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False Confessions: NYC Still Struggles in Aftermath of Central Park Five


raymond-Santana-Confession-Tape

[This story is part of a series focusing on false confessions and filming interrogations published by Juvenile Justice Information Exchange. Read other stories in the series here.]

A 14-year-old Raymond Santana sat slumped in a chair, his arms crossed.

Santana sat across the table from then Assistant District Attorney Elizabeth Lederer and the police detective who had interviewed the Harlem teenager twice in the last 27 hours. Another officer handled a video camera.

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The officer switched the camera on. The time stamp read 2:30 a.m., on April 21, 1989. It was the first time a camera would be used to record any of Santana’s interviews with police, and Lederer read Santana his rights, making sure that the detectives had done the same earlier in the night.

"Yes," Santana kept mumbling in response, his voice barely audible over a growing din at the Central Park precinct station.

"Now that I've advised you of your rights," Lederer began to ask, "are you willing to tell me the truth about what happened on the night of April 19, 1989?"

Santana didn’t know it at the time, but the 30 minutes that would follow the detective’s question would seal Santana’s future and ensure his conviction in a case that featured little other evidence against him or the four other Harlem boys charged along with him.

• • •

In the United States, false confessions play a role in about one in four wrongful convictions overturned by DNA evidence. The confessions often come forth following hours of interrogation, resulting in a statement of guilt put on paper in front of the investigating detectives or, as in Santana's case, on videotape. Although technically a person cannot be convicted on a confession alone, it often plays a crucial role in a trial.

"Confession evidence is heavily relied upon by juries because it’s counterintuitive that one would confess to something that they didn't do," said Stephen Saloom, policy director at the Innocence Project, the New York-based nonprofit legal clinic that has tracked more than 310 DNA exonerations nationwide.

For Saloom and other reform advocates, a written or videotaped confession only tells part of the story. Capturing an interrogation from beginning to end, on the other hand, creates an undeniable record that ensures the veracity of confessions. That, Saloom said, benefits both the defendant and the prosecution.

Seventeen states – along with the District of Columbia – have already adopted some degree of videotaping requirement. Last September, the commissioner of the world's largest police force announced that it would adopt the practice.

Although New York City prosecutors have selectively taped interrogations for decades, the New York Police Department was supposed to be on track to conduct them on a regular basis in every one of its 76 precincts.

In October, The New York Times reported that only two precincts were videotaping interrogations of felony assaults and sexual assaults, the same two precincts that were part of the NYPD’s pilot program announced in 2010.

{pullquote}"It gives the prosecutor a greater sense of security because it shows more accurately than the words the defendant's state of mind."{/pullquote}

Despite its growing popularity, opponents still argue the policy will deter police officers from doing their jobs. But what goes into that job and the means used to get a confession can be just as controversial as the policy itself.

New York City is no stranger to the practice of videotaping suspects. In fact, the Bronx District Attorney's office is the first documented office to videotape confessions on a regular basis. In 1983, The New York Times wrote about how, under Mario Merola's leadership, the Bronx DA's recording policy led the way for neighboring DA's to do the same.

"It gives the prosecutor a greater sense of security because it shows more accurately than the words the defendant's state of mind," former Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau told The Times.

Six years later, it was Morgenthau's office that led the investigation into 1989's Central Park jogger case.

• • •

NYPD first picked up Santana at 11 p.m. Complaints were coming into police that as many as 30 black and Latino boys were roaming through Central Park, harassing and assaulting bystanders.

Santana was soon joined at the police precinct on Central Park West and West 86th Street by Antron McCray, 15; Kevin Richardson, 14; Yusef Salaam, 15; and Korey Wise, 16. They didn’t all know each other when they were arrested, but all five were already in custody when police made a gruesome discovery in the park.

Officers found a female jogger on a path alongside a small river in the park's North Woods around 2 a.m. Near death, she was bleeding and unconscious from a brutal assault and rape. Police spent the next crucial hours trying to connect the dots between the boys they had in custody and the jogger.

Headlines across the country didn't wait until the jury's verdict to find the Santana and the four other boys guilty. In this case, the offense was clear and the case was closed: four of the five confessed. The four youngest spent at least five years in juvenile correctional facilities.

Wise, the oldest at 16 years of age, served nearly 12 years in prison as an adult. While there, Wise had a run in with Matías Reyes. Reyes, who was serving time for the 1989 rape and murder of a pregnant woman, was also linked to least seven other rapes in Manhattan’s Upper East Side.

