Court TV--the latest television network to enter the "reality-based" television sweepstakes--has announced its intention to air actual videotapes of killers and rapists confessing to crimes. No commentary and no context will accompany "Confessions," a weekly prime-time show set for Sunday nights, starting Sept. 10. Viewers who tune in will get nothing but the "real thing"--the killers baring their souls.
"Jurors get to see with their own eyes that the guilty confess to crimes, freely and voluntarily, without any coercion or duress," said Robert Morgenthau, the highly respected Manhattan district attorney who offered Court TV copies of videotaped confessions he had stockpiled at his office. Since then Court TV producers have been in a frenzy, contacting prosecutors and police departments throughout the country and reviewing thousands of hours of videotapes.
Court TV executives see "Confessions" as a breakthrough show, a ratings gang-buster, and have been shamelessly promoting it with the promise of providing a glimpse of "evil incarnate." Both Morgenthau and Court TV say these confessions will serve the greater good by enhancing the public's understanding of the criminal justice process.
On the contrary. In our combined work, we have reviewed hundreds of cases and thousands of hours of interrogations. Confessions, often the product of hours of grueling interrogations, cannot be neatly pigeon-holed into a half-hour time slot. Without tapes of these interrogations, confessions lose critical context. The interrogators, for example, often follow familiar scripts, sometimes appealing to a suspect's conscience ("do the decent thing" or "God will forgive you") or lying about evidence (falsely telling a suspect that his fingerprints were found at the crime scene). Sometimes police interrogators employ illegal tactics, such as promising leniency. In the worst cases, they use psychological and even physical torture to get confessions.
Police officers sometimes suggest to suspects less incriminating or exculpatory motives for committing the crime (such as the crime was merely an accident, an innocent mistake or an act of self-defense) and then feed them the details of the crime. If the interrogator chooses only to tape the suspect's confession, it is difficult to know whether the suspect is giving details of the crime that only the true perpetrator would know or just rehashing details supplied to him by police officers.
