Saul Kassin
speaker
97 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Mar 2025
last heard Mar 2025
Saul Kassin’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
And so they sent me two big Xerox-type boxes. And I spent the next couple of weeks probably doing terrible teaching at Williams because I was completely distracted by this case. And when I was done, I was horrified. There was no evidence of their guilt. The confessions were contradictory.
Yes.
Yes. And I think that's what everyone was thinking. I didn't know this in 1989, but I learned in 2002. that detectives showed Corey Wise pictures of the victim. So he was able to describe her. He was taken to the crime scene. He gave a vivid description of the crime scene. They all did. Turns out two of them were taken to the crime scene. Now, that's contaminating their memories.
Now, this is not their statement. You've motivated and incentivized them because they think it's in their best interest to cooperate, and you've spoon-fed them information to provide a compelling, accurate confession. But you're right. Nobody expected a full alignment of all the facts.
And that's why I think the judges and juries, they were convicted at two different trials, were able to look past those discrepancies.
There were several semen samples taken, sent to the FBI lab. That summer, the results came back. First, all of those samples taken traced back to one person. They all match each other. That person was not one of those five confessors. The judge knew it. The juries knew it. We have two juries in which they are told that they confessed on the one hand, but they're excluded by the DNA on the other.
And as one of the jurors said in an interview years later, they had a confession, and if there's a confession, what else do you need to know?
In December of 2002, their convictions were overturned. The DA's office filed a motion to overturn the convictions, and the judge agreed with that motion, and so their convictions were overturned.
Well, we know what the kids say happened. The kids were in the interrogation rooms for a range of 14 to 30 hours. The kids say they were threatened, that promises were made. They believed that by minimizing their involvement, each one I mentioned, nobody confessed to the rape. Each one said I played a subsidiary minor role. Each one, upon confession, was arrested and each one was surprised.
They thought they were going home. It means they were led to believe that we think the role you played is no big deal, so cooperate with us and everything will be okay. And hence, they were surprised that they were put under arrest. I don't know what happened. I know that they claimed they felt physically threatened. They claimed threats and promises were made. Detectives deny it.
I have no idea what happened behind the scenes, but I do know that their confessions were false and that each one minimized their role in a way that would make some sense. That's not unique to the Jogger case. You see it all over the place.
Yes. It was difficult to me. I didn't know what I was seeing the first time I saw it. There was a case in the 1970s in which a 17-year-old boy named Peter Riley in Connecticut came home and found his mother in a pool of blood having been beaten to death. and stabbed. And Riley's confession was fascinating because, first of all, he adamantly denied having anything to do with this.
He had no history, no background, no conflict with his mother. He wasn't a violent person. But he confessed. And why did he confess? Because after hours and hours and hours of interrogation, the detective offered him a polygraph exam, a lie detector test. Peter, you say you didn't do this. We think otherwise. We have evidence. Are you willing to take a lie detector test?
Trusting in the lie detector test and trusting in his own innocence, Peter said, yes, I would. At which point they administered a test and lied about the results. They said, Peter, you failed the test. And he said, that's not possible. And they said, well, it is possible. You failed the test. It shows deception.
And sometimes the test tells us things about you or a person that even they don't know about themselves. So it looks like you killed your mother, even if you don't remember it. Now, Peter's in this quandary.
On the one hand, they're claiming to have unimpeachable medical, sometimes the polygraph is referred to as medical evidence, sometimes it's referred to as scientific evidence, but it's objective. And it can tell us things about you and your behavior that even you don't recall. So Peter, on the one hand, has this unimpeachable evidence presented to him. Now he's 17.
And God knows what his mental and emotional state is at this time. His mother is his only surviving relative. And he grows up trusting police. And like most Americans, doesn't know that they're allowed to lie about evidence. So Peter is trying to reconcile, on the one hand, they say that I failed the lie detector test. And on the other hand, I don't remember it that way.
And they presented him with some options. You know, sometimes that happens. People block unpleasant memories or people lose consciousness. And they gave him a way to bridge this gap between their unimpeachable evidence and his lack of memory. And so they convinced him that he must have done it. He transitions from this state of denial to, well, it looks like I did it.
When you hear these cases, often the first utterances are things like, I must have done it. It looks like I did it. It appears that I did it. They're not saying, oh yeah, now I remember. They're concluding, they're inferring that they must have done it because after all, you have this evidence.
And then he transitions from that tentative, hypothetical language of inference into a full-blown, oh my God, I killed my mother. I pulled out a knife and I stabbed her. And that was his confession. He was immediately arrested and he was convicted.
Showing 41–60 of 97 · page 3 of 5
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