This call is from a correction facility, and it's subject to monitoring and recording contact even.
There.
And it hasn't been easy one hundred years. That's man, I'm a kid.
I didn't do anything, you know, and uh, you know that was ah, that was real painful, man, No, because my life was discarded as if you know, like I was a piece of trash or something, you know, a hundred years and I had dreams I wanted to do things I wouldn't committing crimes.
You know.
I was a very good young man.
That is what happens in so many cases. The cops have a hunch because they're so smart at the scene, they have a hunch, and once they act on that hunch, they sort of developed tunnel vision and they take off marching in the wrong direction. And that happens in so many of these wrongful convictions.
The opening to sell door and I walk downstairs, and I actually walked downstairs to be outside. It felt very strange to be, like I said, to be walking without no shackles on my feet. I thought it was a dream, but did again it wasn't a dream.
This is wrongful conviction. On March eighteenth, two thousand, and one. Jamie Pennich, an American exchange student in South Korea, was brutally murdered in her motel room after a night of partying with friends from the program. Her bloodied, nude body was found on the floor. She had been stomped to death, and her face was covered with a black fleece jacket. Kenzie Snyder, a nineteen year old exchange student from Marshall University in West Virginia, was one of the friends that
Jamie was with. About a half dozen exchange students had traveled from campus into the city, where they celebrated Saint Patrick's Day in a bar filled with locals and US soldiers. Korean police and army investigators were unable to solve this horrific crime. But a year later, in February two thousand and two, FBI agents contacted Kenzie out of the blue. She was back at school by now in West Virginia
and they wanted to talk alone. She met with three agents on three consecutive days for several hours, and the sessions were grueling. When it was done, Kenzie had confessed she murdered her friend. She said in the context of a drunken sexual encounter. Kenzie was promptly arrested, incarcerated in a local jail for ten months, and extradited to Korea
to stand trial. There, she spent another six months in jail until a panel of judges found her not guilty, but the prosecutor appealed to verdict, and months later an appeals court confirmed not guilty. In two thousand and six, five years after the crime, in response to yet another appeal, the Supreme Court of Korea once again affirmed not guilty. That was eighteen years ago. Today we know a whole
lot more than we did then about false confessions. Kenzie Snyder has been fully acquitted in court, yet her confession haunts her and us, and it leads some people still to question her actual innocence. Kensey Snyder Brown is here with us today to tell her story. Welcome back to Wrongful Conviction. Today is going to be a really interesting day here in the studio at Wrongful Conviction Headquarters because we have a number of firsts and one second, which
is that I'll go to the second first. We have the distinguished professor of psychology and world renowned expert on false confession, Saul Cassen, with us today so i'll welcome, pleasure to be here. We also have as a special treat a PhD student of his, Patty Sanchez, a PhD student of John Jay who amazingly is studying the effect of podcasts on jurors and on public opinion, right, and so I'm super excited to have Patty Sanchez here to learn from you. So Patty welcome, thank you very much.
And the star of our show who has an incredible story to tell, the first case we've certainly ever had from well even from the far East, but from Korea, but not the first false confession case by far, but the first case of this kind, and a really interesting person in her own right, Kenzy Snyder.
Welcome, Hello, thank you for having me.
So, Kenzie, this is a crazy, crazy case. I mean, they're all crazy, but yours is so nuts. And we're going back eighteen years now, two thousand and one. You were a nineteen year old girl in a far away land who was accused of brutally beating and stomping your friend, your roommate, to death. And you don't look like somebody who would stomp a fly to death. I mean, and don't judge a book by its cover.
But I mean, I'm not I'm not that kind of person.
Yeah, you seem like a pretty gentle soul to me. But let's go back to the beginning and Saul jump in whenever you want. I mean, obviously you've been involved in this case and so many others like it. Do you want to go back and give us a little of the history.
Well, you know, eighteen years ago, people really knew nothing about false confessions. But Kenzie's case caught my attention for a few reasons. One, she was a college student, as you say, you know, halfway round the world, and the case made no sense to come back to her. A year later, the case was unsolved, pressure was on the law enforcement and the FBI to solve it, and they came back to Kenzie to interrogate her. And when I read that she confessed, what caught my interest was not
just that she agreed to sign a confession. She actually came to believe in her own guilt. She had formed a memory that they enabled, that they facilitated using police interrogation tactics that are highly suggestive and at lawfel in the United States. And so my interest in this case started with the fact that there She was a college student twenty years old at the time that the FBI came and interrogated her free agents in a motel room in West Virginia, asking her to come alone, and for
three consecutive days they interrogated her. They lied to her about the evidence, they tinkered with her memory. And so what caught my attention was the fact that not only did she confess, she internalized the belief in that confession, which makes it very, very hard for people later to get past it.
So, Kenzy, you are an American person on home soil in West Virginia. Didn't get too much more American than that. I guess you could say, right, hardland stuff. But you were being interviewed on your home turf by people who you would have I think thought would have your back. Like was there even an extradition treaty in place? Like? How did this it happened?
The extradition treaty itself was brand new. It had just been I think formulated between the two countries in nineteen ninety eight. And so the crime itself happened in Korea, and all the suspects were Americans, and so the US and Koreans were trying to work together. It wasn't going very well, and that's why the FBI became a liaison.
And Jason Kenzie Snyder became the first American ever extradited to Korea wow.
Brand new extradition treaty in nineteen ninety eight. I am the first. I believe I am the only, but I don't know that for sure.
What a dubious distinction that is.
It's important to recognize there's a political context to this story. When the Korean police and army investigators failed to solve the crime. You know, there is a victim, and the victim was American. Her name was Jamie Pennach and she was from Pennsylvania, and her parents, as you can imagine I can't even begin to imagine, were incredibly upset and wanted this crime solved. Senator orl Inspector of Pennsylvania met with Korean authorities to pressure them to solve this crime.
Because they're you know, there is that Americans, and we're supposed to be in this together to solve the crime of another American victim.