Reyes apologized to Wise about an earlier fight. They talked for a while. After they spoke, Reyes turned to a correctional employee and said that someone was serving time for a crime that he committed.

Word of Reyes' admission eventually made its way back down to Manhattan, which in 2002 prompted the district attorney’s office to compare Reyes's DNA with samples collected from the Central Park crime scene, samples that never matched any of the boys. The test showed that the DNA was a match for Reyes.

The "new evidence, had it been available to the juries, would have resulted in verdicts more favorable to the defendants, not only on the charges arising from the attack on the female jogger but on the other charges as well,” Morgenthau wrote in a statement that prompted officials in late 2002 to overturn the convictions.

New city leaders had to deal with the aftermath of the exoneration. Less than a year into his first term as mayor, Michael Bloomberg released a statement on the heels of the court's decision.

"I know District Attorney Morgenthau has sought to see justice served, and I have asked Police Commissioner [Ray] Kelly to look at the District Attorney's findings to determine if any changes in police procedures are merited," Bloomberg wrote in January 2003.

• • •

Kelly took no visible steps immediately after Bloomberg released his statement in 2003. In fact, it wasn't until early 2010 — seven years after the Central Park Five’s convictions were overturned — that the NYPD said it would even explore how it might change how officers conduct interrogations.

It took another year for the NYPD to actually launch two pilot programs to videotape interrogations, one in the Bronx's 48th Precinct and another in Brooklyn's 67th Precinct. At that point, the cameras were only used for felony assault cases.

In August 2012, The Wall Street Journal followed up on the pilot program and found that progress was slow. Paul Browne, then the police department's deputy commissioner and spokesman, told The Journal that the NYPD would expand the pilot program to five precincts from the original two. That suddenly changed the following month.

Five weeks after Browne spoke to The Journal, Kelly began an hour-long speech to the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs by announcing that all precincts would adopt the videotaping of interrogations. The policy would also expand beyond just felony assaults, which Kelly said totaled around 300 interviews at the time, to include murders and sex crimes.

"We want to continue to stay ahead of the curve with the help of our recording initiative," Kelly told the audience. He was not specific about a timeline for implementation, nor has the NYPD ever made that information public.

During an unrelated press conference, Bloomberg speculated that significant progress could be made before his third and final term ends in late 2013. That gave NYPD one year to secure a $3 million grant from the New York City Police Foundation to purchase the necessary equipment to update antiquated interrogation rooms and re-train police officers.

{pullquote}A spokesman for the Police Department told The New York Times in October that the NYPD was rolling out the program as fast as it could but that only 28 of the city’s 76 precincts are even outfitted for videotaping interrogations.{/pullquote}

Almost 23 years after Raymond Santana and the other boys were taken to the Central Park precinct for questioning, Kelly and Bloomberg stood in front of the building’s glass doors on a sunny but cold late-March morning.

"Crime in Central Park is down by 80 percent compared to 20 years ago," Kelly said during the event. "This facility underscores just how seriously the City of New York and its police department take our mission of keeping this park safe."

A spokesman for the police department told The New York Times in October that the NYPD was rolling out the program as fast as it could but that only 28 of the city’s 76 precincts are even outfitted for videotaping interrogations.

Asked during a brief press conference after the ribbon cutting, Kelly said that NYPD would begin to roll out the recording program in Queens "probably" by the first week of April 2014. The other boroughs would soon follow, he added, as they continue to collect funds from the Police Foundation.

"We are assembling money, you might say," he said. "We're committed to going forward."

Seven months later — and with less than eight weeks left in Bloomberg’s administration —  NYPD is still only conducting interviews in the same two precincts it launched its pilot program in. A spokesman for the police department told The New York Times in October that the NYPD was rolling out the program as fast as it could but that only 28 of the city’s 76 precincts are even outfitted for videotaping interrogations.

• • •

By the time police first questioned him, the 14-year-old Santana hadn't slept for about a day. He was told repeatedly that he could go home as soon as they sorted out his story, and that any charges stemming from the night were likely to go to family court.

Santana said that the detective didn't start taking notes until the interview turned to the rape. The other boy, he was told, said he was the rapist. That's when his and the others’ stories began to change.

"They knew we were going to confess,” Santana said. “It was just a matter of time."

