Speaker 1: This call is from a correction facility, and it's subject
Speaker 1: to monitoring and recording exactly a hundred years. That's manly.
Speaker 1: I'm a kid. I didn't do anything, you know, and uh,
Speaker 1: you know that was that was real painful, man, no,
Speaker 1: because my life was discarded as if you know, like
Speaker 1: I was a piece of trash or something, you know,
Speaker 1: a hundred years and I had dreams and I wanted
Speaker 1: to do things. I wouldn't commit me crimes, you know.
Speaker 1: That was a very good young man. That is what
Speaker 1: happened in so many cases. The cops have a hunch
Speaker 1: because they're so smart at the scene, they have a hunch,
Speaker 1: and once they act on that hunch, they sort of
Speaker 1: developed tunnel vision and they take off marching in the
Speaker 1: wrong direction. And that happens in so many of these
Speaker 1: wrongful convictions. The opening pick uh to sell door, and
Speaker 1: I walked down stairs, and I actually walked down stairs
Speaker 1: to be outside. It felt very strange to be, like
Speaker 1: I said, to be walking without no shackles on my feet.
Speaker 1: I thought it was a dream, But then again, it
Speaker 1: wasn't a dream. This is wrongful conviction. On March eighteenth,
Speaker 1: two thousand and one, Jamie Pennach, an American exchange student
Speaker 1: in South Korea, was brutally murdered in her motel room
Speaker 1: after a night of partying with friends from the program.
Speaker 1: Her bloody, nude body was found on the floor. She
Speaker 1: had been stomped to death, and her face was covered
Speaker 1: with a black fleece jacket. Kenzie Snyder, a nineteen year
Speaker 1: old exchange student from Marshall University in West Virginia, was
Speaker 1: one of the friends that Jamie was with. About a
Speaker 1: half dozen exchange students had traveled from campus into the city,
Speaker 1: where they celebrated St. Patrick's Day in a bar filled
Speaker 1: with locals and US soldiers. Korean police and army investigators
Speaker 1: were unable to solve this horrific crime, but a year later,
Speaker 1: in February two thousand and two, FBI agents contacted Kenzie
Speaker 1: out of the blue. She was back at school by
Speaker 1: now in West Virginia and they wanted to talk alone.
Speaker 1: She met with three agents on three consecutive days for
Speaker 1: several hours, and the sessions were grueling. When it was done,
Speaker 1: Kenzie had confessed she murdered her friend. She said in
Speaker 1: the context of a drunken sexual encounter. Kenzie was promptly arrested,
Speaker 1: incarcerated in a local jail for ten months, and extradited
Speaker 1: to Korea to stand trial. There, she spent another six
Speaker 1: months in jail until a panel of judges found her
Speaker 1: not guilty, but the prosecutor appealed the verdict, and months
Speaker 1: later an appeals court confirmed not guilty. In two thousand
Speaker 1: and six, five years after the crime, in response to
Speaker 1: yet another appeal, the Supreme Court of Korea once again
Speaker 1: affirmed not guilty. That was eighteen years ago. Today we
Speaker 1: know a whole lot more than we did then about
Speaker 1: false confessions. Kenzie Snyder has been fully acquitted in court,
Speaker 1: yet her confession haunts her and us, and it leads
Speaker 1: some people still to question her actual innocence. Kenzie Snyder
Speaker 1: Brown is here with us today to tell her story.
Speaker 1: Welcome back to Wrongful Conviction. Today is going to be
Speaker 1: a really interesting day here in the studio at Wrongful
Speaker 1: Conviction Headquarters because we have a number of firsts and
Speaker 1: one second um, which is that I'll go to the
Speaker 1: second first. We have the distinguished professor of psychology and
Speaker 1: world renowned expert on false confessions, Saul Casson with us today,
Speaker 1: so I'll welcome, pleasure to be here. We also have
Speaker 1: as a special treat a PhD student of his, Patty Sanchez,
Speaker 1: PhD student at John j who amazingly is studying the
Speaker 1: effect of podcasts on jurors and on public opinion, right,
Speaker 1: and so I'm super excited to have Patty Sanchez here
Speaker 1: to learn from you. So Patty welcome, thank you very much.
Speaker 1: And the star of our show who has an incredible
Speaker 1: story to tell, the first case we've certainly ever had
Speaker 1: from well even from the far East, but from Korea,
Speaker 1: but not the first false confession case by far, but
Speaker 1: the first case of this kind, and a really interesting
Speaker 1: person in her own right, Kenzie Snyder welcome, Hello, thank
Speaker 1: you for having me so, Kenzie, Um, this is a crazy,
Speaker 1: crazy case. I mean, they're all crazy, but yours is
Speaker 1: so nuts um. And we're going back eighteen years now,
Speaker 1: two thousand and one. You were nineteen year old girl
Speaker 1: in a far away land who was accused of brutally
Speaker 1: beating and stomping your friend, your roommate, to death. And
Speaker 1: you don't look like somebody who would stomp a fly
Speaker 1: to death. I mean, I don't judge a book by
Speaker 1: its cover, but I mean no one. I'm not that
Speaker 1: kind of person. Yeah, you seemed like a pretty gentle
Speaker 1: soul to me. Um, But let's go back to the beginning,
Speaker 1: and and saw jump in whenever you want. I mean,
Speaker 1: obviously you've been you know, involved in this case and
Speaker 1: so many others like it. Um, do you want to
Speaker 1: go back and give us a little of the history. Well,
Speaker 1: you know, eighteen years ago, people really knew nothing about
Speaker 1: false confessions. But Kenzie's case caught my attention for a
Speaker 1: few reasons. One, she was a college student, as you say,
Speaker 1: you know, halfway around the world, and uh, the case
Speaker 1: made no sense to come back to her. A year later,
Speaker 1: the case was unsolved, pressure was on the law enforcement
Speaker 1: and the FBI to solve it, and they came back
Speaker 1: to Kenzie to interrogate her. And when I read that
Speaker 1: she confessed, what caught my interest was not just that
Speaker 1: she agreed to sign a confession. She actually came to
Speaker 1: believe in her own guilt she had formed a memory
Speaker 1: that they enabled, that they facilitated, uh, using police interrogation
Speaker 1: tactics that are highly suggestive and at lawful in the
Speaker 1: United States. And so my interest in this case started
Speaker 1: with the fact that there. She was a college student
Speaker 1: twenty years old at the time that the FBI came
Speaker 1: and interrogated her free agents in a motel room in
Speaker 1: West Virginia, asking her to come alone, and for three
Speaker 1: consecutive days they interrogated her. They lied to her about
Speaker 1: the evidence, they tinkered with her memory. And so what
Speaker 1: caught my attention was the fact that not only did
Speaker 1: she confess, she internalize the belief in that confession, which
Speaker 1: makes it very, very hard for people later to get
Speaker 1: past it. So, Kennedy, you are an American person on
Speaker 1: home soil in West Virginia. Doesn't get too much more
Speaker 1: American than that. I guess you could say, right, Aretland stuff.
Speaker 1: But you were being interviewed on your home turf by
Speaker 1: people who you would have I think thought would have
Speaker 1: your back. Like was there even an extradition treaty in place? Like?
Speaker 1: How did this happened? The extradition treaty itself was brand new,
Speaker 1: would had just been I think formulated between the two countries.
Speaker 1: And so the crime itself happened in Korea, and all
Speaker 1: the suspects were Americans, and so the US and Koreans
Speaker 1: were trying to work together. It wasn't going very well,
Speaker 1: and that's why the FBI became a liaison and and
Speaker 1: Jason Kenzie Snyder became the first American ever extraditeedt to
Speaker 1: Korea brand new extradition treaty in n I am the first.
Speaker 1: I believe I am the only, but I don't know
Speaker 1: that for sure. What a dubious distinction that is. It's
Speaker 1: important to recognize there's a political context to this story.
Speaker 1: When the Korean police and army investigators failed to solve
Speaker 1: the crime. You know, there's a victim, and the victim
Speaker 1: was American. Her name was Jamie Pennach and she was
Speaker 1: from Pennsylvania, and her parents, as you can imagine I
Speaker 1: can't even begin to imagine, were incredibly upset and wanted
Speaker 1: this crime solved. Senator Oral Inspector of Pennsylvania met with
Speaker 1: Korean authorities to pressure them to solve this crime because there,
Speaker 1: you know, there is that Americans, and we're supposed to
Speaker 1: be in this together to solve the crime of another
Speaker 1: American victim. And I don't know what they knew about
Speaker 1: the details of the case, but in my view, I
Speaker 1: think they believe they were acting on behalf of the
Speaker 1: family of the victim. Yeah, and Kenzie, I mean it
Speaker 1: must have been surreal. First of all, like, who would
Speaker 1: ever think that, you know, your roommate would turn up
Speaker 1: as as a corpse, right and in such a brutal fashion. Um,
Speaker 1: that alone is a real life nightmare. But then you're
Speaker 1: back in West Virginia, you know, I'm sure dealing with
Speaker 1: some trauma related to this, but moving on with your life,
Speaker 1: and along come these three FBI agents out of nowhere.
