If you’ve ever wondered how an innocent person could confess to a crime, have I got a movie for you. A terrific April for documentaries continues with Grover Babcock and Blue Hadaegh’s “Scenes of a Crime,” a case study in police coercion of false confession through the use of interrogation techniques that, while legally sanctioned, empirically produce false ...positives and undermine the truth-seeking process. Of course, the notion that cops and prosecutors are motivated primarily by a desire for justice and engage in objective fact-finding is a relic of a bygone, rose-colored worldview. Today’s law enforcers are measured by outcomes, arrests, convictions. Guilt and innocence are considered tangentially, if at all.