And I don't know what they knew about the details of the case, but in my view, I think they believe they were acting on behalf of the family of the victim.
Yeah, and Kenzie, I mean, mess have been surreal first of all, like, who would ever think that, you know, your roommate would turn up as a corpse, right, and in such a brutal fashion. That alone is a real life nightmare. But then you're back in West Virginia, you know, I'm sure dealing with some trauma related to this, but moving on with your life, and along come these three
FBI agents out of nowhere. And I can't imagine at that age, when your brain's not even fully formed, right, you're still we know, the adolescent brain doesn't fully switch over, so to speak, right until you're around twenty five. What was going through your head?
I had come back to West Virginia and I was working with troubled youth and I was just trying to get my feet back underneath me again, because as you said, it is a traumatic experience. And then the FBA called me and asked if I could help them further the investigation. So I had gone to the hotel room that day to talk to them to help them, not realizing what they had planned.
So yeah, okay, that's a common thing too. And you know, Patty, I want you to jump in here whenever you want, because I know you're knowledgeable about this case and about this subject. That's sort of a common thing as well that we hear in these wrongful conviction cases is that when the interrogation, whether it's local police or FBI agents or whatever, often they don't tell you that you're a suspect, right, And this way you're more inclined to be open. And
as Kensey was, she wanted to be helpful. Anyone would want to be helpful, but that instinct can really lead you astray for.
Sure, especially when you're not even at a police station or anything like that.
So she was at a hotel.
Tell, so the lines are blurred even further as to the purpose of my even talking to these agents. You know, she was never even realized that she was a suspect until she had already been talking for at least a day. So, yeah, it is a problem that it's not always clear to a suspect that they're a suspect, and then they can invoke their right to a lawyer if you don't know you're being questioned as a suspect.
So, and some people listening would probably wonder whether that's legal for them to take her to a hotel or motel room. I mean it sounds at a minimum unusual, right, yes, And I don't know if it's more or less disorienting than being in one of those rooms that you always see on TV, right, the interrogation rooms, the window lists. You know, it just seems odd. I mean a motel room, there's a bed, there's a TV. It's like, it seems odd.
Yes, it feels odd, and all of the red flags that normally would go up. She's not technically in custody, so they don't have to mirandize her.
So I'm trying to picture this, Kenzie. You're interrogated for that first day for hours and hours I assume.
Right, it wasn't an interrogation. It was just questioning and getting together and seeing how your day was, how was your year, trying to see how I'd been sleeping, you know, if I'd had any repercussions from seeing her body, and just trying to be my friend.
It was your sense that they cared about you.
Yeah, they wanted to see how I was doing. It had been a year no one had checked up on me, and they were just checking up on me. At one point one of the investigators said that he thought of me like a sister.
And then the second day did it become clear to you that they had a different idea or motive or what I want to call it.
Part Way through the second day, the second day still started with friendly conversation. I brought ice cream because I thought they were my friends, and we had ice cream and talked about they'd asked me to do a homework assignment when I left the first day, writing out everything that I had gone through that night, the sequence of events, and then we were just reading that and having ice cream when we first got there in the hotel room on the second day.
That's sort of weirdly chilling to me, I mean, and chilling no pun intended, but even still, I mean, it feels a little sick, right, the idea of you bringing the ice cream and ice cream having you know, it's not something you do with people that you aren't well acquainted with in general. Right, it reminds us all of our youth, right on my trips at Baskin Robbins and whatnot. But that's beside the point. So, Saul, what do you think was really going on here? Like this was this
all scripted? Did they come in? This was scripted, So they had the idea before they went in the first day, we're going to gain her trust, right.
We're going to be friendly, we're going to establish rapport. We're going to gain her trust. That sounds like a very reasonable tactic for an interrogator to use, and it is. But now look at the nefarious side of establishing rapport in that way and gaining her trust as a predicate for what will happen on day two. So if you think of day one as just a friendly interview, she come back into day two, They ask her to return, and she does alone. She comes back day two with
ice cream. But what she doesn't realize is day two is not going to be an interview anymore. It's going to be an accusatory interrogation. And it's going to be the kind of interrogation where they accuse her with certainty, we know you did this. They're going to lie about evidence, they're going to point to apparent contradictions, and they're going to tinker with her memory. From a psychological perspective, here's the problem. They gained her trust and then they exploited
that trust. That they gained because when you have somebody's trust, you become a credible source. So when somebody you trust becomes credible and that person of credibility starts to lie about the evidence, you almost have no choice but to believe the lie and wonder, well, I don't know how I can reconcile that information you just gave me with
the fact that I don't remember things that way. So they gain their her trust on day one as a predicate for manipulating her on day two, And of course at some point on day two when it becomes clear that she's not a witness but a suspect, it would seem to me at some point the alarm bells would go off and you'd realize I need help.
In the second day, shortly after we got there, after we'd read the statement and had our ice cream, we'd gone over the statement a little bit, and they asked if they could show me something, and they showed me some like a little video of the hotel room and walked around in it so I could see it better. And then they had like a photo album of some of the crime scene photos, and when we're looking at them,
they were saying, I can't remember the phrasing. But at one point I asked, are you saying I did it? And they just kind of looked at me and shrugged. And at that point I knew that I needed to get out of the room. I asked them if I could leave, and I went out of the hotel room and I was only gone a few seconds and I came back in and I asked, said, do I need to get a lawyer? That's what I asked, And they said, if you get one, we can't say that you cooperated.
Wow. That's some reverse psychology there, too, isn't it. Right? That was a very well chosen phrase. I mean, you know, not in terms of justice, but in terms of if for what the goal was that they were trying to get, which was a confession, that would be the perfect thing to say, because now you're disoriented. You don't know. There's no right answer to that, right, I mean, and we
see this in false confessions, right. They sort of create this trap with words where there is no door that's open, and so you have to choose between bad options, like which kind of cancer do you want? Right? Right, I'm actually sitting there like I want to go back in time and pull you away and say don't go back there, right, like, don't go.
