What True-Crime Podcasts Have Taught Us About Our Criminal Justice System

 The other day, I discovered a true-crime podcast about true-crime podcasts. I think that means that podcasting may have jumped the shark.

Although there are some fabulous true-crime podcasts, I am always afraid that podcasting will become the Discovery's ID Channel or HLN's Forensic Files of the audio world.  

Podcasting has so much more to offer than true-crime. Everything from factual science like Science Vs to traditional entertainment like Wait Wait...Don't Tell Me! to shows for underrepresented voices like Democracy-ish. 

Don't get me wrong here. I do love the true-crime genre. My personal favorites are Criminal, Killer Queens, and The Murder Sheet. My least favorite is Crime Junkie because of its derivative proclivities. 

Listeners do love these true-crime podcasts. Last week, the Dateline NBC podcast began its subscription service on Apple podcasts and has exceeded all expectations. 

Despite my constant whining about the exploding number of true-crime podcasts (they procreate faster than fruit flies), true-crime podcasts have identified and highlighted crucial weaknesses and a few strengths in our justice system.

What can we learn from all these true-crime podcasts?  Key themes resonate in these shows repeatedly.

The police arrest, and prosecutors convict, a disturbing number of innocent people.

Founded in 1992 by Barry C. Scheck and Peter J. Neufeld at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law at Yeshiva University, the Innocence Project works to free the innocent, prevent wrongful convictions, and create fair, compassionate, and equitable systems of justice for everyone. The Innocence Project is inundated with requests from incarcerated people and their families. 

 

Innocent people being arrested by the police and then prosecuted despite their innocence is a key theme of many true-crime podcasts. 

Depending on your source, between three and six percent of people currently in jail are innocent. That's fertile ground for true-crime podcasts. Especially since more than 2,800 people have been exonerated of crimes that they were imprisoned for in the last 30 years. That number is apparently the floating ice that hides the iceberg.

 

Even more disturbing is that four of every 100 people sentenced to death are innocent, but only half that number are eventually exonerated. 

 

The six primary reasons for wrongful arrest and conviction are mistaken witness or eyewitness identification, false confession, false or misleading forensic evidence, or its misapplication, perjury or false accusation, informants, official and government misconduct, and inadequate legal defense. 

 

Innocent people being convicted of a crime is the second most popular theme of true-crime podcasts, after unsolved cases.

Podcasts like Serial and other true-crime shows continue to demonstrate that police and prosecutors arrest and convict people who are innocent. 

Why are innocent people arrested and convicted? See below.

Racism is a primary reason that people are wrongly accused and convicted.

No one knows how many innocent blacks were arrested and convicted for crimes they did not commit in the nearly 100 years of Jim Crow. Nowhere is racism more explicit than the 2019 film Just Mercy starring Michael B. Jordan as young defense attorney Bryan Stevenson who represents poor people on death row in the South. Featured is his work with Walter McMillian, a black man who had been wrongfully convicted of the murder of a young woman.

True-crime podcasts to their credit often highlight this major flaw in the justice system. For example, although blacks make up about 13 percent of the U.S. population, 49 percent of wrongful conviction exonerations involve black defendants.

 

 The justice system also has a class prejudice. 

In many cases, innocent people in jail are there because of inadequate or negligent legal counsel. 

In effect, there don't have money to hire a lawyer or hire a good one. Not having a lawyer in our justice system typically leads to a plea deal (despite innocence) and then we're back to why so many innocent people are in prison.

For example, until April 2022, Maine was the only state that had no public defenders. Thanks to an exhaustive investigation by ProPublica, state lawmakers were finally pressured to secure money to hire Maine’s first public defenders. Now it will have five -- for the entire state. In January 2022, the Public Defenseless podcast with Hunter Parnell also exposed this serious legal flaw.

Rich people make out much better than people with little access to expensive and time-consuming legal care. There are multiple true-crime podcasts about real-estate heir and serial killer Robert Durst. Podcasts such Jury Duty and The Jinx followed his trial and ultimate life-sentence conviction in 2021.  Durst died in prison earlier this year.

