:34.800 --> 0:12:39.640 dot com or Twitter at Unexplained Pod and Facebook at 0:12:39.679 --> 0:12:48.720 Facebook dot com orward slash Unexplained. Now. It's time to 0:12:48.800 --> 0:12:52.680 take care of yourself. To make time for you, Tell 0:12:52.720 --> 0:12:55.800 a doc gives you access to a licensed therapist to 0:12:55.840 --> 0:12:58.840 help you get back to feeling your best. Speak to 0:12:58.880 --> 0:13:03.040 a licensed therapist by phone or video anytime between seven 0:13:03.080 --> 0:13:06.400 am to nine pm local time, seven days a week. 0:13:07.000 --> 0:13:11.800 Teledoc Therapy is available through most insurance or employers. Download 0:13:11.840 --> 0:13:15.520 the app or visit teledoc dot com Forward slash Unexplained 0:13:15.559 --> 0:13:21.880 Podcast today to get started. That's teladoc dot com slash 0:13:22.000 --> 0:13:23.199 Unexplained Podcast