Innocent, But Behind Bars
Another man confessed to murder. Why is this retarded man in prison?
Seeking to avoid such unpleasantness, the mildly retarded learn quickly how to hide their limitations. They search for protectors like teachers and parents; they learn to please authority figures, and they bluff their way through situations they don't understand, says James Ellis. These survival techniques had served Wilson well--but they would be precisely the wrong skills to rely upon once he got caught up in the criminal justice system.
Interrogation. Wilson says he thought he was being asked to help solve the murder of a beloved family friend when--on April 18, 1986, five days after the killing--police said they wanted to question him. He signed a waiver of his Miranda rights, never thinking to ask for an attorney. Rights, as he later explained to a court-appointed psychologist, mean "right from wrong. I'd rather do right." Since he hadn't done anything wrong, Wilson had no fear. Early in his interrogation, police asked whether he would admit it if he had done "something real bad." "Yes," Wilson replied, childlike--"because that's what your job is here for. You help people, and you put them behind bars if they done something."
Wilson's trust was misplaced. From 8:30 p.m. until 12:10 a.m., four officers from the police and sheriff's departments, playing a good-cop, bad-cop game, would bully the retarded 20-year-old with half-truths and threats. They told him they had eyewitnesses who placed him inside Martz's home, even though they presented none. They claimed to have enough evidence to send him to jail. Courts have allowed cops to play such games of deception. Career criminals, after all, do not freely admit their outrages. And, experts say, an innocent man will not admit to something he didn't do, absent a physical beating. There is one little-understood exception, says Denis Keyes, a College of Charleston special-education professor who evaluated Wilson: A retarded man like Wilson "will admit to almost anything to get out of a threatening situation."
It was Wilson's own words that made the strongest case for his guilt. But to experts in retardation, that same confession also makes the best case for his innocence. The frightened Wilson, says Keyes, realized he was in trouble and desperately sought to give police the answers they wanted to hear. At first, for almost two hours, Wilson insisted upon his innocence. He described Martz, who had let him leave his bicycle in her carport after teasing classmates had vandalized it, as "another grandma to me." But a confused Wilson broke down when police, in loud voices, got tough in the following exchange:
OFFICER: You are in serious trouble right now. Murder is what you're in. Murder. Premeditated, willful, malicious, burning up an old lady in her house, that's what you're in on, Wilson. Ain't no sense kidding around about it.
JOHNNY: I wasn't near that house, though.
OFFICER: I think it's despicable.
JOHNNY: I was with my mom all along. I was at [the grocery store] with her and I was ...
OFFICER: Yeah, you may need other statements from your mother and things like that. We got statements from other people here that say you were there and that you admitted doing it. We got a lot of people that saw you there that night. And they're going to put you right inside that house torching that lady, robbing her, tying her up. No one else knew she was tied up. We didn't even know it.
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