Well, I wish I could have. When I left the room, I understand that they were afraid that I wouldn't come back in because it would have been over for them. So I wish I wouldn't have gone back in the room. But when I did, you know, they said, if you get a lawyer, then we can't say that you cooperated.
Then we sat down and I was sitting in like the easy chair in the hotel room, so a comfortable seat, and I was tired from work the day before and then staying up late doing the homework assignment that they asked for and waking up early and to go to work before this. So I was sitting in the chair and they brought in an FBI agent who specialized in this field, and he said, we can do this two ways. We can either do it the hard way or the
easy way. And I said, well, let's do it the easy way, and that way you'll know I didn't do this and we can get on with our day. So he said, well, let's go through the events and emotionally talk about how we feel when we were, you know, at the bar and when you were drinking, and how did you feel when you're walking home with Jamie on
your arm? And then we got to the part where where she was undressed and to take a shower when I left her, and they were trying to get into how I felt about that, and I was like, well, I'm fine. I said, I was helping her out. Now I'm leaving. And they said, well, this isn't working. Let's do it the hard way. And so they would ask me these questions, like direct questions. So what was she wearing when you left her? And I said that she was in her brawn or underwear to take the shower,
and they said, no, that's not right. And I remember sitting there and I'm like, but she was like, I have memories of her. I have memories of what she was wearing when I left her.
She's me.
And they said, no, that's wrong. And I remember referencing back to the photos that they had shown me, and one of them was her pants with her underwear inside of them, and I was like, well, in my head, I said, well, obviously she did take them off at some point. So I said in the bathroom, because that's where the picture was taken, and her underwear was in her pants, so obviously it had happened, even though that's
not what she looked like when I left her. But it was like this wedge that opened up the floodgates of me doubting the memories that I had had and replacing them with this like multiple choice questioning that they were giving me. And if I gave them an answer that they didn't like, then they'd say, no, that didn't happen. They'd asked me a new question, they didn't like that answer. No,
that's not how it happened. And I kept kind of like winding my way through their questions, trying to make all I'd spent a week in the police station in Korea after this crime, seeing all of all the crime scene photos. I had seen the crime scene itself. We'd stayed in the hotel room, and so all these pieces had been put together for me to recreate what they wanted me to be saying, So.
Day three, you end up signing this false confession.
Well, the second day they had the confession, and so that night, I know it sounds crazy, I started like making it more mine, or making it more real, or making it more believable, eve into myself. And so on the third day we met back and they want led me to narrate that confession, and they wrote it down, still guided a little bit with their assistance, like we didn't you say something about I think there was a rag?
Didn't you say something about a rag? And so then I would fill that in and then I signed that confession and that's the one that they submit it for me to be arrested.
It sounds to me like there's elements here of Stockholm syndrome too.
Now, yes, they didn't just manipulate her compliance, they manipulated her memory. It's form of brainwashing.
And you know, I.
Think what happened here is the hardest type of false confession for anybody to understand. It's one thing to argue that I can coerce you by stress, by promises, by threats real or implied, to agree to confess to something you didn't do. It's a whole other game to argue that I cannot only get you to confess, I can get you to believe in your guilt. And yet those internalized false confessions throughout history, there are several high profile
cases like it. When I heard what was done to Kenzi and the way she internalized the belief in her guilt to a point where I read an account Kenzi where you said it was like, I have two memories. One I think is the real one in color with voices, and the other is kind of a black and white film. I think was how you put it, yeah.
Like still's being put together, whereas the other one, like you have the emotions attached to them, you know what, it felt like, it's more colorful. The other one had like clouds around it. As I said, still images being put together, like photos. The images that I had in my head from what they had worked their way through. The confession didn't feel like something. It still didn't feel
like something that I would ever do. But I didn't understand how could I confess to something that I didn't do.
I gotta ask when in between day one and day two, or day two and day three, or at what point did you call your dad or your mom or somebody that you trust and say, this is going crazy? What's I don't know what to do here? I need your help.
My father and I didn't have the best relationship, but he was in Florida and my mom was in Thailand. I didn't have anyone to call.
Well, so you're really all alone. I mean, that's it's a tough thing to face, no matter how much support you have. But that I think that obviously contributed to it, because I have to believe that if you had, especially you know, parents, you know, who were educated as you did, I would certainly hope that they would have intervened. But this is really the perfect storm.
And did they ask you not to talk to anyone between days or after?
On the third day after the confession, they asked me not to talk about it to anyone because they didn't even know if I could be if anything could happen with this. The FBI, they then had to go to Korea with a confession and say, hey, we have a confession. What do you want to do with this? Do you want this person to come back to Korea to go to trial to possibly face you know, time for a
crime that was committed on your soil. Come to find out, they didn't really even have permission to come and speak with me. It was still a Korean case and they shouldn't have been talking to me. So after the confession, that's why it took me about three weeks to get arrested because everything took so long, asking for permission, coming back and saying well, why were you even talking to her?
And so I wasn't arrested until February twenty eight, even though this interrogational questioning happened February sixth.
And in that time, you didn't talk to parents, friends, counselor lawyer.
It's amazing.
So all those external reality cues that will normally rerain you in she didn't have those.
No, my friends knew that I was upset. I mean after the confession, they gave me a bottle of water and a Snickers bar, and so I'm holding on this Snicker for hours, and I went to a friend's house and I was just sitting on their couch. But I couldn't tell them.
I mean, here, you are a young girl nineteen, right, overwhelmed with three FBI agents, right, And when you say FBI, I think all of us feel like WHOA Like FBI's still carries that connotation, even while we know they're flawed human beings like everyone else, but their FBI agents. We want to believe in the FBI. We want to believe that they are you know, good, Yeah, you know, like honorable,
higher standard everything else. Right, But we know from when Saul and I were talking, we were all talking about this before we came in the studio. We know from examples like the Madrid bombing and others that important to note that in the Madrid bombing case, and they ended up arresting a lawyer from Oregon and the FBI claimed they had their man and the fingerprints, manch and all this other stuff, and turnouty'd never been to Madrid and he was acquitted. They can be as dead wrong as anyone.
