This week, in Sarah Koenig’s quest to get to the bottom of
the murder of Hae Min Lee, Koenig turned to an expert on criminal
investigations: Jim Trainum. A former Washington D.C. police detective, Trainum
has some first-hand experience in the interrogation room, and can speak to
tactics that Detectives Ritz and MacGillivary employ when they question Jay,
the key witness in the case against Adnan Syed. And these tactics don’t always
seem to be the most ethical. After all, Trainum says that in an investigation,
a detective’s goal is not getting to the truth; the goal is to build a strong
case. I found this particularly disturbing.
I wanted to find some context around Trainum’s claim that
getting to the truth is not the ultimate goal of any given investigation. It
turns out that Serial is not
Trainum’s first encounter with podcast programming. In 2013, he appeared on a This American Life episode focused on
“Confessions.” There, he discussed his experience as a police detective, and
the ease with which he could extract a false confession from a witness or a
suspect. And this type of confession manipulation landed Trainum in a tricky
spot when he realized that he and his fellow investigators had pinned a crime
on an innocent woman. It took ten years for Trainum and his colleagues to right
their investigative mistake. I found Trainum’s take on the investigation
process fascinating, especially as I have been on the fence about the
genuineness of the interrogations we hear about in Serial. I came across an article on USA Today’s website detailing
the release of the man Trainum and his colleagues coerced into a wrongful
confession. The article includes a quote from Trainum on the investigation
process I found interesting as it could illuminate the reason behind Ritz and
MacGillivary’s apparent loyalty to Jay’s side of the story:
"It's like you're on this speeding train going down the
track and it's extremely difficult to get that train to stop," Trainum
says. "While you're on that train, you might be getting other leads coming
in, other clues about the killer, but because we're so fixated on the suspect,
often times those clues go undocumented."
This quote makes me think that the story the detectives are extracting
from Jay is not necessarily the whole truth. That is not to say that I think
Jay’s whole testimony is untruthful. I don’t know about that. But, I think
there is something more to this case than the detectives are letting on.
Here is the link to the USA Today article: http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/nation/story/2011-12-26/false-confessions-interrogation/52236364/1
I am very intrigued by how through mentioning Jim Trainum’s potentially unethical interrogation tactics, we understand that he thinks that the detective’s goal is not getting to the truth, but to build a strong case. I agree that this is particularly disturbing, especially when you consider there’s so much potential for the case to be built around false evidence or lies. I think it’s interesting how Trainum reveals how easy it is for him to extract a false confession from a witness or suspect. I agree with you on the note that maybe Jay is not telling the whole truth, yet I don’t know whether to believe Jay fully or not, still. His relevance to the case troubles me, for though he may seem to be a reliable witness, many of his inconsistencies in story and the way in which the police let his changing of story slip by convince me that maybe, just maybe, Jay might be a criminal informant.
ReplyDeleteThough this wasn’t really discussed in this episode, after reading several theories about who may have killed Hae, I wanted to explore the implications of “snitching” in the police world, and how snitches such as criminal informants affect a case. This is a really interesting article I found from the Golden Gate University Law Review Journal called “Beyond Unreliable: How Snitches Contribute to Wrongful Convictions.”
http://digitalcommons.law.ggu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1942&context=ggulrev
In this article, Alexandra Natapoff explains that she considers “snitches” criminals who provide information in exchange for “lenience for their own crimes or other benefits.” According to Northwestern University Law School’s Center on Wrongful Convictions, as this article details, “45.9 percent of documented wrongful capital convictions have been traced to false informant testimony, making ‘snitches the leading cause of wrongful convictions in U.S. capital cases’” (107). In this sense, we understand that though the police have grown to rely heavily on the testimonies of their criminal informants or “snitches,” what is dangerous about depending so much on these informants is that they do not always tell the truth, and the police hardly go about challenging the informant’s word. As a result, police “often lack the objectivity and the information that would permit them to discern when informants are lying” (108). Unfortunately, “this gives rise to a disturbing marriage of convenience: both snitches and the government benefit from inculpatory information while neither has a strong incentive to challenge it” (108). So in the end, informant’s lies can lead innocent people into getting framed or wrongfully convicted for the crimes of another. The article goes on to discuss “snitches” vs. expert witnesses, and reliability hearings, and cross examination as an insufficient guarantee of reliability in some senses.
We can relate a lot of this to what you mentioned about how Trainum and his fellow investigators pinned a crime on an innocent woman, due to a witness’ false confession. Could this scenario be the same with the police and Jay? Was he a criminal informant whom the police trusted enough to not question his evidence or statements?