Speaker 1: And I can't imagine at that age when your brain
Speaker 1: isn't even fully formed, right, you're still we know, the
Speaker 1: adolescent brain doesn't fully switch over, so to speak, right
Speaker 1: until you're around was going through your head. I had
Speaker 1: come back to West Virginia and I was working with
Speaker 1: troubled youth, and um, I was just trying to get
Speaker 1: my feet back underneath me again, because as you said,
Speaker 1: it is a traumatic experience. And then the FBA called
Speaker 1: me and asked if I could help them further the investigation.
Speaker 1: So I had gone to the hotel room that day
Speaker 1: to talk to them to help them, not realizing what
Speaker 1: they had planned. So yeah, okay, that's a common thing too.
Speaker 1: And you know, Patty, I want you to jump in
Speaker 1: here whenever you want, because I know you're knowledgeable about
Speaker 1: this case and about this subject. That's sort of a
Speaker 1: common thing as well that we hear in these wrongful
Speaker 1: conviction cases is that when the interrogation, whether it's local
Speaker 1: police or FBI agents or whatever, often they don't tell
Speaker 1: you that you're a suspect, right, And this way you're
Speaker 1: more inclined to be open. And as Kenzie was, she
Speaker 1: wanted to be helpful. Anyone would want to be helpful,
Speaker 1: but that instant can really lead you astray for sure,
Speaker 1: especially when you're not even at a police station or
Speaker 1: anything like that. So she was at tell So the
Speaker 1: lines are blurred even further as to the purpose of
Speaker 1: my even talking to these agents. You know, she was
Speaker 1: never even realized that she was a suspect until she
Speaker 1: had already been talking for at least a day. So, yeah,
Speaker 1: it is a problem that it's not always clear to
Speaker 1: a suspect that they're a suspect, and then they can
Speaker 1: invoke their right to a lawyer if you don't know
Speaker 1: you're being questioned as a suspect. So and some people
Speaker 1: listening would probably wonder whether that's legal for them to
Speaker 1: take her to a hotel or motel room. I mean
Speaker 1: it sounds at a minimum unusual, right, And I don't
Speaker 1: know if it's more or less disorienting than being in
Speaker 1: one of those rooms that you always see on TV, right,
Speaker 1: the interrogation rooms, the window lists, you know, Um, it
Speaker 1: just seems odd. I mean a motel room, there's a bed,
Speaker 1: there's a TV. It's like, its odd, it feels odd,
Speaker 1: and all of the red flags that normally would go up.
Speaker 1: She's not technically in custody, so they don't have to
Speaker 1: mirandize her. So I'm trying to picture this. Kanzie's You're
Speaker 1: interrogated for the first day for hours and hours I assume, right,
Speaker 1: it wasn't an interrogation. It was just questioning and getting
Speaker 1: together and seeing how your day was, how was your year, Um,
Speaker 1: trying to see how I've been sleeping, you know, if
Speaker 1: I'd had any repercussions from seeing her body, um, and
Speaker 1: just trying to be my friend. It was your it
Speaker 1: was your sense that they cared about you. Yeah, they
Speaker 1: wanted to see how I was doing. It'd been a
Speaker 1: year no one had checked up on me, and they
Speaker 1: was just checking up on me. At one point, one
Speaker 1: of the investigators said that he thought of me like
Speaker 1: a sister. M hmm. And then the second day did
Speaker 1: it become clear to you that they had a different
Speaker 1: idea or motive or what you want to call it.
Speaker 1: Part Way through the second day, the second day still
Speaker 1: started with friendly conversation. I brought ice cream because I
Speaker 1: thought they were my friends, and we had ice cream
Speaker 1: and talked about they'd asked me to do a homework
Speaker 1: assignment when I left the first day, writing out everything
Speaker 1: that I had gone through that night, the sequence of event,
Speaker 1: and then we were just reading that and having ice
Speaker 1: cream when we first got there in the hotel room
Speaker 1: on the second day. That's sort of weirdly chilling to me,
Speaker 1: I mean, and chilling no pun intended, but even still,
Speaker 1: I mean, it feels a little sick, right, the idea
Speaker 1: of you bringing the ice cream and ice cream having
Speaker 1: you know, it's not something you do with people that
Speaker 1: you aren't well acquainted with in general, right, it reminds
Speaker 1: us all of our youth, right, my trips at Baskin
Speaker 1: Robbins and whatnot. But that's beside the point. So, so
Speaker 1: what do you think was really going on here? Like?
Speaker 1: Was this was this all scripted to day's come in scripted.
Speaker 1: So they had the idea before they went in the
Speaker 1: first day, we're going to gain her trust, right, We're
Speaker 1: gonna we're gonna be friendly, We're going to establish rappoort,
Speaker 1: We're going to gain her trust. Um. That sounds like
Speaker 1: a very reasonable tactic for an interrogator to use, and
Speaker 1: it is. But now look at the nefarious side of
Speaker 1: establishing rapport in that way and gaining her trust as
Speaker 1: a predicate for what will happen on day two. So
Speaker 1: if you think of day one is just a friendly interview,
Speaker 1: she come back into day two. They asked her to return,
Speaker 1: and she does alone. She comes back day two with
Speaker 1: ice cream. But what she doesn't realize is day two
Speaker 1: is not going to be an interview anymore. It's going
Speaker 1: to be an accusatory interrogation. And it's going to be
Speaker 1: the kind of interrogation where they accuse her with certainty,
Speaker 1: we know you did this. They're gonna lie about evidence,
Speaker 1: they're going to point to apparent contradictions, and they're going
Speaker 1: to tinker with her memory. From a psychological perspective, here's
Speaker 1: the problem. They gained her trust and then they exploited
Speaker 1: that trust that they gained, because when you have somebody's trust,
Speaker 1: you become a credible source. So when when somebody you
Speaker 1: trust becomes credible and that person of credibility starts to
Speaker 1: lie about the evidence, you almost have no choice but
Speaker 1: to believe the lie, and wonder, well, I don't know
Speaker 1: how I can reconcile that information you just gave me
Speaker 1: with the fact that I don't remember things that way.
Speaker 1: So they gain their our trust on day one as
Speaker 1: a predicate for manipulating her on day two. And of
Speaker 1: course at some point on day two when it becomes
Speaker 1: clear that she's not a witness but a suspect, it
Speaker 1: would seem to me at some point the alarm bells
Speaker 1: would go off and you'd realize I need help. In
Speaker 1: the second day, um, shortly after we got there, after
Speaker 1: we you know, read the statement and had our ice cream. Um,
Speaker 1: we'd gone over the statement a little bit, and they
Speaker 1: asked if they could show me something, and they showed
Speaker 1: me some like a little video of the hotel room
Speaker 1: and walked around in it so I could see it better.
Speaker 1: And then they had a photo album of some of
Speaker 1: the crime scene photos. And when we're looking at them,
Speaker 1: they were saying. I can't remember the phrasing, but at
Speaker 1: one point I asked, are you saying I did it?
Speaker 1: And they just kind of looked at me and shrugged.
Speaker 1: And at that point I knew that I needed to
Speaker 1: get out of the room. I asked them if I
Speaker 1: could leave, and I went out of the hotel room
Speaker 1: and I was only gone a few seconds. Um, and
Speaker 1: I came back in and I asked, I do I
Speaker 1: need to get a lawyer? That's what I asked, And
Speaker 1: they said, if you get one, we can't say that
Speaker 1: you cooperated. Wow. That's some reverse psychology there, too, isn't it. Right?
Speaker 1: That was a very well chosen phrase. I mean, um,
Speaker 1: you know, not in terms of justice, but in terms
Speaker 1: of for what the goal was that they were trying
Speaker 1: to get, which was a confession. That would be the
Speaker 1: perfect thing to say, because now you're disoriented, you don't know.