And there's tons of proof of this now. I mean, there's that study that came out of several years ago, right about the hair analysis. Yes, and do you want to talk about that for a second, because I think while we're on the subject of a FBI, let's get that off our chest. Yeah.
Well, you know, it's interesting when when police, including the FBI, form a judgment a presumption of guilt, it biases the
way they view other kinds of evidence. And in fact, there's a whole lot of research now that psychologists have done in the laboratory and in the field showing that when you bring forensic examiners in and insert a presumption of guilt or presumption of innocence into their analysis, whether that analysis is to make a handwriting judgment or a fingerprint judgment, or a judgment about tire tracks or bite marks. You can alter their judgment by giving them contextual information.
Do those two stimulus patterns match well? If the suspect confess they did? And so what happened in Kenzie's case, in some ways is even worse. There was no physical evidence that linked her. In fact, there was every indication that there were one or two men involved in this murder. Male voices were heard screaming at about the time of the murder, A male was seen running from the motel
with blood on his pants at about that time. There was every indication that this was a crime, and a man to go back to Kenzi a year later because they failed to solve the crime just made no sense. There was no physical evidence. When you look at the photos of the crime scene and how bloody it was, it's inconceivable that that could have happened and not a trace of that blood remained on her clothing. Inconceivable.
I was in the exact same clothes while I was in the police station in Korea, from the night before. It was in the same clothes, and I didn't have any blood on my pants, or I wouldn't have been able to leave Korea in the first place. Not to mention my shoes, I only had one pair of shoes with me in Korea, and I was wearing them the entire time. I was in the police station and with the Army CID, and they still let me leave the country. And only a year later did they come back and talk to me.
So there was no physical evidence, There were no witnesses. Kenzie had no background of violence. She was a class A student aspiring to be a teacher. There was absolutely no basis for suspicion when they called her out of the blue to talk to her in West Vine, Virginia.
And not only was there I mean we say there's absence of evidence, there actually was evidence in the opposite direction, right, I mean you could say that if there's no blood on your clothes and you're accused of beating someone to death, that should be dispositive, right, that should actually be like, Okay, well, let's rule her out and keep it moving and go find out who did this.
And just for the record, Korean police working with Army investigators because there were a lot of military guys in the bars that night and nearby that motel. So the army investigators became involved along with Korean police, and they did dismiss Kenzie as a suspect. It was over when she went home. It was one year later when the FBI became involved that suddenly everything changed.
Do you think that anyone, or all three or none of the FBI agents believed going into that room that she was guilty?
The human mind is an interesting thing. I'm not a mind reader. I don't know whether they were coldheartedly closing a case without any regard for the truth, or whether they had convinced themselves through their investigation that, in fact, she must be the culprit. I don't know the same mechanisms you described earlier that led the FBI to misidentify fingerprints in the Madrid bomber case led these agents to misidentify her as their suspect. And once a presumption of
guilt kicks in, what happens next is anybody's guests. They can make that reality their own.
And Kenzie, I know this is difficult for you to talk about even now, eighteen years later, and I mean, I can understand that as well as someone can understand it who hasn't been through it. But you were then arrested three weeks later and taken to jail.
Correct.
Here you are one day, you're working with troubled kids, making your way in the world, dealing with the normal stresses of a twenty year old. I'm sure you know doing good, right, more so than I was in your age. And the next thing you know, you're in jail for something you didn't do, but you don't even know if you did it anymore. I mean, what And you were there for ten months, right?
I was there for ten months, which allowed me to It was a long time, but it allowed me to kind of separate those memories from and get more confident in the fact that I know that the memories that I had going into that hotel room that day are the real memories. And I was able to separate a little bit from that confession, but it still wasn't complete. Even by the time of the extradition hearing, I still hadn't completely removed that understanding that the confession wasn't real.
And I think at my hearing, I think I said something along the lines of not by the memories that I hold true when they asked me if the confession was real, so I still had some cloud around it.
And so the.
Extradition hearing itself that happened actually in October of that year, was basically just asking was Kinsey Snyder in Korea at the time, so it's not even a guilt or innocence. Yes, I was in Korea. So then you are sent over to Korea itself and then you go through their legal proceedings. And it wasn't until I went back to Korea now after the extradition, and they wanted me to reenact some of the images. The Korean police wanted me to go
back to the hotel room and reenact the confession. And I walked into the hotel room, and at that point I knew one hundred percent that that confession was completely wrong, and I didn't do it because none of the still images that I had in my head matched that hotel room in the way that confession worked out didn't make any sense anymore. And so at that point I felt a lot more empowered, a lot more confident again, a
lot stronger. And the Korean police didn't like that so much because they were really hoping I would reconfess in Korea, and they got mad at me because you had a ten day period where you were talking to the police again and they were going over the evidence again and reinterviewing, and they really wanted a confession then, and they kept asking me, well, when did you do this? And I said I didn't. I did not kill Jamie. And at one point one of the police officers said, well, quld
say that? Say something different? Because I was as I said, I felt more in control again at that point, and I refused, even though they told me that if I confessed again at this point, it would be easier on me and I would probably only be looking at seven or eight years versus looking at the death penalty if I went to trial and I lost. But I didn't want to lose that control again. I have to look at myself every day in the mirror, and I couldn't lie again, and I knew that confession was a lie.
So were you in custody in South Korea? Yes, And that's got to be I.
Can't imagine it's not being in jail in the United States. We don't treat our inmates like their people, and so when I got to go to Korea while it was different, and that's something I would want to do again. There's still a sense of humanity in their prisons, in their jails.
Interesting, Yeah, that's well said. We don't treat our inmates like their people. We flip a switch. As soon as you're in the system. You're no longer human.
