A flaw in Thailand’s justice

By Joel Brinkley - McClatchy-Tribune News

Published 12:00 am PDT Monday, September 22, 2008

BANGKOK, Thailand — During many years as a newspaper journalist, now and then I was called upon to cover what police reporters call the "perp walk." A suspect, "the perpetrator," is pulled out of his cell at police headquarters and taken outside to a waiting car that will take him to the courthouse for his arraignment.

Photographers are waiting to shoot photos as the suspect walks out the back door. You've certainly seen these pictures. Often a suspect will pull his coat over his head or simply look down at the street so his face will not emblazon the front page of the local paper the next morning.

To me it has always seemed a peculiar American ritual — until I saw the equivalent rite here in Thailand, where peculiar is an understatement. A better word might be perverse.

Once suspects here are arrested for crimes, a surprisingly high percentage of them are said to have confessed. Almost immediately, they are led to the scene of the crime and told to re-enact it.

Newspapers and television stations are invited to cover the event.

Dozens of other people flock to the scene. Often a confessed murderer is photographed plunging a fake knife into the heart of a stand-in victim, and cameras record the act as television boom microphones hang just over his head. These photos have long been staples of newspapers and television newscasts across Thailand.

Over the summer, the Pattaya People newspaper published a photo of two young men, Tamarat Leungsiri and Sirawat Sateung, who were said to have confessed to killing an 18-year-old acquaintance. The photo showed one of them pretending to stab a man lying on the ground, and the newspaper's story left little doubt about the defendants' guilt.

"Two confessed murderers were taken to the scene of their crime on the afternoon of the 6th of July to re-enact their terrible deed," it wrote.

I asked Visut Vanichbut, a major general in the Thai police, why the police insist on these re-enactments.

"We have to let the public know that this criminal has violated the law, and we are serious about enforcement," he said.

What is wrong with this? The "perpetrator" has confessed, right? I asked Visut if it had ever happened that a suspect who had confessed to a crime turned out to be innocent.

"Not in Thailand," he insisted with clench-jawed certainty.

"They know the punishment is very serious." In other countries, however, confessions are notoriously unreliable. An organization called the Innocence Project in the United States uses DNA evidence to find innocent people who have been convicted of crimes. And after 16 years of research, the project has come up with a startling conclusion: DNA evidence shows that 25 percent of the people who confess or plead guilty to a crime are irrefutably innocent.

The organization offers several explanations for this, among them: The suspects were coerced, drunk, mentally impaired, ignorant of the law, afraid of the police or simply exhausted after hours of aggressive interrogation.

Of course, it's irresponsible to apply American standards of justice to another country. The American system has many glaring shortcomings of its own. But I have always found it useful to consider how other nations handle legal affairs to put what we do in context.

Thailand's legal system has glaring shortcomings, too. For one thing, Thai police are thoroughly corrupt. The Asian Human Rights Commission recently noted that some criminal cases "have been deliberately concocted against innocent people in exchange for cash or favors." The commission regularly finds evidence of "torture to obtain a confession," as the group puts it. And it notes that police generally "are only interested in getting a confession, not in proper investigation." That certainly makes their jobs easier.

I am not here to vouch for the views of this human rights group. But from many months of working here over the years, I do know firsthand that corruption is commonplace among Thai police. So does Gen. Visut. He told me so. Given that, how can he be so certain that an innocent man has never confessed? How can a democratic nation — and Thailand is a true, if flawed, democracy — allow the police to parade these suspects before the public for a media show when it is obvious that a certain percentage of them are innocent? Once they are on the TV news, firing a pistol at a pretend victim, the public will forever regard them as guilty — no matter what may actually happen after that.

About the writer:

Joel Brinkley is a former Pulitzer Prize-winning foreign correspondent for The New York Times and now a professor of journalism at Stanford University.

They do it in the Philippines as well.

I've seen suspects beaten to a pulp by angry relatives on the evening news after police took them back to reenact the scene then stood back to watch the fun. .

Certainly beats the Brady Bunch for prime time viewing.

I know a man who "confessed" to murder, recanted later and said that the confession was made under serious duress. After two years of incarceration waiting for his appeal to be heard, during which time his father died of cancer (he was not allowed out to see him or to go to the funeral), the charges were finally dropped.

A minor point, perhaps, but I take issue with Brinkley's statement that 'after 16 years of research, the project has come up with a startling conclusion: DNA evidence shows that 25 percent of the people who confess or plead guilty to a crime are irrefutably innocent'. For a start, this could only be 25% of people who have approached the project to take on their cases; 'The Innocence Project makes clear to potential clients that, in addition to proving innocence, DNA testing may also reaffirm guilt and the results of all testing would become a matter of public record.' (http://www.innocenceproject.org/Content/105.php). Secondly, the sample set seems to be rather small, so there would be a large margin of error (broad confidence coefficient). I thought the claim seemed startling, and a mere five minutes of research proved the claim to be wanting in validity. Accordingly, the reliability of the entire article is impugned.

I don't think that it invalidates the entire article...... it should have been phrased as 25% of the people tested...... other than that the article is sound.

I would certainly not like to get on the wrong side of the police here.