Speaker 1: There's no right answer that, right, I mean? And we
Speaker 1: see this in false confessions. Right. They sort of create
Speaker 1: this trap with words where there is no door that's open,
Speaker 1: and so you have to choose between bad options like
Speaker 1: which kind of cancer do you want? Right? I'm actually
Speaker 1: sitting there like I want to go back in time
Speaker 1: and pull you away and say don't go back there, right, like,
Speaker 1: don't go Well, I wish I could have. When I
Speaker 1: left the room, I understand that they were afraid that
Speaker 1: I wouldn't come back in because it would have been
Speaker 1: over for them. Um So, I wish I wouldn't have
Speaker 1: gone back in the room. Um But when I did,
Speaker 1: you know, they said, if you get a lawyer, then
Speaker 1: we can't say that you cooperated. Then we sat down
Speaker 1: and I was sitting in like the easy chair in
Speaker 1: the hotel room, so a comfortable seat, and I was
Speaker 1: tired from work the day before and then staying up
Speaker 1: late doing the homework assignment that they asked for and
Speaker 1: waking up early and to go to work before this.
Speaker 1: Um So, I was sitting in the chair. And they
Speaker 1: brought in an FBI agent who specialized in this field,
Speaker 1: and he said, we can do this two ways. We
Speaker 1: can either do it the hard way or the easy way.
Speaker 1: And I said, well, let's do it the easy way,
Speaker 1: and that way you'll know I didn't do this and
Speaker 1: we can get on with our day. So he said, well,
Speaker 1: let's go through the events and emotionally talk about how
Speaker 1: we feel when we were you know, at the bar
Speaker 1: and when you were drinking, and how did you feel
Speaker 1: when you're walking home with Jamie on your arm? And
Speaker 1: then um, we got to the park where where she
Speaker 1: was undressing to take a shower when I left her,
Speaker 1: and they were trying to get into how I felt
Speaker 1: about that, and I was like, well, I'm I'm fine.
Speaker 1: I said, I was helping her out. Now I'm leaving.
Speaker 1: And they said, well, this isn't working. Let's do it
Speaker 1: the hard way. And so they would ask me these questions, um,
Speaker 1: like direct questions. So what was she wearing when you
Speaker 1: left her? And I said that she was in her
Speaker 1: brawn or underwear to take the shower, and they said, no,
Speaker 1: that's not right. And I remember sitting there and I'm like,
Speaker 1: she was like, I have memories of her. I have
Speaker 1: memories of what she was wearing when I left her.
Speaker 1: Excuse me? And they said, no, that's wrong. And I
Speaker 1: remember referencing back to the photos that they had shown me,
Speaker 1: and one of them was her pants with her underwear
Speaker 1: inside of them, and I was like, well, in my head,
Speaker 1: I said, well, obviously she did take them off at
Speaker 1: some point. So I said in the bathroom, because that's
Speaker 1: where the picture was taken, and her underwear was in
Speaker 1: her pants, so obviously it had happened, even though that's
Speaker 1: not what she looked like when I left her. But
Speaker 1: it was like this wedge that opened up the floodgates
Speaker 1: of me doubting the memories that I had had and
Speaker 1: replacing them with this like multiple choice questioning that they
Speaker 1: were giving me. And I gave him an answer that
Speaker 1: they didn't like. Then they'd said, no, that didn't happen.
Speaker 1: They'd asked me a new question. They didn't like that answer. No,
Speaker 1: that's not how it happened. And I kept kind of
Speaker 1: like winding my way through their questions, trying to make
Speaker 1: all I'd spent a week in the police station in
Speaker 1: Korea after this crime, seeing all of all the crime
Speaker 1: scene photos. I had seen the crime scene itself. We
Speaker 1: had stayed in the hotel room, and so all these
Speaker 1: pieces had been put together for me to recreate what
Speaker 1: they wanted me to be saying. So, so day three
Speaker 1: you end up signing this false confession. Well, the second
Speaker 1: day they had the confession, and so that night, UM,
Speaker 1: I know it sounds crazy, I started like making it
Speaker 1: more mine, or making it more real or making it
Speaker 1: more believably into myself. And so on the third day
Speaker 1: we met back and they at me to narrate that
Speaker 1: confession and they wrote it down, still guided a little
Speaker 1: bit with their assistance, like, well, what didn't you say
Speaker 1: something about um, I think there was a rag? Didn't
Speaker 1: you say something about a rag? And so then I
Speaker 1: would fill that in and then I signed that confession
Speaker 1: and that's the one that they submitted for me to
Speaker 1: be arrested. It sounds to me like there's elements here
Speaker 1: of Stockholm syndrome. To know, yes, they didn't just manipulate
Speaker 1: her compliance, they manipulated her memory. It's form of brainwashing.
Speaker 1: And you know, I think what happened here is the
Speaker 1: hardest type of false confession for anybody to understand. It's
Speaker 1: one thing to argue that I can coerce you by stress,
Speaker 1: by promises, by threats real or implied, to agree to
Speaker 1: confess to something you didn't do. It's a whole other
Speaker 1: game to argue that I cannot only get you to confess,
Speaker 1: I can get you to believe in your guilt. And
Speaker 1: yet those internalized false confessions throughout history, there are several
Speaker 1: high profile cases like it. When I heard what was
Speaker 1: done to Kenzie and the way she internalized the belief
Speaker 1: in her guilt to a point where I read an
Speaker 1: account Kenzie where you said it was like, I have
Speaker 1: two memories. One I think is the real one in
Speaker 1: color with voices, and the other is kind of a
Speaker 1: black and white film. I think was how you put it, yeah,
Speaker 1: like stills being put together, whereas the other one, like
Speaker 1: you have the emotions attached to them. You know what
Speaker 1: it felt like. It's it's more colorful. The other one
Speaker 1: had like clouds around it. As I said, still images
Speaker 1: being put together like photos. The images that I had
Speaker 1: in my head from what they had worked their way through.
Speaker 1: The confession didn't feel like something It still didn't feel
Speaker 1: like something that I would ever do. But I didn't
Speaker 1: understand how could I have confess to something that I
Speaker 1: didn't do. I gotta ask when in between day one
Speaker 1: and day two, or day two and day three, or
Speaker 1: at what point did you call your dad or your
Speaker 1: mom or somebody that you trust and say, this is
Speaker 1: going crazy? What's I don't know what to do here.
Speaker 1: I need your help. My father and I didn't have
Speaker 1: the best relationship, but he was in Florida and my
Speaker 1: mom was in Thailand. I didn't have anyone to call. Well,
Speaker 1: so you're really all alone. I mean, that's a it's
Speaker 1: a tough thing to face, no matter how much support
Speaker 1: you have. But that I think that obviously contributed to it,
Speaker 1: because I have to believe that if you had, especially
Speaker 1: you know, parents, you know, who were educated as you did,
Speaker 1: I would certainly hope that they would have intervened. But
Speaker 1: this is really the perfect storm. And did they ask
Speaker 1: you not to talk to anyone between days or after?
Speaker 1: On the third day after the confession, they asked me
Speaker 1: not to talk about it to anyone because they didn't
Speaker 1: even know if I could be if anything could happen
Speaker 1: with this. The FBI, they then had to go to
Speaker 1: Korea with the confession and say, hey, we have a confession.
Speaker 1: What do you want to do with this? Do you
Speaker 1: want this person to come back to Korea to go
Speaker 1: to trial to possibly face you know, time for a
Speaker 1: crime that was committed on your soil. Um come to
Speaker 1: find out they didn't really even have permission to come
Speaker 1: and speak with me. It was still a Korean case
Speaker 1: and they shouldn't have been talking to me. Um. So
Speaker 1: after the confession That's why it took me, um, about
Speaker 1: three weeks to get arrested, because everything took so long,
Speaker 1: asking for permission, coming back and saying well, why were
Speaker 1: you even talking to her? And so I wasn't arrested
Speaker 1: until February, even though this interrogational questioning happened in February
Speaker 1: six And in that time, you didn't talk to parents, friends,
Speaker 1: counselor lawyer. So all those external reality cues that will
Speaker 1: normally rerain you in she didn't have those. No, my
Speaker 1: friends knew that I was upset. I mean, after the confession,
Speaker 1: they gave me a bottle of water in a Snickers
Speaker 1: bar and so I'm holding on the Snicker for hours,
Speaker 1: and I went to a friend's house and I was
Speaker 1: just sitting on the couch. Um, but I couldn't tell him. Um.
Speaker 1: I mean, here, you are a young girl, right, overwhelmed
Speaker 1: with three FBI agents, right, And when we say FBI,
Speaker 1: I think all of us feel like whoa like? FBI
Speaker 1: still carries that connotation, even while we know they're flawed
Speaker 1: human beings like everyone else, but their FBI ages. We
Speaker 1: want to believe in the FBI. We want to believe
Speaker 1: that they are you know, yeah, like honorable, higher standard
Speaker 1: everything else. Right, Um, but we know from when Saul
Speaker 1: and I were talking, we were all talking about this
Speaker 1: before we came in the studio. We know from examples
Speaker 1: like the Madrid bombing and others that important to note
Speaker 1: that in the Madrid bombing case, and they ended up
Speaker 1: arresting a lawyer from Oregon, and the FBI claimed they
Speaker 1: had their man and the fingerprints match and all this
Speaker 1: other stuff, and turn out you've never been to Madrid
Speaker 1: and he was acquitted. They can be as dead wrong
Speaker 1: as anyone. And there's tons of proof of this now.