You're just a number now.
Yeah, And it's weird because if that's the right way to do it, then we have to ascribe to the theory that Americans are worse people than any other people in the world, right, that were among the most evil people in the world, and that we need to be treated like subhumans. But it starts before you're convicted.
Well, it even starts in the jails. If we believe that you're innocent and to proven guilty, then if you want to treat people like they're not people, that should be in prisons, if you're going to do it at all, I'm not saying you should. But in jail, supposedly you're innocent. So then why are we starting then.
Well, you shouldn't. It should never start.
You shouldn't start.
I mean, I think there's more and more awareness of that now and there's a lot of movement with correction officials going to European countries and learning about how they did over there, and there's a reason why their recidivism rate is a tiny fraction of arts. It's because they treat their people who are incarcerate over there like human beings and they come out and what do you know,
they adapt better and they end up not reoffending. And yeah, but that's, like I said, that's a whole other subject. So it's interesting that you went back to the room where this gruesome crime occurred and that's what really crystallized in your mind that you could not have done this. It's just fascinating as to how the brain works. And doesn't you know. I'm reading this wonderful book called Burned.
I mean, it's wonderful. It's terrible also, but it's an amazing book by Pulitzer Prize winning author and Them Humes, and it's about an arson case, terrible case Juliane Taylor in California. But in it he talks about memory and how it can be manipulated. And you know, one of the things I read was either there in New Yorker
story about the Nebraska case. Recently where six people falsely confessed to the brutal rape and murder of an old woman, and many of them, I think all but one, actually came to believe that they did it, even though DNA proved with an error rate. They said in the article of one to nine hundred and fifty one quintillion that
the actual killer was a serial rapist murderer. But there's a couple of them that's still even after an apology, an official apology from the Attorney General of Nebraska, which those are hard to come by, some of them still believe that they had something to do with this because they've been so totally brainwashed. But what I did read is that I think they said that some statistic like seventy percent of people can be manipulate. I don't know how they figured this out into believing that a false
memory is real. You know, that's a scary number.
Under the right or wrong circumstances, you can get almost anybody to do that. You know, you're referring to the beatro six case, which is dramatic for a a whole different reason. Kenzi eventually gave up on that memory, and I think it's interesting as to how it happened, but eventually she came to grasp reality again in the Beatrice six, as you said, right on through being exonerated and receiving an apology. There was a precious quote when that first
happened from one of those exoneries. She said something like, Wow, I guess I didn't do this, because right to that moment she continued to believe that she did it. And so that's how powerful that process can be. And when you look at a case like Kenzie's, they were drinking that night, there was a lot going on. It was confusing.
It was a year ago now, and then the FBI comes in and they start to mischaracterize the evidence and it's confusing to her and she can't find a way to bridge their version of reality, their version of the facts, with her lack of memory of their version. She has a different memory. And I believe they actually assisted you in terms of how to bridge their version of the facts with your memory.
Yeah, they said, the person who had done this may have been feeling really guilty, but they may not have any memory of it because it was too traumatic and so the brain would have suppressed it. So to help them let go of that guilt, and feel better. They should confess.
That's what they did. In the Beatrix six case. Many of those people the accused had been abused as children, and they said, you're blocking it out the same way you blocked out the abuse. I mean, they played on that. That's a really sick way to go, right, to sort
of re traumatize. I mean, I don't even know what the word is from that, but yeah, it's crazy because I think most people listening at home or probably over in their cars whatever, probably like, well, I could see confusing or having a memory lapse or you know about some mundane type of thing. But it's really crazy to think how someone could be led to believe that they someone who's never done anything violent in their life, could be led to believe that they beat and stomped their
roommate to death. That is really scary. And we know the malleability of memory and the influence. What you were talking about before, which I think is such an important point and why we need to have, you know, objective analysts at every phase of testing, forensic testing, et cetera, et cetera, is that we know from every area of life, right if you even when it comes to like I
saw a movie about wine. I think it was Bottle Shock or something right, where they did that test where they blindfolded something well famous somoliers, and they gave them like seven dollars wine and they gave them like the top wine from Italy or France, and they couldn't tell which was which. Someone couldn't tell if it was white or red with the blindfold because they told them. And
so we know that that wine tastes. And I'll get letters from the the Vintnor's Association, right, But we know that wine taste about as good as you expected to write. And we know that tilanol works better than regular aspirin if you know it's tilanol, right, And here I come with another loss, so you'll have to defend me anyway.
So two of the most persuasive pieces of quote unquote evidence that can be and are presented in courtrooms thousands and thousands cents one thousand times a day, are confessions and even more so I was identification. That's not the case here, Ironically, those are two of the most unreliable forms of evidence that there can be. So I guess what I want to ask is for everyone that's listening,
and people have heard me say this before. Everyone that's listening to us right now, at some point in the future is going to get a jury duty notice, and after they get over the initial grumpiness about having received that thing in the mail, they're going to hopefully go
and show up and do their duty. And we know that there have been cases like Jeffrey Dskovics, where there were jurors who were swayed by his false confession so much so that they disregarded scientific proof that was presented at his original trial that proved without any doubt that he could not have committed this brutal rape and murder of a fifteen year old girl, and they convicted him anyway.
So that's an extreme case. But four jurors, when they're in a courtroom and there's a confession, and they're up there and they're saying nothing else, this defense attorney says matters because this person is confessed, and therefore you have to convict. How can somebody who's not a psychologist or a trained expert in criminal justice, how can they interpret that information? How can they make a better decision.