READ THE REST OF THE STORY AT JUVENILE JUSTICE INFORMATION EXCHANGE

Federal Appeals Court Blocks Stop-And-Frisk Ruling, Removes Judge


Updated with statements from the city, Judge Scheindlin and mayoral candidates Bill de Blasio and Joe Lhota. 

A federal appeals court today froze a lower court’s ruling that the New York Police Department's stop-and-frisk policy was unconstitutional.

A three-judge panel of the Second Circuit Court of Appeals also ordered that the judge behind the ruling be removed from her the case, writing that the "appearance of partiality surrounding this litigation was compromised."

READ THE RULING

That judge, U.S. District Judge Shira Scheindlin, ruled in August that the NYPD’s use of the controversial policing method was "indirect racial profiling.”

"We could not be more pleased with the Court's findings," said city attorney Michael A. Cardozo in a statement today. "This ruling not only ensures that the remedies ordered by the District Court — which we believe were unjustified and deeply problematic — will be put on hold during our appeal, but it stays the liability decision on the Police Department’s compliance with the Constitution."

Scheindlin also spoke out after her expulsion from the case, justifying her decsion on particulars in the case as well as for talking to the New Yorker's Jeffrey Toobin in May, which the appeal court innapropriate.

"All of the interviews identified by the Second Circuit were conducted under the express condition that I would not comment on the Floyd case," Scheindlin wrote. "And I did not."

When Scheindlin's original ruling came down, the decision was hailed by police reform advocates as proof that the NYPD had engaged in policing that disproportionately targeted black and Latino men. Democratic mayoral candidates during this summer's primary also took umbrage under the ruling.

Mayor Michael Bloomberg — whose office appealed Scheindlin's ruling — defended the policy. The outgoing mayor accused the candidates of using campaign rhetoric to score political points with voters and risking the city's strides in public safety.

Bloomberg also personally took Scheindlin to task for her decision.

"Think about this judge on stop-and-frisk," he said during a radio appearance in mid-August. "What does she know about policing? Absolutely zero."

The ruling has also been featured heavily during the general election, with Republican candidate Joe Lhota defending the NYPD from Scheindlin's ruling. His Democratic rival, Bill de Blasio, made significant inroads with primary voters, however, by criticizing how stop-and-frisks have been conducted under Police Commissioner Ray Kelly.

"I'm extremely disappointed in today's decision," de Blasio said in a statement. "We shouldn't have to wait for reforms that both keep our communities safe and obey the Constitution. We have to end the overuse of stop and frisk — and any delay only means a continued and unnecessary rift between our police and the people they protect."

Lhota had a different take.

"Bravo! As I have said all along, Judge Scheindlin's biased conduct corrupted the case and her decision was not based on the facts," Lhota said in a statement. "The ruling by the nation's second highest court was an unprecedented rejection of both the result of the case and the manner with which it was achieved."

The now-stayed order Scheindlin had released also called a pilot program to place body cameras on police officers and installing attorney Peter L. Zimroth as an independent monitor to oversee the department’s use of stop-and-frisk.

The next scheduled court date for the case is March 14, 2014, three months into the next administration.

De Blasio, who has maintained a commanding lead over Lhota in various polls, has already vowed to drop the appeal.

City Council Overrides Bloomberg Vetoes Of NYPD Bills


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NEW YORK — One week after a federal court ruled against the New York Police Department's use of stop-and-frisk, the City Council passed two bills that aim to systemically upend how the much debated tactic is used.

Yesterday's vote in the Council to override Mayor Michael Bloomberg's veto of the bill had some observers on edge.

Originally passed in an overnight meeting in June, the bill to create an inspector general to investigate general practices and policies passed 39 to 10 at yesterday's Council meeting. A second bill to expand the city's law against racial profiling was overridden by the minimum 34 votes needed .

"Today, the City Council listened to the voices of reason and passed legally sound and responsible legislation that respects the Fourth and Fourteenth amendment rights of city residents, while providing the necessary oversight to establish better policing practices," said Brooklyn Councilmen and bill sponsors Jumaane Williams and Brad Lander in a statement after the vote.

Minutes after the vote, Bloomberg vowed to appeal the racial profiling bill, writing in a statement that it would fail to stop profiling but instead is aimed at winning votes.

On the John Gambling radio show this morning, Bloomberg again focused his attention on the profiling bill and the likelihood of it becoming law.

"We believe we have a very good case in court," he said before adding that he'd likely be out of office before a court can reach a decision. "Just looking at the calendar, the next mayor will have to decide whether or not to continue the appeal."

