Unfair by Adam Benforado Read Free Book Online Page B

long in the dark, it felt as if someonehad lit a lantern inside his body. He would walk out of that prison. He would be reborn. There was life to live.
    It took four more years to reach that third trial, but the moment finally came—the opportunity for science to redeem the failures of the past and save this condemned man.With the lab test offering exoneration and with no physical evidence linking Juan to the crime, the outcome seemed like a foregone conclusion.
    But something curious happened once proceedings got under way.The prosecution didn’t back away; it doubled down, advancing two explanations for the autopsy evidence: either the DNA sample had been contaminated or Holly had had sex with someone else before she was raped and killed by Juan.
    The problem for the prosecution was that there was nothing to suggest that the swab had been compromised, and the experts were in agreement that the semen had been deposited shortly before the victim was killed.Semen tends to drain into underwear, but no sperm was found on Holly’s clothes.That meant that the prosecution had to convince the jury that an eleven-year-old girl had sex with a mystery man directly before being violently attacked by Juan Rivera, who managed to leave the mystery man’s semen completely intact in the girl’s body and to provide no trace of ever having touched her himself, let alone of having been inside the apartment where she was found.The account seemed implausible, to say the least.
    Once more, twelve jurors retired to the deliberation room to ponder the tragedy at 442 Hickory Street.When they returned, they were met with the gaze of Holly’s twin sister, Heather, and Juan’s brother, Miguel.Juan, on the threshold of exoneration, was silent and ready.
    Guilty.
    It was a verdict that Juan’s lawyers described as “unfathomable,” but it had happened. Again.
    The defense had provided many facts to raise a reasonable doubt in the eyes of the jury.It wasn’t just that none of the copiousforensic evidence at the crime scene—blood, fingerprints, hair, and semen—matched Juan.There were also phone records and data from an electronic leg monitor Juan was wearing (a condition of bail for an earlier charge of stealing a car stereo) corroborating his parents’ claim that he had been home the night of the murder, talking to his mother in Puerto Rico.Yet, despite Juan’s alibi and the lack of either eyewitness testimony or physical proof, the prosecution got the conviction it sought because of evidence so damning that it made everything else in the trial seem superfluous: a signed three-page confession.
    As Holly’s sister later put it, “Why would you confess? If I’m getting charged with murder, I am not going to fess to something I did not do and then explain the whole night and how I did it and why I did it and everything like that if I didn’t do it.” Innocent people just don’t confess.Indeed, the esteemed father of evidence law, John Henry Wigmore, once declared that false confessions were “scarcely conceivable.”The potency of this assumption overpowers doubt, even when there is exonerating evidence or indications of police coercion.
    We expect people to be consistent; we assume that someone who has signed a confession believes what it says.In a famous study documenting this phenomenon, researchers asked people to evaluate essays written about Fidel Castro.Despite being told that the authors of the essays had been assigned their respective positions, for or against, participants disproportionately believed that the writers of the pro-Castro essays actually held pro-Castro views. They placed too much faith in outward conduct as a window on inner belief and underestimated the power of the situation to shape behavior. The expectation was that—assignment or no assignment—a person’s views on Castro would remain constant:
semper fidelis
.
    Another reason we find it hard to accept that some confessions are false is that we assume