If it Can Happen to a Senator

Richard Cohen has an interesting take on the Larry Craig story:

...But I do believe he was set up and then coerced into pleading to a misdemeanor. If that's the case -- if things went as he says -- why doesn't he say he learned something from the incident? Maybe he wants to reconsider his votes in favor of restricting death penalty appeals because he now knows that the cops can arrest the wrong person and get a confession. Look, it happened to him.

It has happened to others as well. We can start with the approximately 124 people who have been freed from death row since 1973, some on account of DNA testing -- about one-quarter of whom had confessed. We can go on to John Mark Karr, who proved with his confession last year to the murder of JonBenet Ramsey that some confessions are nothing more than proof of delusion. And we can proceed to the famous Central Park jogger case in which five young men confessed to the rape and brutal beating of a young woman. Years later, a totally different person not only confessed to the crime but supplied DNA matching the sample taken from the victim. If this had been a murder, or a black-against-white rape in the old days, the accused might already have been executed. In this case, the five young men were released from prison.

Such cases are not legion, but they happen. Why they happen is often a mystery, but surely if a three-term U.S. senator can be pressured into confessing to a crime that he insists he did not commit, something similar can happen to a rattled, undereducated kid who thinks the deck is stacked and is promised a reduced sentence...