The fuzzy line separating truth, lies and guesses shapes the plot of most television dramas and has sustained the mystery genre from the moment Sherlock Holmes picked up his pipe.
We love a good mystery so long as, in the end, there is resolution. You know the spinster aunt weilded the knife because, in a good mystery story, she breaks down in self righteous rage and admits the whole sordid truth. She even tells us why she did it and why she’d gladly do it again.
That happens in real life too, but not very often. Criminal cases that go to trial are ambiguous by definition. The alleged villain claims innocence; a prosecutor says he’s guilty as sin. Witnesses take the stand, documents are entered into the record, closing arguments are presented and the question is handed to the ladies and gentlemen of the jury.
Don’t let Law and Order fool you, real trials can be excruciatingly dull. Witnesses rarely break down on the stand and pour out their souls. Juries are forced to sift through an ungainly assortment of contradictions, evasions and mind-numbing detail.
Most jurors find resolution by siding with the prosecution. That way they have the satisfaction of taking a rapist, a murderer, an assailant or a drug dealer off the street. That feels good. Putting a guy who may be guilty back on the street is bad for the digestion. If prosecutors really had to prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt we would see far more acquitals.
A man from Lubbock, Texas recently died after spending the last fourteen years of his life in prison for a series of rapes he did not commit. According to the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, Timothy Brian Cole professed his innocence from the outset, refusing an attractive plea agreement because it was contingent on a full confession. Those curious about Mr. Coles’ ethnicity can find a picture of his family here.
DNA evidence shows that the actual rapist was a man in prison for another crime of sexual violence at the time Mr. Cole was convicted. The actual rapist confessed to the crime on several occasions but nobody wanted to listen to him. They had their man.
The jurors who sent Mr. Cole to prison were guessing. They guessed wrong. They guessed wrong because a prosecutor guessed wrong. They guessed wrong because a victim guessed wrong after being shown a photo array designed to emphasize Mr. Coles’ picture. Investigators rigged the photo array because they too were guessing Cole was the rapist.
Why all this guessing?
People need closure; we crave resolution. We hate movies that leave us guessing. Guessing is only fun when you know the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth will be revealed in the end.
Police investigators and prosecutors are no exception to this rule. They will make the pieces fit even if they have to shave off a corner here and plaster in a gaping crack there. Once they have their suspect a false concreteness takes hold. A fuzzy picture snaps into high definition. To win at trial, a prosecutor has to appear convinced. The best way to appear convinced is to actually be convinced.
Prosecutors should be the ultimate skeptics. Too often, they are playing the guessing game along with everyone else.
Most of us aren’t very good at distinguishing the truth from a lie. Studies have shown that police interrogators are no better than randomly selected college sophomores at distinguishing between honest and dishonest testimony. The difference is that professional interrogators say they know who is lying and who is telling the truth; the sophomores admit freely admit that they’re guessing.
Prosecutors guess because law enforcement guesses. The issue is settled when two or more authorities agree. Once the official story takes shape it rapidly hardens into fact. That’s why Tomothy Brian Cole died in prison.
Once law enforcement agrees on the orthodoxy story, it is blindly accepted by prosecutors and jurors. Most people look to the proper authorities for the answers because they have little confidence in their own empirical skills. The desire for resolution is so intense that innocent suspects will often confess to a crime because they can’t maintain an independent version of the facts in the face of intense interrogation.
A healthy dose of skepticism would have saved Brian Cole, Ann Colomb, Alvin Clay and Freddie Brookins Jr from wrongful conviction.
Our almost religious veneration for authority figures was recently on display in Gerald Missouri when a Tom Coleman style zealot calling himself “Sergeant Bill” came to town claiming to be a federal agent from a “multijurisdictional task force”. The New York Times story ran this morning under the headline, “Drug arrests were real; the badge was fake.” Sergeant Bill led local police on a series of no-knock drug raids. “I don’t need no warrant, I’m a federal officer,” Sergeant Bill would tell suspects as he dragged them out of their beds.
The Times article suggests that most of these unconstitutional atrocities were based on terrorized suspects “naming names” to Sergeant Bill. Monica Davey, the author of this intriguing piece, scours the midwestern states looking for natural disasters and human interest stories. For all I know, she could be a trained attorneys. But her grasp of due process protections seems a bit weak. These arrests were not real.
Notice how an appeal to federal authority produced instant compliance from a long list of alleged perps, police officers and public officials. Then a local newspaper editor made a simple phone call and Sergeant Bill’s reign of error was over.
