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It’s rare for true crime documentaries to focus on a larger picture. Typically, the best true crime docs revel in the small details of specific cases, unpacking the swatches of misleading evidence, lies, and courtroom dramatics while offering an intimate look into into the victim and the accused’s lives. However, Netflix’s latest docuseries turns that formula on its head. By examining six cases, The Confession Tapes painstakingly unpacks the problems our legal system has when it comes to coerced confessions.
There are few silver linings for the subjects of The Confession Tapes. Every story, which ranges from 42 minutes to an hour and a half, follows a single case where the accused is only behind bars because of his or her confession. At first glance, nothing seems to be wrong with that outcome. Most people typically believe that accused criminals do not confess to crimes they haven’t committed, especially when the crimes in question are as serious as murder. But time and time again, The Confession Tapes proves how shockingly easy it is to pressure a dazed suspect who is fearful of police into saying whatever police want. Even more disturbingly, the docuseries argues, that false confession alone is often enough to imprison these men and women for life.
Much like Making a Murderer, the central argument of The Confession Tapes isn’t that its subjects did or did not commit the crimes they were accused of. Rather, it’s that these subjects were tried and sentenced based on a confession and little to no actual evidence. It’s an argument that questions whether our legal system truly does operate under the premise of “innocent until proven guilty,” and more often than not this base belief in human rights falls apart under the docuseries’ lens.
That divide is shown most clearly in “A Public Apology,” which explores Wesley Myers’ alleged murder of Teresa Haught. After Haught’s murder, Myers was taken into police custody where he was questioned about the death of his girlfriend for hours on end. Shortly after this interrogation, Myers was transported to another facility, and during that transportation, Myers was asked by a reporter if he committed the murder. He confessed to the crime on air and apologized to the victim’s parents, allegedly believing, as the documentary argues the police had pressured him to believe, that he must have killed Haught while he was blacked out. The rest of “A Public Apology” sifts through the remaining details of this case, trying to find hard evidence that would connect Myers to Haught’s death. The episode comes up painfully short, to the point where the defendant’s lawyer claims he was confident Myers would be found innocent. Despite this lack of evidence, Myers was found guilty, almost exclusively because of his confessions.
The same story plays out again and again throughout the series. Perhaps the most heartbreaking versions of it are “Trial By Fire,” which follows a mother who was accused and sentenced for her teenage daughter’s death, and “8th and H,” in which a brutal attack is blamed on the young members of a gang that never existed. In those two episodes, the series makes a compelling case for its subjects’ innocence. However, other episodes are a bit more ambiguous.
“True East Part 1” and “True East Part 2” follows Glen Sebastian Burns and Atif Ahmad Rafay’s trial. The pair were accused of murdering Rafay’s family, but, the documentary argues, there is a substantial amount of evidence that suggests these murders were religiously motivated. Both episodes are fascinating installments in the true crime genre as they switch between rebuking the accused for their too relaxed demeanor regarding these deaths and arguing why they couldn’t possibly be the killers. It’s also an episode, perhaps more than any other, that shows how doggedly police officers hold onto their personal case theories. Watching “True East,” you may not be completely sure who committed these murders, but it’s clear there were several avenues and explanations that went unexplored.
Through its many examples, The Confession Tapes does what good documentaries do best — it makes viewers re-examine a subject they thought they knew. You may start watching this five and a half hour series believing that there’s no possible way a person can falsely admit to committing a crime. However, you’ll likely leave it questioning most of what you know about confessions and mildly fearful about what impact they can have on a jury. It’s a haunting watch with no happy endings.
