0:00 In over one quarter of all cases where DNA has proven someone innocent… that person had already confessed to the crime.0:09 Last week, we explored how memory and error can imprison the innocent.0:15 But sometimes, the prison is built not with a faulty memory, but with the person's OWN words, twisted into a weapon against them.0:25 The call came in to Suffolk County police on September seventh, 1988.0:31 At seventeen years old, Marty Tankleff woke up to find his father, Seymour, dead in the study.0:39 His mother, Arlene, was unconscious and bleeding nearby.0:43 She would die weeks later.0:45 The scene was brutal, a frenzy of violence.0:49 But the detectives who arrived didn't focus on the bloody room.0:54 They focused on the son who made the call.0:57 They took him to the station.1:00 No lawyer.1:00 No parent.1:01 Just Marty, and the detectives, and the four walls of the interrogation room.1:07 For hours, he told them what he knew, which was nothing.1:12 Then, a detective named James McCready played his card.1:16 He told Marty that his father, Seymour, had woken up briefly at the hospital.1:23 And in that moment of consciousness, he had named his own son as his attacker.1:29 It was a complete fabrication.1:31 A tactic.1:32 A permissible lie in the pursuit of a confession.1:36 Marty’s world collapsed.1:38 He was exhausted, in shock, and now, he was being told his own dying father had condemned him.1:46 The detective suggested he just...1:48 speculate.1:49 How could it have happened?1:51 So he did.1:52 He offered a confused, hypothetical scenario.1:56 That was enough.1:57 He recanted the moment he was out of that room.2:01 But the story was already written.2:04 That unsigned, immediately retracted confession became the centerpiece of the state’s case.2:11 At trial, it was everything.2:13 He was convicted and sentenced to fifty years to life.2:18 And for years, that was the end of the story.2:21 We watched seventeen years pass from behind the glass of a visitor’s room.2:28 We saw appeals filed and denied.2:30 We saw a family ripped apart, some believing the confession, others spending their life savings to prove it was a lie.2:40 The official narrative held fast.2:42 But the facts underneath...2:45 they never settled.2:46 Things didn't add up.2:48 The business partner who owed Seymour half a million dollars, the one who faked his own suicide and fled to California days after the murders...2:59 he was never truly a suspect.3:02 We held onto that.3:03 We knew the truth was out there, waiting for a crack in the wall.3:09 The crack appeared in 2001.3:11 An inmate in a county jail began talking.3:14 He said another man, Joseph Guarascio, had bragged about being at the Tankleff house that night.3:22 He wasn’t alone.3:23 He was with two accomplices, sent to collect a debt on behalf of Seymour Tankleff’s business partner.3:31 Suddenly, there was a new story.3:34 A story that fit the evidence far better than the coerced confession of a traumatized teenager.3:42 It still took six more years of fighting, of private investigators tracking down leads the police had ignored.3:51 But in 2007, an appellate court looked at the mountain of new evidence and vacated the conviction.3:59 The District Attorney’s office declined to retry him.4:03 After six thousand, four hundred and seventy-eight days in prison, Marty Tankleff walked free.4:10 The confession was finally seen for what it was: a ghost, conjured in a small room under unbearable pressure.4:19 Marty went on to graduate from law school.4:23 Today, he is an attorney, and he spends his days fighting for others who are trapped in the same nightmare he endured.4:32 It is a story not of guilt, but of why an innocent person confesses.4:38 Interrogation techniques are designed to create a sense of hopelessness.4:44 They introduce false evidence.4:46 They suggest that confessing is the only path to escape.4:51 For a juvenile, or someone simply exhausted after hours of questioning, the pressure to make it stop becomes overwhelming.5:01 They come to believe that the short-term relief of ending the interrogation is worth the risk of a lie they think they can correct later.5:12 But a confession is a dye that stains every other piece of evidence.5:17 Once a jury hears it, it becomes almost impossible for them to see the truth.5:23 The system believes it can tell truth from lies.5:27 But in the quiet of an interrogation room, the line between them can be erased.5:34 And an innocent person can be made to build their own cage.