 

Durst's case was ultimately satisfying because, for a change, a rich person didn't get away with a crime. In Durst's case, heinous, violent crimes.

 

 True-crime podcasts can and will run their own investigations. Sometimes, their podcast even leads to identifying the perpetrator and to a conviction. 

 

For example, the subject of Australian true-crime podcast, The Teachers Pet, Chris Dawson has recently been found guilty in the Australian Supreme Court of murdering his first wife, who vanished more than four decades ago. Hedley Thomas, an Australian journalist, investigated the case in a successful 14-episode podcast containing what he claimed was new evidence. The podcast was released in 2018 at the same time as the local police had started re-investigating Lynette Dawson’s disappearance.

 Forensics is a double-edged sword: It helps to identify the guilty person with DNA, but also is not as scientifically bulletproof as crime TV shows depict

For instance, in the episode #147 of the Junk Science podcast, host Josh Dubin covered the pseudo-science of blood spatter pattern evidence. In episode 11 of the Adam Ruins Everything podcast, host Adam Conover discussed outdated forensic techniques such as bite mark analysis, with Chris Fabricant, Director of Strategic Litigation at the Innocence Project. 

In the Stuff To Blow Your Mind iHeart podcast, the episode was titled, "What if bad science put you in prison for a crime you didn't commit" 

In the Heartland Daily podcast, economist Roger Koppl discussed the inherent problem of the government’s monopoly on crime labs, pointing to institutional incentives for experts in a variety of fields. From fingerprint analysis to DNA matching, Koppl estimated that 20,000 individuals are wrongly convicted each year in the United States because of faulty forensic evidence.

Then we have true-crime podcasts that report how forensics science, especially DNA genealogy and public databases, have caught murderers who otherwise never be caught and convicted.

 The DNA:ID podcast, for example, looks at crimes solved by genetic genealogy, and examine the connection - if any - between the victim and the killer, and why the crime occurred. 

Numerous true-crime podcasts covered how the Green River Killer and Golden State Killer were finally caught with DNA evidence.  

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True-crime podcasts can -- and do -- offer us more of a Webb telescope view of our justice system than we've ever had before. Despite podcast networks cooking up as many true-crime podcasts as we can humanly stand, true-crime podcasts often provide several valuable services.

First, these podcasts continue to focus on the unacceptable number of innocent people serving sentences for crimes they did not commit.

Second, these podcasts remind us -- and we need the reminder -- that racism infects the core of our justice system, from police to prosecutors to penitentiaries.  

Third, these podcasts highlight how rich, powerful people (those traits tend to go together) can "game" the justice system due to money, influence, and authority.

Fourth, we have to be cautious about swooning over fictional and documentary-style forensics TV shows because they can -- and do -- position forensics as somehow beyond reproach and incontrovertible evidence. DNA evidence can be subject to secondary transfer, where DNA from the accused can be transferred to someone else who carried it to the scene. Further, lab mistakes with DNA have been made and exposed by true-crime podcasts. 

Unlike some TV "police" reality shows that overdramatize routine police work and reinforce racial and class stereotypes, true-crime podcasts have, for the most part, presented their audience a more balanced view of the criminal justice system.

In 2019, Dan Taberski and the team behind Missing Richard Simmons podcast investigated COPS — the longest running reality show in TV history — and its cultural impact on policing in America with his Running From COPS podcast. It was not a flattering portrait of the TV show, with Taberski revealing how show producers orchestrated arrests and often overruled law enforcement.

So we end this article, with a question.

Why do listeners digest so many true-crime podcasts like competitive eaters ram down hot dogs at an eating contest?

Earlier this year, Chistine Persaud of Digital Trends explained it this way:  "The answer leans to part escapism, part morbid curiosity. Ironically, while true crime is rooted in fact, watching these terrible tales about events that took place decades or even just a few years ago offers a strange sense of satisfaction that maybe things are and will be OK, because, well, they could be worse."

 

Photo Credit: Kat Wilcox