They need to understand what the sound and sight of a false confession really is. For example, here's one single statistic that should scare the hell out of everybody, and it is the fact that ninety five percent of known false confessions taken right out of the DNA exoneration case files of the Innocence Project, ninety five percent of known fault confessions contained facts about the crime that were spot
on accurate that the public didn't know about. And so what happens when a jury comes into the courtroom and they've got a defendant who said I'm innocent. They coerced my statement. The jury can understand the notion of coercion, but they ultimately come down to this question, Well, he
says he's innocent, but then how did he know those things? Well, you know what, they don't know how he knowed those things unless they can see an entire recording from start to finish of every transaction between the police and the suspect. In Kenzie's case, the FBI agent's account of what happened in those three days neglected to mention that they told her about repression and blacking things out. They neglected some of the details that a jury would need to know
to evaluate that statement. So I think a jury needs to know that unless you're watching the entire process, not just the final production that is scripted and re hearst for public consumption. But unless they see the hours and hours off camera that preceded that, they can't possibly competent to make a judgment of that confession. They need to
demand everything. And if police in one of those states that requires or doesn't require recording had failed to record the interrogation, the jury should react with an ultra degree of suspicion. They need to ask themselves, why don't I see this process? If the police are proud to show their interrogation work, why don't I get to see how that statement was crafted? Because unless the jury can see the whole thing, they're just not in a position to evaluate the statement.
They're just not right. And we see that in the amazing Netflix series Now The Innocent Man, where Tommy Ward and kral Font and I are still in prison over three decades later, and we only see the part of the confession that they want us to see exactly. But we know what went on now. We know it's too late to help them, unfortunately, but it happens too often. And you know, New York State resisted for the longest time recording interrogations. They said it was too expensive, expensive expensive.
It's free, it's free, It's literally free. But you just hear these things and you.
Go, I know, we're in an audio only situation. But my impulse was to pull my phone out of my pocket, put it on the table and say there, we can do it now.
Yeah. And you know there's that movie as well, False Confessions, that both Saul and I are in which I encourage people to look up it profiles for false confession cases, and it really shows you, down and dirty, how terribly flawed this process is. And at the end of the day, if you don't know, you have to acquit because it says so in the Constitution, not because I think so, but because it says so in the Constitution. They have to prove guilt without a reasonable doubt. That's not the
standard that we hold anymore. It doesn't seem like that, it doesn't hold up in the justice system. And you know, and of course there's that quote, wasn't it Benjamin Franklin that said it is better than one hundred guilty men go free, than that an innocent should suffer. William Blackstone, Oh, William Blackstone, damn I quoted that in the podcast before William Blackstone said that, yeah, so yeah, and it's certainly again with Kenzie here living proof that it can happen
to anyone. I mean, strangely enough, fortunately for you, the Korean justice system functioned. We can't prove this, but probably better than ours would have. So now we get to the vindication. Right, and you had three of those, right, I mean, they just kept stamping your thing like nope, nope, nope that I mean, and I mean, how did that feel? And you know, and how did it feel coming home?
And it felt great to get the you know, the first hearing, the judge was saying it and I had to wait for the translator. So the people in the courtroom had reacted, but I didn't know how or why they were reacting, like is this in my favor or not? And then I heard the translator said innocent and it wasn't even they did. She didn't say not guilty, she said innocent. And I don't know if that's a translation error, but it felt so good to hear that those words,
but I still my mom came rushing at me. She was able to be there in Koree at the time. And I went to her and we got a hug, but the courtroom, the bailiff kind of had to separate us because I still had to go back to the jail, this time not in handcuffs, but I wasn't really free for another twelve hours. They had to wait for a
fax from the courthouse. So when I got back to the jail after my innocence verdict, everyone was asking me, well, how long did you get how And I said, no, I'm going home, And they're like, what do you mean You're going home. People don't go home from here. People shouldn't be in jail. They didn't do a crime. Why you mean you're going home? And I said, I didn't
do it. I get to go home, and so I got to say goodbye to the people that i'd spent spent about four and a half months in a room with fifteen other women and so formed some bonds and we got say goodbye to them. And then at ten or four pm on June nineteenth, I got out.
So there were three separate verdicts, though were you held in between those verdicts?
I was not held in between, but I didn't I technically didn't have a visa I wasn't allowed to work, and I was in limbo. The prosecutor when I hadn't appealed the case. I think it's they're just expected to. I don't know if it's an honor thing. I said. I wasn't allowed to work. My mom did come to the country during that time, and so she got a work visa and I had There was a pastor who would visit me on Tuesdays. Every day. We had seven minutes visits and he would come in every Tuesday and
we would talk. And when I got out, he was really really supportive, he and his family, and he found someone who donated an apartment to us, donated our rent. Otherwise I would be an immigration in jail. And then October I got another innocent verdict, and then it was appealed to the Supreme Court. And at that point I'm
still in Korea. They had my passport, I didn't have permission to leave, and my brother was getting married at the end of December, and I asked permission if I could go home, and they said if I would sign a letter that would waive extradition if I was found guilty, they would let me go home. So I wrote that letter, and then it was still almost three years later that I finally got the official Supreme Court of South Korea said that I was innocent. So weird, I mean limbo all that.
Time you were in limbo in South Korea.
For I was in limbo for about six months in South Korea and then went back home and was still in limbo in the States, waiting on a verdict, not knowing if I would have to go back to Korea. I had a gap in my work histories. The finding a job was incredibly hard. All of my credit cards had defaulted, maxed out and defaulted. Student loans had.
Defaulted, right, so there was more trouble waiting you. And yeah, then that is a very strange state of being in the Twilight zone, right, You're over there in this eastern country where you can't work, so you can't make money, and you can't go home, and you can't do anything.
And I was an efficial tourist. Yeah that's all I could do.
But you would have had to sleep on the streets. So, like you said, go to immigration and jail. If not for the fact of the kindness of strangers and the fact that your mom was able to be supported the way she was before we get to the closing, and I want to hear about what you're doing now and how you're doing now, and you know all that stuff.
But I want to ask Saul and Patty. When I started doing this podcast, my goal was to help to prevent as many wrongful convictions going forward as I can by teaching people or educating people, I should say as to how and why they happen, and to give people an idea of what to look for if they're on a jury, and what some of the dos and don'ts if you're arrested or even picked up and not arrested
as Kenzie was. So you know, being that we have two experts in the room, I would love to get your take on both of those two topics, and together we can hopefully prevent the next Kenzie from going through what she did. So, if you want.