Speaker 1: I mean, there's that study that came out of several
Speaker 1: years ago, right about the hair analysis, and you want
Speaker 1: to talk about that for second cause I think while
Speaker 1: we're on the subject of FBI, let's get that off
Speaker 1: our chest. Yeah. Well, you know, it's interesting when when police,
Speaker 1: including the FBI, form a judgment a presumption of guilt,
Speaker 1: it biases the way they view other kinds of evidence.
Speaker 1: And in fact, there's a whole lot of research now
Speaker 1: that psychologists have done in the laboratory and in the
Speaker 1: field showing that when you bring forensic examiners in and
Speaker 1: insert a presumption of guilt or presumption of innocence into
Speaker 1: their analysis, whether that analysis is to make a handwriting
Speaker 1: judgment or a fingerprint judgment, or a judgment about tire
Speaker 1: tracks or bite marks. You can alter their judgment by
Speaker 1: giving them contextual information. Do those two stimulus patterns match well?
Speaker 1: If the suspect confessed, they did, And so what happened
Speaker 1: in Kenzie's case, in some ways is even worse. There
Speaker 1: was no physical evidence that linked her. In fact, there
Speaker 1: was every indication that there were one or two men
Speaker 1: involved in this murder. Male voices were heard screaming at
Speaker 1: about the time of the murder. A mail was seen
Speaker 1: running from the motel with blood on his pants at
Speaker 1: about that time. There was every indication that this was
Speaker 1: a crime, and involving a man to go back to
Speaker 1: Kenzie a year later because they failed to solve the
Speaker 1: crime just made no sense. There was no physical evidence.
Speaker 1: When you look at the photos of the crime scene
Speaker 1: and how bloody it was, it's inconceivable that that could
Speaker 1: have happened and not a trace of that blood remained
Speaker 1: on her clothing. Inconceivable. I was in the exact same
Speaker 1: clothes while I was in the police station in Korea,
Speaker 1: from the night before. It was in the same clothes,
Speaker 1: and I didn't have any blood on my pants, or
Speaker 1: I wouldn't have been able to leave Korea in the
Speaker 1: first place. I'm not to mention my shoes. I only
Speaker 1: had one pair of shoes with me in Korea, and
Speaker 1: I was wearing them the entire time. I was in
Speaker 1: the police station and with the Army c I D.
Speaker 1: And they still let me leave the country. And only
Speaker 1: a year later did they come back and talk to me.
Speaker 1: So there was no physical evidence, There were no witnesses.
Speaker 1: Kenzie had no background of violence. She was a class
Speaker 1: ace student aspiring to be a teacher. There was absolutely
Speaker 1: no basis for suspicion when they called her out of
Speaker 1: the blue to talk to her in Westvirginia. And not
Speaker 1: only was there and when we say there's is an
Speaker 1: absence of evidence, there actually was evidence in the opposite direction, right.
Speaker 1: I mean you could say that if there's no blood
Speaker 1: on your clothes and you're accused of beating someone to death,
Speaker 1: that should be dispositive, right, that should actually be like, Okay, well,
Speaker 1: let's rule her out and keep it moving and go
Speaker 1: find out who did this. And just for the record,
Speaker 1: Korean police working with army investigators because there were a
Speaker 1: lot of military guys in the bars that night and
Speaker 1: nearby that motel. So the army investigators became involved along
Speaker 1: with Korean police, and they did dismiss Kenzie as a suspect.
Speaker 1: It was over when she went home. It was one
Speaker 1: year later when the FBI became involved that suddenly everything changed.
Speaker 1: Do you think that anyone, or all three or none
Speaker 1: of the FBI agents believed going into that room that
Speaker 1: she was guilty? The human mind is an interesting thing, um,
Speaker 1: I'm not a mind reader. I don't know where there
Speaker 1: they were, coldheartedly closing a case without any regard for
Speaker 1: the truth or whether they had convinced themselves through their
Speaker 1: investigation that in fact, she must be the culprit. I
Speaker 1: don't know. The same mechanisms you described earlier that led
Speaker 1: the FBI to misidentify fingerprints in the Madrid bomber case
Speaker 1: led these agents to misidentify her as their suspect. And
Speaker 1: once a presumption of guilt kicks in, what happens next
Speaker 1: is anybody's guess. They can make that reality their own,
Speaker 1: and Kenzie, UM, I know this is difficult for you
Speaker 1: to talk about even now, eighteen years later, and I
Speaker 1: mean I can understand that as well as someone can
Speaker 1: understand it who hasn't been through it. Um. But you
Speaker 1: were then arrested three weeks later and taking a jail.
Speaker 1: Here you are one day, you're working with troubled kids,
Speaker 1: making your way in the world, dealing with the normal
Speaker 1: stresses of a twenty year old. I'm sure you know
Speaker 1: doing good, right, more so than I was in your age.
Speaker 1: And uh, and the next thing you know, you're in
Speaker 1: jail for something you didn't do, but you don't even
Speaker 1: know if you did it anymore. I mean what And
Speaker 1: you were there for ten months, right? I was there
Speaker 1: for ten months, um, which allowed me to It was
Speaker 1: a long time, but it allowed me to kind of
Speaker 1: separate those memories from an and get more confident in
Speaker 1: the fact that I know that the memories that I
Speaker 1: had going into that hotel room that day are the
Speaker 1: real memories. And I was able to separate a little
Speaker 1: bit from that confession, but it still wasn't complete. Even
Speaker 1: by the time of the extradition hearing, I still hadn't
Speaker 1: completely removed that understanding that the confession wasn't real. And
Speaker 1: I think at my hearing, I think I said something
Speaker 1: along the lines of not by the memories that I
Speaker 1: hold true when they asked me if the confession was real,
Speaker 1: so I still had some cloud around it. And so
Speaker 1: the extradition hearing itself that happened actually in October of
Speaker 1: that year, was basically just asking was Kenzie Snide in
Speaker 1: Korea at the time, so it's not even a guilt
Speaker 1: or innocence. Yes, I was in Korea. So then you
Speaker 1: are sent over to Korea itself and then you go
Speaker 1: through their legal proceedings. And it wasn't until I went
Speaker 1: back to Korea now after the extradition, and they wanted
Speaker 1: me to reenact some of the images. The Korean police
Speaker 1: wanted me to go back to the hotel room and
Speaker 1: reenact the confession. And I walked into the hotel room,
Speaker 1: and at that point I knew a percent that that
Speaker 1: confession was completely wrong, and I didn't do it because
Speaker 1: none of the still images that I had in my
Speaker 1: head matched that hotel room in the way that confession
Speaker 1: worked out didn't didn't make any sense anymore. And so
Speaker 1: at that point I felt a lot more empowered, a
Speaker 1: lot more confident again, um a lot stronger, and the
Speaker 1: Korean police didn't like that so much because they were
Speaker 1: really hoping I would reconfess in Korea, and they got
Speaker 1: mad at me, Um, because you had a ten day
Speaker 1: period where you were talking to the police again and
Speaker 1: they were going over the evidence again and reinterviewing Um,
Speaker 1: and they really wanted a confession then, Um, And they
Speaker 1: kept asking me, well, when did you do this? And
Speaker 1: I said I didn't, I did not kill Jamie. And
Speaker 1: at one point one of the police officers and said,
Speaker 1: we quit saying that. Say something different because I was
Speaker 1: as I said. I felt I felt more in control
Speaker 1: again at that point, and I refused, even though they
Speaker 1: told me that if I confessed again at this point,
Speaker 1: it would be easier on me and I would probably
Speaker 1: only be looking at seven or eight years versus looking
Speaker 1: at the death penalty if I went to trial and
Speaker 1: I lost. But I didn't want to lose that control again.
Speaker 1: I have to look at myself every day in the mirror,
Speaker 1: and I couldn't lie again. And I knew that confession
Speaker 1: was alive. So were you in custody in South Korea?
Speaker 1: And that's got to be I can't imagine it's not
Speaker 1: being in jail in the United States, we don't treat
Speaker 1: our inmates like they're people. And so when I got
Speaker 1: to go to Korea, while it was different, and that's
Speaker 1: something I would want to do again, there's still a
Speaker 1: sense of humanity in their presence and their jails. Yeah,
Speaker 1: we don't. That's well said. We don't treat our inmates
Speaker 1: like their people. We flip a switch. As soon as
Speaker 1: you're in the system, you're no longer human. You're just
Speaker 1: a number now. Yeah, And it's weird because if if
Speaker 1: that's the right way to do it, then we have
Speaker 1: to ascribe to the theory that Americans are worse people
Speaker 1: than any other people in the world, right, that we're
Speaker 1: among the most evil people in the world, then that
Speaker 1: we need to be treated like subhumans. But it starts
Speaker 1: before you're convicted, well, it even starts in the jails.
