This
summer TNT will air the final episodes of its police procedural The Closer, and the series will ease
into perpetual syndication. Linda and I have been faithful viewers from the
beginning, and I’ve enjoyed it, though less for the stories than for the
ensemble of performers who make up a congenial major-crimes unit.
If
you’ve never seen it, The Closer features Kyra Sedgwick as Brenda Johnson, head
of the aforementioned unit, who is a wizard at extracting confessions in order
to close a case with an arrest. In more than one episode, she has said, as she
goes in to break down an unwary perp, “There’s nothing like a confession.”
In
crime fiction, that’s absolutely true, and the tradition goes back nearly a
century, to the early British murder mysteries where the detective calls all the
suspects together, explains how the crime was committed, and gets the guilty
party to confess — or at any rate, to kill himself, attempt to escape, or
otherwise behave guiltily.
Not
so much in real life, however. A couple of months ago The New York Times had a
lengthy article on convictions that had been overturned or called into doubt by
subsequent DNA evidence, and well into it, the reader came across the statistic
that in nearly one out of five such cases handled by the Innocence Project, the
innocent person had confessed to a crime he didn’t commit.
Many
of the innocent parties were not exactly what you would call good citizens.
They had a low social status and a history of (usually nonviolent) crime that
called police attention to them in the first place. Once pulled in, past
memories of police encounters made them behave suspiciously, and led police to
try to break down their protestations of innocence.
One such suspect said he confessed
to get a grueling interrogation over with, figuring the police would quickly
realize he wasn’t the killer and let him go. Instead, confession in hand, they
wrapped up the investigation and didn’t look into anything else that might
muddy their case. The prosecutor didn’t bother to run DNA tests, and an
incompetent defense attorney didn’t insist on them. Believing in the fairness
and competence of law enforcement cost the man years in prison and very nearly
his life.
Stories like this are more common
than we’d like to believe, yet we almost never see them on TV or in the movies.
We’re much more likely to see a film or show about a guilty creep set free by a
bleeding-heart judge over a “technicality.” That certainly happens, but not to
the degree it’s depicted in popular entertainment.
Actually, the whole question of how
TV and movies warp our understanding of crime and affect social policy is probably
something you don’t want to think about if you have a queasy stomach. I love
crime shows as much as the next guy, but they would leave you thinking that
this country is full of cunning, vicious psychopaths preying on innocent people
whose cars break down or who otherwise happen to get in their way.
The reality is that today’s crime
rates are low by any long-term standard of measurement and that if you’re the
victim of a violent crime, it’s probably at the hands of someone you know. The
additional reality is that hardly any criminals are shrewd and calculating. As
one of our local judges, a former prosecutor, likes to say, “If they weren’t
dumb, we wouldn’t catch ‘em.” If
they weren’t dumb, they wouldn’t confess, either, so it would be a grave
mistake to take such a confession as the last word.