The lack of independent thinking in Gerald, Missouri is an egregious case of normal. At every stage of the criminal justice process an uncritical groupthink often substitutes for real evidence. Uneducated guesses come to the judicial party disguised as unassailable facts.
You can’t understand how the process works unless you have watched it unfold in real time. I can imagine how Timothy Brian Coles’ family felt as they watched an innocent man slowly succumb to the guessing game.
This doesn’t just happen in a few isolated rape cases; it happens whenever the human appetite for resolution trumps independent thought. The narrative campaigns Friends of Justice undertakes for people like Freddie Brookins Jr., Ann Colomb, Mychal Bell and Alvin Clay reveal the mechanics of wrongful conviction. When jurors are forced to participate in a guessing game bad things happen to innocent defendants.
Friends of Justice 
Justice is no longer a goal of the criminal justice (sic) system. See my book, The Tyranny of Good Intentions.
As long as jurors will be chosen among “nice” people, people who never had real problems living, as long as no prostitutes, no former jailbirds, no “fringe”-people will be excluded from such jurys, I cannot believe in their “justice”. As you say, they guess and, as honest as they are, they can obviously guess wrong. I remember a trial where the accused was considered guilty by such a “ppopular” jury – it was in Belgium – and a few days later, a magistrate told me that a pmrofessionnal magistrate would never have reached the same verdict!
Thanks for your work.
Sincerely
J.A.
What is not being mentioned much in the major papers – those that are carrying it anyway – but was told when this case was originally reported in http://lubbockonline.com was that Timothy Cole was targeted by the police and prosecution after he flirted with an undercover officer at a bar. Cole was black, the undercover officer is white. I will grant you that the rapist is black, and the women that he was assaulting – including the ones that he also murdered – were white. But in this instance, Cole was tagged as a rapist – murderer by the police and prosecution who ignored – and some say withheld – evidence of his innocence solely because he was a black man, and a college student at that, who flirted with a white woman. In other words, Cole was a modern day Emmitt Till. Actually, this is worse, because Till’s death came at the hands of private individuals whom the state exonerated, but Cole’s death came solely at the hands of the state from start to finish.
Hopefully this will result in a civil suit by the family where the prosecutor and the police will have to acknowledge their role in this. But according to the Lubbock paper that broke this story, they are already claiming not to remember this fellow or his case, so they will never have to deal with the consequences of killing an innocent man for flirting with a white woman. The district attorney in the case, who is now a judge in the area, claimed “I do not really remember, but if it is true it makes me sick to my stomach” and that was it.
This article makes me sick. How can these unjustices happen in our America today? Thank you for all you do.
a very sad situation; I think laziness and of course racism play a part too
The Presumption of innocence is a fiction. It only exists if a sufficient number members of the jury are capable of entertaining the belief that the authorities could be mistaken, or acting in bad faith. In the US especially, wide spread moral panic about blue collar crime and antinegro racism make it unlikely that any coloured person coming before a mainly white jury drawn from the respectable classes will have the benefit of such a presumption. In the notorius Tulia cocaine cases it is clear that the respectable white judge and jurors were incapable of believing that a black defendant could be telling the truth and a white policeman lying. Not surprisingly most defendants took plea bargains.
I question whether the authorities and jury members really consider that not having done the actions of the crime constitutes innocence in any real sense. In the minds of respectable white people, the concepts of criminal and coloured person have become conflated so that they assume that a black defendent is guilty of something even if innocent in a purely technical of the charge in question, so a wrong guilty verdict does no real harm. In fact the extreme hatred of drug use in the US is a result of drug use being seen as typically negro behaviour. They hate white drug users because they are seen as behaving like niggers. The drug laws exist to punish niggers and white people guilty of niggerness, that is behaving like niggers. I have used the politically incorrect n-word here because I think one needs to consider the extreme animosity of white people towards non-whites that this word embodies to understand why white police, prosecutors, judges and jurors including some black people of the respectable classes who have taken on white values, cannot see innocence as a opossibility that matters when the defendant is black.
Remember that when a miscarriage of justice occurs, only a few people are certain of this fact, the victim, perhaps some of his friends, the true perpetrator and pehaps some police who have fabricated evidence. Most purposes of the justice system, deterrance, closure for the victim or relatives of the victim and a feeling of righteous vengence being implemented are achieved as much by a wrongful conviction as by a rightful one. In fact in as much as the right people among the marginalized know that a conviction is wrongful this may be a good thing as it reminds them of the complete power that the rightous and whiteous have over their lives. It is a matter of keeping niggers from getting uppity, and jailing them at random for rape of white women is a good way of doing this.