Speaker 1: If we believe that you're innocent and to proven guilty,
Speaker 1: then if you want to treat people like they're not people,
Speaker 1: that should be in prisons if you're going to do
Speaker 1: it at all, I'm not saying you should, but in jail,
Speaker 1: supposedly you're innocent, So then why are we starting them? Well,
Speaker 1: you shouldn't, I should never start. We shouldn't start. I
Speaker 1: mean think there's more and more awareness of that now
Speaker 1: and there's a lot of movement with correction officials going
Speaker 1: to European countries and learning about how they did it
Speaker 1: over there. And there's a reason why they're acitivism rate
Speaker 1: is a tiny fraction of arts. It's because they treat
Speaker 1: their people who in cars right over there like human
Speaker 1: beings and they come out and what do you know,
Speaker 1: they adapt better and they end up not reoffending. And yeah,
Speaker 1: but that's, like I said, that's a whole another subject.
Speaker 1: So it's interesting that you went back to the room
Speaker 1: where this gruesome crime occurred and that's what really crystallized
Speaker 1: in your mind that you could not have done this. Um,
Speaker 1: It's it's just fascinating as to how the brain works.
Speaker 1: And doesn't you know. I'm reading this wonderful book called Burned.
Speaker 1: I mean, it's wonderful. It's terrible also, but it's an
Speaker 1: amazing book by Pulitzer Prize winning author named Humes um
Speaker 1: And and it's about an arson case, terrible case Julian
Speaker 1: Taylor in um California. But in it he talks about
Speaker 1: memory and how it can be manipulated. And you know,
Speaker 1: one of the things I read was either there in
Speaker 1: the New Yorker story about the Nebraska case recently where
Speaker 1: six people falsely confess to the brutal rape and murder
Speaker 1: of an old woman, and many of them, I think
Speaker 1: all but one actually came to believe that they did it,
Speaker 1: even though d n A proved with an error rate.
Speaker 1: They said in the article of one and one quintillion
Speaker 1: um that the actual killer was a serial rapists murder.
Speaker 1: But there's a couple of them that's still even after
Speaker 1: an apology and official apology from the Attorney General of Nebraska,
Speaker 1: which those are hard to come by, some of them
Speaker 1: still believe that they had something to do with this
Speaker 1: because they've been so totally brainwashed. But but what I
Speaker 1: did read is that I think they said that some
Speaker 1: statistic like sevent of people can be manipulated on how
Speaker 1: they figured this out into believing that, you know, a
Speaker 1: false memory is real. You know, that's a scary number.
Speaker 1: Under the right or wrong circumstances, you can get almost
Speaker 1: anybody to do that. You know, you're you're referring to
Speaker 1: the Beatro six case, which is dramatic for a whole
Speaker 1: different reason. Kenzie eventually gave up on that memory, and
Speaker 1: I think it's interesting as to how it happened, But
Speaker 1: eventually she came to grasp reality again. In the Beatrice six,
Speaker 1: as you said, right on through being exonerated and receiving
Speaker 1: an apology. There was a precious quote when that first
Speaker 1: happened from one of those exonorees. She said something like, Wow,
Speaker 1: I guess I didn't do this, because right to that
Speaker 1: moment she continued to believe that she did it. And
Speaker 1: so that's how powerful that process can be. And when
Speaker 1: you look at a case like Kenzie's, they were drinking
Speaker 1: that night, there was a lot going on. It was confusing.
Speaker 1: It was a year ago now, and then the FBI
Speaker 1: comes in and they start to mischaracterize the evidence, and
Speaker 1: it's confusing to her and she can't find a way
Speaker 1: to bridge their version of reality, their version of the facts,
Speaker 1: with her lack of memory of their version. She she
Speaker 1: has a different memory. And I believe they actually assisted
Speaker 1: you in terms of how to bridge their version of
Speaker 1: the facts with your memory. They said, the person who
Speaker 1: had done this may have been feeling really guilty, but
Speaker 1: they may not have any memory of it because it
Speaker 1: was too traumatic and so the brain would have suppressed it.
Speaker 1: So to help them let go of that guilt and
Speaker 1: feel better, they should confess, right, That's what they did.
Speaker 1: In the Beatrix six case. Many of those people, the
Speaker 1: accused had been abused as children, and they said, you're
Speaker 1: blocking it out the same way you blocked out the abuse.
Speaker 1: I mean, they really they played on. That's that's a
Speaker 1: really sick way to go, right to to sort of
Speaker 1: re trauma. I mean, I don't even know what the
Speaker 1: word is for that, um, but yeah, it's it's crazy
Speaker 1: because I think most people listening at home or probably
Speaker 1: are in their cars whatever, probably like, well, I could
Speaker 1: see confusing or having a memory lapse or or you
Speaker 1: know about some mundane type of thing. But it's really
Speaker 1: crazy to think how someone could be led to believe
Speaker 1: that they someone who's never anything violent in their life,
Speaker 1: could be led to believe that they beat and stomped
Speaker 1: their roommate to death. That is really scary. And we
Speaker 1: know the malleability of memory and the mount and the
Speaker 1: influence what you were talking about before, which I think
Speaker 1: is such an important point and why we need to have,
Speaker 1: you know, objective analysts at every phase of testing, forensic testing, etcetera, etcetera.
Speaker 1: Is that we know from every area of life, right
Speaker 1: if you even when it comes to like I saw
Speaker 1: a movie about wine. I think it's Bottle Shock or
Speaker 1: something right where they did that test where they blindfolded
Speaker 1: something wild famous Samilias, and they gave them like seven
Speaker 1: dollar wine and they gave them like the top wine
Speaker 1: from Italy or France, and they couldn't tell which was which.
Speaker 1: Someone couldn't tell if it was white or red with
Speaker 1: the blindfold because they told them. And so we know
Speaker 1: that you're that wine taste, um, And I'll get letters
Speaker 1: from the Visnors Association, right, but we know that wine
Speaker 1: taste about as good as you expected to write. And
Speaker 1: we know that thailand all works better than regular aspirin
Speaker 1: if you know it's tail in all. And here I
Speaker 1: come with another loss, so you'll have to defend me anyway. So, um,
Speaker 1: two of the most persuasive pieces of quote unquote evidence
Speaker 1: that can be in our presented in court rooms thousands
Speaker 1: and thousands cents of thousands of times a day are confessions.
Speaker 1: And even more so I was identification. That's not the
Speaker 1: case here, ironically, Those are two of the most unreliable
Speaker 1: forms of evidence that there can be. So I guess
Speaker 1: what I want to ask is for everyone that's listening,
Speaker 1: and people have heard me say this before, everyone is
Speaker 1: listening to us right now, at some point in the
Speaker 1: future is going to get a jury duty notice and
Speaker 1: after they get over the initial grumpiness about having received
Speaker 1: that thing in the mail, they're going to hopefully go
Speaker 1: and show up and do their duty. And we know
Speaker 1: that there have been cases like Jeffrey Deskovics, where there
Speaker 1: were jurors who were swayed by his false confession so
Speaker 1: much so that they disregarded scientific proof that was presented
Speaker 1: at his original trial that proved without any doubt that
Speaker 1: he could not have committed this brutal rape and murder
Speaker 1: of a fifteen year old girl, and they convicted him anyway.
Speaker 1: So that's an extreme case. But four jurors, when they're
Speaker 1: in a courtroom and there's a confession, and and they're
Speaker 1: up there and they're saying nothing else, this defense attorney
Speaker 1: says matters because this person confessed, and therefore you have
Speaker 1: to convict. How can somebody who's not a psychologist or
Speaker 1: a trained expert in criminal justice, how can they interpret
Speaker 1: that information, how can they make a better decision. They
Speaker 1: need to understand what the sound and sight of a
Speaker 1: false confession really is. For example, here's one single statistic
Speaker 1: that should scare the hell out of everybody, and it
Speaker 1: is the fact that of known false confessions taken right
Speaker 1: out of the DNA exoneration case files of the Innocence Project,
Speaker 1: of known fall confessions contained facts about the crime that
Speaker 1: were spot on accurate that the public didn't know about.
Speaker 1: And so what happens when a jury comes into the
Speaker 1: courtroom and they've got a defendant who said I'm innocent.