To go first, sure, I think that's a noble and very important mission. I think one thing we learned from Kenzie's case, and this gets at a strength of the Korean justice system that in contrasts to a serious weakness of the American system. She had the surge of relief when they took her back to the crime scene. She looked and she said, WHOA, that's not the memory they
gave me. That doesn't fit. In Korean law, if a suspect confesses to police and recant the confession and won't reenact it and won't restate it to the prosecutor, it didn't happen. And yet in the US, when behind closed locked doors without recording, police claimed that a suspect confessed and then that suspect immediately recance the confession and won't restate it and won't plead guilty and won't re enact it, that suspect has done already the damage that will get
him or her convicted. And so I think there is buried in this story about comparing two systems. Problem with the American system. The only way Kenzie could have stepped out of that situation intact was to invoke her right to silence, to invoke her right to an attorney. That's all she could have done, because once she is alleged to have confessed, even if she recants it and will not restate it, the damage has been done.
Well, I'll touch on the other topic about what should we do to make people aware. I'm trying to figure that out out and I'll report back in a year with concrete findings. But I think just telling more stories like this so that number one people accept that it's a thing that happens more often than you probably think,
and just focusing on the person. I think, on a person to person basis rather than on trends, because it becomes clear once you hear each individual story, It's a lot more clear as to how that confession happened than speaking in statistics and things. So I think focusing on the individual stories is really important.
That's my hypothesis.
It's a scary system, and you know, we're here to try to, you know, help turn the tide, and media plays an important part in it. You're studying that. Now, what have your studies so far shown about the effective podcasts on an opinion of civilians.
We're just starting, so we started off looking at Netflix documentaries, but so far we are seeing that that there is a certain type of person that's number one likely to watch these kinds of documentaries to begin with and also know more about interrogations. We're trying to figure out as to whether these people are just more knowledgeable and then they watch these documentaries or whether the documentaries are doing the educating, so podcasts is the next step. So I
don't know yet. And actually you brought up my exact dissertation question earlier. In that question, you posed about why is it that people can be presented with scientific findings or logic but still kind of hold on to that gut reaction towards a confession. So you can tell someone and I maybe there's research where you give them all the information about wrongful convictions and it makes them more critical of evidence, but it doesn't necessarily change their overall
verdict decisions. So I'm trying to figure out why.
Well, it's good that you're doing the work, and you know, I think too we should mention that, you know studies. My friend Josh Dubin was involved in the study. It showed that there's an inherent bias among normal people who become jurors that if they see someone present it to them as a defendant, whether it's in the box or whatever it is, eighty percent of people have a natural
assumption that they're guilty or they wouldn't be there. And we have to correct that because there shouldn't be any presumption. You should come in as a blank slate in understanding how often these things go wrong. So before we turn to closing remarks, Kenzie, how are you? What's going on now? How are you doing? You seem like like a little orb of light. But I, you know, think I'm not a minder. I'm not even a psychologist. I'm going with here.
That isn't overall I'm good. I'm good. I do have hard days and hard times year February and March with the confession and the murder itself, that's a hard time a year, But overall I'm good. I'm a mom. Now. I have a six year old.
Boy, what's his name?
His name is Garrik. I get emotional talking about him because I think about how this could affect him, how my past still to this day, eighteen years later, will still like bump into things. People will hear about it or google it, or they'll see it. Sometimes the show's on syndication, and it'll affect how people treat me. And some friendships have been lost because of it, and sometimes there's some trickle down effect to him. But overall good.
It's hard trying to rebuild and people will have difficulty getting past the confession. Even if I was found innocent, That doesn't matter. They still think why would you have said said you did something that you didn't do, especially why did you kill your friend? And so it kind of follows you around like you have to monitor your behavior all the time. You can never get too angry,
you can never get too upset. You have to when do you tell this with new people that you've met, Like you you have to gauge your relationship with them. Am I going to see them again? Do they need to know about this? If you wait too long, then they feel like you violated their trust, because why didn't you tell this to me before? Before you came into my house, before I saw you every day at school. So you're always having to monitor your reactions and your relationships.
When I first talked to you about whether you want to come out and do this, you said something about your son and the loss of a play date. Can you say something about that, because in a funny way, I think that just says so much.
It was one of the things I had arranged a play date, and so my son had gone over to their house and they were playing, and it's you know, gauging when do I tell this to someone? And now I was in their home, and I felt that I know if someone came into my house, I would want to know who is coming into my home. So I had shared this story a little bit, and that person was no longer available for play dates, just wouldn't return phone calls or texts or messages, just stopped.
I actually have one more question, Are you better?
I'm not. I think life is too short to be bitter. I do get angry at times that they feel that they have the right to do this to someone's life, because it's not just my life that's affected. That's also the Penwick family who hasn't gotten the proper closure that they need. This is a person out there who has killed someone and is not in jail or prison for having committed that crime. And I think I'm not bitter.
I get angry about it, though, but I'm not letting what they did to me ruin the rest of my life.
We'll glad you're doing well and wish you all the best for the future. And now we come to my favorite part of the show, which is and you're familiar with this since you listen to the show, so you're ready. A lot of people come on and never heard it, so this takes them by surprise. But this is a part of the show where I thank each of you, Kenzie of course, Kenzie Schnyder, and Patty Sanchez and Professor saulkass And for being here and taking your time and
sharing your thoughts. And now I get to stop talking and listen. And so I'm going to go in order. I guess we'll start with Patty and Saul, and then you can Zie for just final thoughts.
Final thoughts, understand that humans are flawed, and you are normal, no less flawed than general people. I've noticed there's a lot of people consuming these things saying like, oh yeah, I would always be able to tell a part something, or like I'd be able to tell true and false.