Bloomberg repeated his opposition to the bill. He said that he already signed a profiling bill into law in 2004. Any and all stops, he said, are based on where crime is reported and the description of suspects — not Census data.

Unless a court does intervene on the mayor's appeal, the profiling bill is slated to become law in late November, 90 days since yesterday's vote. Otherwise, the inspector general bill will be law as of Jan. 1, 2014.

The NYPD inspector general would exist under the Department of Investigation. A DOI spokeswoman declined to comment on the bill's passage.

Whoever is appointed to the job at DOI will operate separately from the independent monitor assigned by federal Judge Shira Scheindlin in her ruling against the city two weeks ago.

"Let me be clear the IG is not limited as the court's monitor is to only stop-and-frisk," said City Council Speaker Christine Quinn, adding that the inspector general would look into any practices that the NYPD engages in, including stop-and-frisk.

Quinn has long supported the inspector general bill, but has been criticized in recent months for her opposition to the racial profiling bill. A Democratic candidate for mayor, Quinn has spent the last few weeks confronting fellow  candidate Public Advocate Bill de Blasio on the issue.

A non-voting sponsor on both bills, de Blasio on Thursdsay accused Quinn of taking advantage of the cameras by supporting one bill and not the other. He argued again that he's the only candidate who can end the "Bloomberg era of stop-and-frisk" by supporting both bills and replacing Commissioner Ray Kelly — whom Quinn said she'd ask to remain at the department's helm.

At an impromptu campaign event before the vote, Quinn accused de Blasio of misleading primary voters by calling himself the only candidate opposed to the policy's status quo or racial profiling — a charge also levied by former comptroller and the only the only black candidate race, Bill Thompson.

Quinn also vowed that under her leadership, Kelly would have to be willing to reform stop-and-frisk to her liking, calling de Blasio a "say anything, do nothing politician talking out of both sides of his mouth."

The profiling bill, Quinn said yesterday standing in front of a group of Council members, opens the door to conflicting court opinions between the local and state courts. Many of the legislators behind her disagreed with Quinn on policy grounds, but praised her willingness to engage despite their differences of opinion.

To some legislators, that difference of opinion meant that the body needed to continue the conversation beyond the vote.

During the vote, Williams said that none of the votes against the bill came from any members of the Council's Black, Latino and Asian Caucus. With 27 members, its members make up a little more than half of the entire Council.

However, at least two opposing votes did come from caucus members. Queens Councilman Peter Koo voted against both bills, and Bronx Councilman Joel Rivera voted against the racial profiling bill.

The idea that one had to belong to a minority in order to understand the issue of stop-and-frisk rankled some members outside the caucus.

"I vote on things that I have a role in — things I don't have expertise in — and to say you shouldn't vote with your own judgment because you're not a person of color, I think it's offensive," said Staten Island Councilman Vincent Ignizio.

"It's indisputable that thousands of people are alive because of the efforts of this police department," Ignizio said as he defended his vote against both bills. However, he also vowed to work with his colleagues to work with those in support of the new laws.

Another opponent to the bills, however, was less measured in his message. Queens Councilman Eric Ulrich said that he appreciated and respected those who support the bills but couldn't stand for a bill that costs taxpayers $2 million for redundant bureaucracy instead of paying for more officers on the street.

Briefly shouted at by an audience member in the overlooking public gallery, Ulrich shouted that he would not be intimidated, calling both bills "downright dangerous."

"New Yorkers will rue the day that City Council overturned these vetoes," Ulrich said.

Many of the bill supporters agreed with Ulrich and the other Council members who defended Bloomberg's veto that NYPD needs to increase the number of police officers, but the consensus among them seems to be that the bills would help improve policing.

"I think what we all want is a city where we're safe and our civil rights are protected," Lander said, noting that the debate has been "difficult and polarizing." Like Ignizio, Lander nonetheless thanked the bills' opponents for helping to elevate the dialogue.

While emotions didn't necessarily run as high at yesterday's meeting as they did when the Council originally passed the bills, when members made multiple rounds at the mic to explain their votes, many legislators noted the personal significance of vote.

Queens Councilwoman Julissa Ferreras sat at the front of the Council to explain her vote as important not just to her as a legislator but as a mother-to-be. The councilwoman is more than 8 months pregnant.

Ferreras called upon her experiences as a Latina and her hopes as a mother as reasons for her vote, saying that she knows her son is "coming into a better New York City" for it.

"My son and I vote yes," she said.



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