Speaker 1: They coursed my statement. The jury can understand the notion
Speaker 1: of coercion, but they ultimately come down to this question, Well,
Speaker 1: he says he's innocent, but then how did he know
Speaker 1: those things? Well, you know what, they don't know how
Speaker 1: he knowed those things unless they can see an entire
Speaker 1: recording from start to finish, of every transaction between the
Speaker 1: police and the suspect. In Kenzie's case, the FBI agent's
Speaker 1: account of what happened in those three days neglected to
Speaker 1: mention that they told her about repression and blacking things out.
Speaker 1: They neglected some of the details that a jury would
Speaker 1: need to know to evaluate that statement. So I think
Speaker 1: a jury needs to know that unless you're watching the
Speaker 1: entire process, not just the final production that is scripted
Speaker 1: and hearst for public consumption, But unless they see the
Speaker 1: hours and hours off camera that preceded that, they can't
Speaker 1: possibly competent to make a judgment of that confession. They
Speaker 1: need to demand everything. And if police in one of
Speaker 1: those states that requires or doesn't require recording had failed
Speaker 1: to record the interrogation, the jury should react with an
Speaker 1: ultra degree of suspicion. They need to ask themselves, why
Speaker 1: don't I see this process? If the police are proud
Speaker 1: to show their interrogation work, why don't I get to
Speaker 1: see how that statement was crafted? Because unless the jury
Speaker 1: can see the whole thing, they're just not in a
Speaker 1: position to evaluate the statement. They're just not right. And
Speaker 1: we see that in the amazing Netflix series Now The
Speaker 1: Innocent man Um, where Tommy Ward and Calfont and I
Speaker 1: are still in prison over three decades later, and we
Speaker 1: only see the part of the confession that they want
Speaker 1: us to see exactly. But we know what went on now,
Speaker 1: we know it's too late to help them. Unfortunately, but
Speaker 1: it happens too often. And you know, New York State
Speaker 1: resisted for the longest time recording interrogations. They said it
Speaker 1: was too expensive, expensive expensive. It's free, It's literally free.
Speaker 1: So but you just hear these things and you go, wait,
Speaker 1: I know we're in an audio only situation, but my
Speaker 1: impulse was to pull my phone out of my pocket,
Speaker 1: put it on the table and say there, we can
Speaker 1: do it now. Yeah. And you know there's that movie
Speaker 1: as well, False Confessions, that both Saul and I are
Speaker 1: in which I encourage people to look up it profiles
Speaker 1: for false confession cases, and it really shows you, down
Speaker 1: and dirty, how terribly flawed this process is. And at
Speaker 1: the end of the day, if you don't know, you
Speaker 1: have to acquit because it says so in the Constitution,
Speaker 1: not because I think so, but because it says so
Speaker 1: in the Constitution. They have to prove guilt without a
Speaker 1: reasonable doubt. That's not the standard that we hold anymore.
Speaker 1: It doesn't seem like that, it doesn't hold up in
Speaker 1: the dustice system. And you know, and of course says
Speaker 1: that quote wasn't a Benjament Franklin that said is better
Speaker 1: than a hundred guilty men. Go Freezer than that an
Speaker 1: innocent should suffer William Blackstone, Oh, William Blackstone, damn, which
Speaker 1: quoted down in the podcast before William Blackstone said that yeah, um,
Speaker 1: so yeah. And it's certainly again with with Kenzie here
Speaker 1: living proof that it can happen to anyone. I mean,
Speaker 1: strangely enough, fortunately for you, the Korean justice system function
Speaker 1: and we can't prove this, but probably better than ours
Speaker 1: would have. So now we get to the vindication, right, um,
Speaker 1: and you had three of those, right, I mean, they
Speaker 1: just kept stamping your thing like nope, nope, nope, I mean,
Speaker 1: and I mean, how did that feel? And you know,
Speaker 1: and how did it feel coming home? And it felt
Speaker 1: great to get the you know, um the first hearing, Um,
Speaker 1: the judge was saying, and I had to wait for
Speaker 1: the translator. So the people in the courtroom had reacted,
Speaker 1: but I didn't know how or why they were reacting,
Speaker 1: like is this in my favor or not? And then
Speaker 1: I heard the translator said innocent and it wasn't even
Speaker 1: they did. She didn't say not guilty, she said innocence.
Speaker 1: And I don't know if that's a translation error, but
Speaker 1: it felt so good to hear that those words, um,
Speaker 1: but I still my mom came rushing at me. She
Speaker 1: was able to be there and create at the time,
Speaker 1: and I went to her um and we got a hug.
Speaker 1: But the courtroom, the bailiff kind of had to separate
Speaker 1: us because I still had to go back to the jail,
Speaker 1: this time not in handcuffs, but I wasn't really free
Speaker 1: for another twelve hours. They had to wait for a
Speaker 1: fact from the courthouse. So when I got back to
Speaker 1: the jail after my innocence verdict, everyone was asking me, well,
Speaker 1: how long did you get how And I said, no,
Speaker 1: I'm going home, and they're like, what do you mean
Speaker 1: You're going home? People don't go home from here. People
Speaker 1: shouldn't be in jail that didn't do a crime. Why
Speaker 1: you mean going home? And it's like, I didn't do it.
Speaker 1: I get to go home, and so UM, I got
Speaker 1: to say goodbye to the people that I spent UM.
Speaker 1: I spent about four and a half months in a
Speaker 1: room with fifteen other women and so form some bonds
Speaker 1: and we got to say goodbye to them. And then UM,
Speaker 1: at ten or four pm on June nineteenth, I got out.
Speaker 1: So there were three separate verdicts, though were you held
Speaker 1: in between those verdicts. I was not held in between,
Speaker 1: but I didn't technically didn't have a visa UM. I
Speaker 1: wasn't allowed to work UM and I was in limbo.
Speaker 1: The prosecutor when I hadn't appealed the case. I think
Speaker 1: it's they're just expected to. I don't know if it's
Speaker 1: an honor thing. UM I said. I wasn't allowed to work.
Speaker 1: My mom did come to the country during that time,
Speaker 1: and so she got to work visa and I had
Speaker 1: There was a pastor who would visit me on Tuesdays.
Speaker 1: Every day. We had seven minutes visits and he would
Speaker 1: come in every Tuesday and we would talk. And when
Speaker 1: I got out, who was really really supportive, he and
Speaker 1: his family, and he found someone who donated an apartment
Speaker 1: to us, donated our rent. Otherwise I would be an
Speaker 1: immigration jail. And then October I got another innocent verdict
Speaker 1: and then it was appealed to the Supreme Court. And
Speaker 1: at that point I'm still in Korea. They had my passport,
Speaker 1: I didn't have permission to leave, and my brother was
Speaker 1: getting married at the end of December, and I asked
Speaker 1: permission if I could go home, and they said if
Speaker 1: I would sign a letter that would wave extradition if
Speaker 1: I was found guilty, they would let me go home.
Speaker 1: So I wrote that letter, and then it was still
Speaker 1: almost three years later that I finally got the official
Speaker 1: Supreme Court of South Korea said that I was innocent
Speaker 1: limbo all that time you were in limbo in South Korea.
Speaker 1: For I was in limbo for about six months in
Speaker 1: South Korea and then went back home and was still
Speaker 1: in limbo in the States, waiting on a verdict, not
Speaker 1: knowing if I would have to go back to Korea. Um,
Speaker 1: I had a gap in my work history. Is the
Speaker 1: finding a job was incredibly hard. All of my credit
Speaker 1: cards had defaulted, maxed out and defaulted. Student loans had defaulted, right,
Speaker 1: so there was more more trouble waiting you. And yeah,
Speaker 1: then that is a very strange state of sort of
Speaker 1: being in a twilight zone. Right, You're over there in
Speaker 1: this eastern country where you can't work, so you can't
Speaker 1: make money and you can't go home and you can't
Speaker 1: do anything. And it was an efficient tourist, Yeah that's
Speaker 1: all I could do. But you would have had to
Speaker 1: sleep on the streets. So, like you said, go to
Speaker 1: immigration jail if not for the fact of the kindness
Speaker 1: of strangers and the fact that your mom was able
Speaker 1: to be supported the way she was. Before we get
Speaker 1: to the to the closing, and I want to hear
Speaker 1: about what you're doing now and how you're doing now,
Speaker 1: and you know all that stuff. Um, but I want
Speaker 1: to ask solid Patty. When I started doing this podcast,
Speaker 1: my goal was to help to prevent as many wrongful
Speaker 1: convictions going forward as I can by teaching people or
Speaker 1: educating people I should say as to how and why
Speaker 1: they happen, and to give people an idea of it
Speaker 1: to look for if they're on a jury and what
Speaker 1: some of the dudes and don't if you're arrested or
Speaker 1: even picked up and not arrested as Kenzie was. So um,
Speaker 1: you know, being that we have two experts in the room,
Speaker 1: I would love to get your take on both of
Speaker 1: those two topics, and together we can hopefully prevent the
Speaker 1: next Kenzie from going through what she did. So if
Speaker 1: you want to go first, sure, I think that's a
Speaker 1: noble and very important mission. I think one thing we
Speaker 1: learned from Kenzie's case, and this gets at a strength
Speaker 1: of the Korean justice system that in contrasts to a
Speaker 1: serious weakness of the American system. She had the surge
Speaker 1: of relief when they took her back to the crime scene.
