CCDBR President Bob Clarke’s Comment on NYT’s “Police Must Admit When Confessions Are False”

Posted on November 26, 2012

Adele Bernhard — November 19, 2012: “Why is the New York City Police Department fighting the civil rights lawsuit brought by the five innocent young men wrongly convicted of sexually assaulting the Central Park jogger? In New York City, as in many other jurisdictions, police refuse to concede error.

In the jogger case, all the DNA evidence collected from the crime scene led to the sole attacker who later confessed to the crime, insisting he acted alone. The Manhattan district attorney had the original charges vacated……………………..”

Bob Clarke — November 20, 2012: “The Chicago Committee to Defend the Bill of Rights (www.ccdbr.org) has a program to inform young people in minority neighborhoods of their rights in dealing with the police. One of the things we have been obliged, sadly, to tell them is that police officers regularly (and “legally”) lie to suspects in order to secure confessions or create evidence. These lies can include false claims that mothers are waiting outside the police station and have conceded their children’s guilt, that a guilty plea to a felony charge is all it takes to get out of jail and go home – without further consequences – and the like. A few days ago a federal civil jury in Chicago formally found that the “code of silence” about rights violations by fellow officers is systematically and rigidly enforced in the local police culture – even in the case where a huge drunken off-duty male cop was caught on tape leaping a across a bar and nearly pounding the life out of a small female bartender.”

Read the full article at NY Times.