And I think we all just humble ourselves a little bit and admit that we're all vulnerable and we're all susceptible to being manipulated and being okay with that and understand it, and so that we can be aware and always get a lawyer.
All that's good, You always get a lawyer. Part I would have led with. But you know, false confessions. I've been looking at them for god knows how long. I'm not going to tell you because I don't want to reveal my age. But it wasn't that long ago when people said doesn't happen, and I would say never, never, doesn't happen. I would never confess to a crime I didn't commit. Now I think some of that is changing. The problem is that what people see and hear a confession,
what they're seeing and hearing is a story. It's a narrative. This is what I did, this is how I did it, this is why, this is what it felt like, this is what the victim may have looked like or said. It's a story from start to finish. Kenzie's is no exception. If you read her so called confession, it is a narrative from start to finish. It's chronology, that is the
sight in the sound of a false confession. And so it's very important for people to understand that absent corroborating evidence taken independent of that confession, and absence seeing the process by which that confession was taken, you are in no position to make a judgment. And the reason I think that's important is Kenzie's case illustrates something disturbing. Eighteen years ago, she gave a confession. She was then acquitted, She was then acquitted again, She was then acquitted again.
The fact that eighteen years later she is feeling the effects of the stigma that has not detached itself from her. She gave a confession, but she has never been convicted of a crime. It doesn't matter to some people. She is guilty by virtue of the fact that she confessed,
and they will never see her actual innocence. People need to get past it, people, And that's why I think Patty's proposed studies looking at whether or not a podcast, for example, can raise public awareness and make people more discerning jurors, is so important because we're flailing a bit trying to find ways to raise public awareness. I've been working top down, trying to convince the courts, the judiciary
to reform the system in ways that makes sense. But you know what, that's just too slow, and there are more victims every day, and so maybe what we need to do is work from the bottom up and create a ground swell of public awareness and a ground swell
of support. You know, I think making a Murderer, the Central Park five, The Confession Tapes, Demand, the Knox documentary, your podcast series on wrongful convictions, those are I think essential tools for raising public awareness and making people more critical consumers of their criminal justice system.
Canzi.
I was hesitant to do this podcast because of how it could affect my life now, but Saul had mentioned something and he said maybe a future juror would hear this, and I wanted to help someone keep them from this happening to them. I think that's important. The biggest thing that I would say is get a lawyer. I know
everyone thinks it's a false confession. That would never confess to something that I didn't do, And I know it sounds crazy, but no one goes into the room with law enforcement expecting to leave with a confession to a crime they didn't commit. So get a lawyer. Law enforcement agents, they are doing their job. They're not your friend. Don't trust them. Make sure you have a lawyer on your sign.
And before we close, Saul, I want to do sadly, I want to do an immemoriam because there's a case that was profiled in the movie that you and I both appeared in, called False Confessions, and can you talk a little bit about because it actually has an eerie resemblance to Kenzie's case, and that he was never convicted. He was actually in jail for almost exactly the same amount of time in America. Anyway, He was an exchange student. Yes, and he died you know recently. You know, you could
say he died of a broken heart. But can you talk about that case a little bit.
Yeah, his name was Multi Thompson. He was twenty or twenty one years old when he came to the US to New York to work as a teacher in a preschool,
a high end preschool near the United Nations. He came from a family of teachers and educators just Kenzie was aspiring as well to be a teacher, and some way through the school year, another employee went to the school and said they saw him touching the children inappropriately, which seemed inconceivable given the layout of the room and the fact that there are always multiple adults at any given moment. But they watched for a while and saw absolutely nothing.
Turns out that the person who accused him of that had made similar allegations earlier in the year about others, so the school proceeded to dismiss her. She went to the police department and she reported it. The police ended up in Malta Thompson's door early one morning, about six am, picked him up, interrogated him for seven or eight hours,
and took from him a confession. The interrogation was not courted on audio or on video, and the result of that seven or eight hours of off camera interrogation was that they convinced Malti Thompson to go to the district Attorney's office and give a videotape statement. And the opening of his videotape statement, I'm paraphrasing, but it's something like it has come to my attention that I've done a bad thing. Apparently they told him falsely that they had
surveillance video footage of him touching the children inappropriately. That was a lie. But he's from Denmark and he doesn't know that police are allowed to lie, because in Denmark, as in most other Western civilized countries, police are not allowed to lie.
But he was.
Delivered that lie, and so, like Kenzie, he had to presume that this must be true. I don't recall doing it, and so he gave a confession to the district attorney on camera. He was sent to Rikers Island for several months while the case worked its way through the system. Nobody would corroborate, none of the children would corroborate, and they had to ultimately drop the charges. He went home
to Denmark. He had a lawyer who settled with the city for some I don't know what the settlement figure was. And you and I saw him in the film. If you see the film, what you will see as an individual who is depressed. And this was years later, and so the fact that he died recently according to the family, he died of a heart attack, as at twenty seven years old, is just sad beyond belief. But you can see in the movie he can't even break open a smile.
This affected him and had never left six seven years later. I don't know what was going through his mind. I don't know what goes through Kenzie's mind, but I know that people who are induced into giving confessions to crimes they didn't commit are constantly self reflecting. What was I thinking, what was I doing? How could that have happened? And that's what makes these stories so important to tell.
Rest in peace. Thank you everyone for listening to Wrongful Conviction. We'll see you next week. Don't forget to give us a fantastic review wherever you get your podcasts. It really helps. And I'm a proud donor to the Innocence Project and I really hope you'll join me in supporting this very important cause and helping to prevent future wrongful convictions. Go to Innocenceproject dot org to learn how to donate and get involved. I'd like to thank our production team, Connor
Hall and Kevin Wartis. The music in the show is by three time OSCAR nominated composer Jay Ralph. Be sure to follow us on Instagram at Wrongful Conviction and on Facebook at Wrongful Conviction Podcast. Wrongful Conviction with Jason Flamm is a production a Lava for Good Podcasts and association with Signal Company Number One.
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