Speaker 1: She looked and she said, WHOA, that's not the memory
Speaker 1: they gave me. That doesn't fit. In Korean law, if
Speaker 1: a suspect confesses to police and recants the confession and
Speaker 1: won't re enact it and won't restate it to the prosecutor,
Speaker 1: it didn't happen. And yet in the US, when behind
Speaker 1: closed locked doors, without recording, police claim that a suspect confessed,
Speaker 1: and then that suspect immediately recants the confession and won't
Speaker 1: restate it and won't plead guilty and won't reenact it,
Speaker 1: that suspect has done already the damage that will get
Speaker 1: him or her convicted. And so I think there is
Speaker 1: buried in this story about comparing two systems. Problem with
Speaker 1: the American system. The only way Kenzie could have stepped
Speaker 1: out of that situation intact was to invoke her right
Speaker 1: to silence, to invoke her right to an attorney. That's
Speaker 1: all she could have done. Because once she is alleged
Speaker 1: to have confessed, even if she recants it and will
Speaker 1: not restate it, the damage has been done. Well, I'll
Speaker 1: touch on the other topic about what should we do
Speaker 1: to make people aware. Um, I'm trying to figure that
Speaker 1: out and I'll report back in a year with concrete findings.
Speaker 1: But I think just telling more stories like this so
Speaker 1: that number one people except that it's a thing that
Speaker 1: happens more often than you probably think, and just focusing
Speaker 1: on the person. I think, on a person to person
Speaker 1: basis rather than on trends, because it becomes clear once
Speaker 1: you hear each individual story. It's a lot more clear
Speaker 1: as to how that confession happened than speaking in statistics
Speaker 1: and things. So I think focusing on the individual stories
Speaker 1: is really important. That's my hypothesis. It's a scary system
Speaker 1: and you know we're here to to try to, you know,
Speaker 1: help turn the tide, and media plays an important part
Speaker 1: in it. You're studying that. Now, what have your studies
Speaker 1: so far shown about the effective podcasts on an opinion
Speaker 1: of civilians. We're just starting. So we started off looking
Speaker 1: at Netflix documentaries, but so far we are seeing the
Speaker 1: at there is a certain type of person that's number
Speaker 1: one likely to watch these kinds of documentaries to begin with.
Speaker 1: And also no more about interrogations. We're trying to figure
Speaker 1: out as to whether these people are just more knowledgeable
Speaker 1: and then they watch these documentaries or whether the documentaries
Speaker 1: are doing the educating. So um podcasts is the next step.
Speaker 1: So I don't know yet. And and actually you brought
Speaker 1: up my exact dissertation question earlier. In that question, you
Speaker 1: posed about why is it that people can be presented
Speaker 1: with scientific findings or logic but still kind of hold
Speaker 1: onto that gut reaction towards a confession. So you can
Speaker 1: tell someone and I maybe there's research where you give
Speaker 1: them all the information about wrongful convictions and it makes
Speaker 1: them more critical of evidence, but it doesn't necessarily change
Speaker 1: their overall verdict decisions. So I'm trying to figure out why. Well,
Speaker 1: it's good that you're doing the work. And you know,
Speaker 1: I think too we should mention that you know studies.
Speaker 1: My friend Josh Dubin was involved in the study. It
Speaker 1: showed that there's an inherent bias among normal people who
Speaker 1: become yours that if they see someone presented to them
Speaker 1: as a defendant, whether it's in the box or whatever,
Speaker 1: it is people having a natural assumption that they're guilty
Speaker 1: or they wouldn't be there, and we have to correct
Speaker 1: that because there shouldn't be any presumption. You should come
Speaker 1: in as a blank slate and understanding how often these
Speaker 1: things go wrong. So before we turn to closing remarks, Kenzie,
Speaker 1: how how are you? What's going on now? How are
Speaker 1: you doing? You seem like a like a little orb
Speaker 1: of light. But I you don't think. I'm not a minder.
Speaker 1: I'm not even a psychologist. I'm going over here. That
Speaker 1: isn't overall I'm good. I'm good. Um. I do have
Speaker 1: hard days and hard times year February and March with
Speaker 1: the confession and the the murder itself, that's a hard
Speaker 1: time of year. But overall I'm good. I'm a mom. Now.
Speaker 1: I have a six year old boy, what's his name?
Speaker 1: His name is Garic. I get emotional talking about him
Speaker 1: because they think about how this could affect him. How
Speaker 1: my past still to this day, eighteen years later, we'll
Speaker 1: still like bump into things. Um. People will hear about
Speaker 1: it or google it, or they'll see it. Um. Sometimes
Speaker 1: the shows on syndication, and it'll affect how people treat me.
Speaker 1: And some friendships have been lost because of it, and
Speaker 1: sometimes there's some trickle down effect to him. Um, but
Speaker 1: overall overall good. Um, It's it's hard trying to rebuild
Speaker 1: and people have difficulty getting past the confession. Even if
Speaker 1: I was found innocent, that doesn't matter. They still think
Speaker 1: why would you have said said you did something that
Speaker 1: you didn't do, especially why did you kill your friend?
Speaker 1: And so it kind of follows you around, like you
Speaker 1: have to monitor your behavior all the time. You can
Speaker 1: never get too angry, you can never get too upset.
Speaker 1: You have to Um, when do you tell this with
Speaker 1: new people that you've met, Like, do you you have
Speaker 1: to gauge your relationship with him? Am I going to
Speaker 1: see them again? Do they need to know about this?
Speaker 1: If you wait too long, then they feel like you
Speaker 1: violated their trust, because why didn't you tell this to
Speaker 1: me before, before you came into my house? Before I
Speaker 1: saw you every day at school. Um, So you're always
Speaker 1: having to monitor your reactions and your relationships. When I
Speaker 1: first talked to you about whether you want to come
Speaker 1: out and do this, you said something about your son
Speaker 1: and the loss of a play date. Can you say
Speaker 1: something about that, because in a funny way, I think
Speaker 1: that just says so much. It was one of those things. Um,
Speaker 1: I had arranged a play date and so my son
Speaker 1: had gone over to their house and they were playing.
Speaker 1: And it's you know, gauging when do I tell this
Speaker 1: to someone? And I I was in their home and
Speaker 1: I felt that I know if someone came into my house,
Speaker 1: I would want to know who is coming into my home.
Speaker 1: So I had shared this story a little bit and
Speaker 1: that person was no long we're available for play dates,
Speaker 1: just wouldn't return phone calls or texts or messages, just stopped.
Speaker 1: I actually have one more question, Um, are you better?
Speaker 1: I'm not. I think life is too short to be bitter.
Speaker 1: I do get angry at times that they feel that
Speaker 1: they have the right to do this to someone's life,
Speaker 1: because it's not just my life that's affected. That's also
Speaker 1: the Pennett family who hasn't gotten the proper closure that
Speaker 1: they need. Um, this is a person out there who
Speaker 1: has killed someone and is not in jail or prison
Speaker 1: for having committed that crime. And I think I'm not
Speaker 1: I'm not bitter. I get angry about it, though, but
Speaker 1: I'm not letting what they did to me ruin the
Speaker 1: rest of my life. We're glad you're doing well, and um,
Speaker 1: wish you all the best for the future. And now, um,
Speaker 1: we come to my favorite part of the show, which is,
Speaker 1: and you're familiar with this since you listen to the show,
Speaker 1: so you're ready. A lot of people come on and
Speaker 1: never heard. It's like this takes them by surprise. But
Speaker 1: this is a part of the show where I thank
Speaker 1: each of you, um Kenzie of course, um Kenzie Snyder,
Speaker 1: and Patty Sanchez and Professor saulcass And for being here
Speaker 1: and taking your time and sharing your thoughts. And now
Speaker 1: I get to stop talking and listen, and so I'm
Speaker 1: going to go, um in order, I guess we'll start
Speaker 1: with Patty and Saul and then you Kenzie for just
Speaker 1: final thoughts. Final thoughts, understand that humans are flawed, and
Speaker 1: you are normal, no less flawed than general people. UM.
Speaker 1: I've noticed there's a lot of people consuming these things
Speaker 1: saying like, oh yeah, I would always be able to
Speaker 1: tell apart something, or like I'd be able to tell
Speaker 1: true and false. And I think we all just humble
Speaker 1: ourselves a little bit and admit that we're all vulnerable
Speaker 1: and we're all susceptible to being um manipulated and being
Speaker 1: okay that and understand it and so that we can
Speaker 1: be aware and always get a lawyer. So that's good,
Speaker 1: they always get a lawyer. Part I would have lood with.
Speaker 1: But um, you know, false confessions. I've been looking at
Speaker 1: them for god knows how long. I'm not going to
Speaker 1: tell you because I don't want to reveal my age.
Speaker 1: But um, it wasn't that long ago when people said
Speaker 1: doesn't happen, and I would say never, never, doesn't happen.
Speaker 1: I would never confess to a crime I didn't commit.
Speaker 1: Now I think some of that is changing. The problem
Speaker 1: is that what people see and hear a confession. What
Speaker 1: they're seeing and hearing is a story. It's a narrative.
Speaker 1: This is what I did, This is how I did it,
Speaker 1: this is why, this is what it felt like, this
Speaker 1: is what the victim may have looked like or said.
Speaker 1: It's a story from start to finish. Kenzie's is no exception.
Speaker 1: If you read her so called confession, it is a
Speaker 1: narrative from start to finish. Its chronology that is the
Speaker 1: sight and the sound of a false confession. And so
Speaker 1: it's very important for people to understand that absent corroborating
Speaker 1: evidence taken independent of that confession and absent seeing the
Speaker 1: process by which that confession was taken, you are in
Speaker 1: no position to make a judgment. And the reason I
Speaker 1: think that's important is Kenzie's case illustrates something disturbing. Eighteen
Speaker 1: years ago, she gave a confession, she was then acquitted,
Speaker 1: She was then acquitted again, she was then acquitted again.
Speaker 1: The fact that eighteen years later she is feeling the
Speaker 1: effects of the stigma that has not detached itself from her.
Speaker 1: She gave a confession, but she has never been convicted
Speaker 1: of a crime. It doesn't matter to some people. She
Speaker 1: is guilty by virtue of the fact that she confessed,
Speaker 1: and they will never see her actual innocence. People need
Speaker 1: to get past it people, And that's why I think
Speaker 1: Patti's proposed studies looking at whether or not a podcast,
Speaker 1: for example, can raise public awareness and make people more
Speaker 1: discerning jurors, is so important because we're flailing a bit
Speaker 1: trying to find ways to raise public awareness. I've been
Speaker 1: working top down, trying to convince the courts, the judiciary
Speaker 1: to reform the system in ways that makes sense. But
Speaker 1: you know what, that's just too slow, and there are
Speaker 1: more victims every day, and so maybe what we need
Speaker 1: to do is work from the bottom up and create
Speaker 1: a groundswell of public awareness and a groundswell of support.
Speaker 1: You know, I think making a murderer, the Central Park five,
Speaker 1: the Confession Tapes, Demand, the Knox documentary, your podcast series
Speaker 1: on wrongful convictions, Those are I think essential tools for
Speaker 1: raising public awareness and making people more critical consumers of
Speaker 1: their criminal justice system. I was hesitant to do this
Speaker 1: podcast because of how it could affect my life now,
Speaker 1: but Saul had mentioned something and he said, maybe a
Speaker 1: future juror would hear this, and I wanted to help
Speaker 1: someone keep them from this happening to them. I think
Speaker 1: that's important. The biggest thing that I would say is
Speaker 1: get a lawyer. I know everyone thinks it's a false confession.
Speaker 1: That would never confess to something that I didn't do
Speaker 1: when I know it sounds crazy, but no one goes
Speaker 1: into the room with law enforcement expecting to leave with
Speaker 1: a confession to a crime they didn't commit. So get
Speaker 1: a lawyer. Law enforcement agents, they're doing their job, they're
Speaker 1: not your friend. Don't trust them. Make sure you have
Speaker 1: a lawyer on your side. And before we close, so
Speaker 1: all I want to do um sadly I want to
Speaker 1: do an in memoriam because, Um, there's a case that
Speaker 1: was profiled in the movie that you and I both
Speaker 1: appeared in called False Confessions. Um, and can you talk
Speaker 1: a little bit about because it actually has an eerie
Speaker 1: resemblance to Kenzie's case, and that he was never convicted.
Speaker 1: He was actually in jail for almost exactly the same
Speaker 1: amount of time in America. Anyway, Um, he was an
Speaker 1: exchange student and he died you know, recently. You know,
Speaker 1: you could say he died of a broken heart. But
Speaker 1: can you talk about that case a little bit. Yeah,
Speaker 1: his name was Maulte Thompson. He was twenty or twenty
Speaker 1: one years old when he to the US to New
Speaker 1: York to work as a teacher in a preschool, a
Speaker 1: high end preschool near the United Nations. He came from
Speaker 1: a family of teachers and educators, just Kenzie was aspiring
Speaker 1: as well to be a teacher. And some way through
Speaker 1: the school year, another employee went to the school and
Speaker 1: said they saw him touching the children inappropriately, which seemed
Speaker 1: inconceivable given the layout of the room and the fact
Speaker 1: that there are always multiple adults at any given moment.
Speaker 1: But they watched for a while and saw absolutely nothing.
Speaker 1: Turns out that the person who accused him of that
Speaker 1: had made similar allegations earlier in the year about others.
Speaker 1: So the school proceeded to dismiss her. She went to
Speaker 1: the police department and she reported it. The police ended
Speaker 1: up in multi Thompson's door early one morning, about six am,
Speaker 1: picked him up, interrogated him for seven or eight hours,
Speaker 1: and took from him a confession. The interrogation was not
Speaker 1: corded on audio or on video, and the result of
Speaker 1: that seven or eight hours of off camera interrogation was
Speaker 1: that they convinced Malte Thompson to go to the district
Speaker 1: Attorney's office and give a videotaped statement. And the opening
Speaker 1: of his videotape statement, I'm paraphrasing, but it's something like
Speaker 1: it has come to my attention that I've done a
Speaker 1: bad thing. Apparently they told him falsely that they had
Speaker 1: surveillance video footage of him touching the children inappropriately. That
Speaker 1: was a lie. But he's from Denmark and he doesn't
Speaker 1: know that police are allowed to lie, because in Denmark,
Speaker 1: as in most other Western civilized countries, police are not
Speaker 1: allowed to lie. But he was delivered that lie and
Speaker 1: so like Kenzie, he had to presume that this must
Speaker 1: be true. I don't recall doing it, and so he
Speaker 1: gave a confession to the district attorney on camera. He
Speaker 1: was sent to Rikers Island for several months while the
Speaker 1: case worked its way through the system. Nobody would corroborate,
Speaker 1: none of the children would corroborate, and they had to
Speaker 1: ultimately drop the charges. He went home to Denmark. He
Speaker 1: had a lawyer who settled with the city for some
Speaker 1: I don't know what the settlement figure was. And you
Speaker 1: and I saw him in the film. If you see
Speaker 1: the film, what you will see as an individual who
Speaker 1: is depressed. And this was years later, and so the
Speaker 1: fact that he died recently. According to the family, he
Speaker 1: died of a heart attack at twenty seven years old,
Speaker 1: is just sad beyond belief. But you can see in
Speaker 1: the movie he can't even break open a smile. This
Speaker 1: affected him and had never left six seven years later.
Speaker 1: I don't know what was going through his mind. I
Speaker 1: don't know what goes through Kenzie's mind, but I know
Speaker 1: that people who are induced into giving confessions to crimes
Speaker 1: they didn't commit are constantly self reflecting what was I
Speaker 1: thinking what was I doing? How could that have happened?
Speaker 1: And that's what makes these story is so important to tell.
Speaker 1: Rest in peace. Thank you everyone for listening to Wrongful Conviction.
Speaker 1: We'll see you next week. Don't forget to give us
Speaker 1: a fantastic review wherever you get your podcasts. It really helps.
Speaker 1: And I'm a proud donor to the Innocence Project and
Speaker 1: I really hope you'll join me in supporting this very
Speaker 1: important cause and helping to prevent future wrongful convictions. Go
Speaker 1: to Innocence Project dot org to learn how to donate
Speaker 1: and get involved. I'd like to thank our production team,
Speaker 1: Connor Hall and Kevin Wardis. The music on the show
Speaker 1: is by three time OSCAR nominated composer Jay Ralph. Be
Speaker 1: sure to follow us on Instagram at Wrongful Conviction and
Speaker 1: on Facebook at Wrongful Conviction Podcast. Wrongful Conviction with Jason
Speaker 1: Flam is a production a Lava for Good Podcasts in
Speaker 1: association with Signal Company. Number one Word