Marty Tankleff and the Murders He Did Not Commit: Our Obsession with Scapegoats

Several weeks ago, I listened with horror the story of a fourteen-year-old suburban boy who was manipulated by his interrogators to confess to the brutal murder of his younger sister. This story was one incident of other cases highlighted in an old podcast episode of This American Life, which explored how DNA evidence can prove the wrongdoing of police and interrogators who pin horrific crimes onto the wrong people. The podcast is available online for anyone to listen. A recent episode on Oprah highlighted a similarly shocking story of another young person coerced by authority figures into confessing a crime. Marty Tankleff, who was a high school senior at the time of the incident, woke up to find both of his parents bludgeoned to death in his family home. Police interrogators tricked him into confessing the crime by falsely telling him that his dead father regained consciousness and indicated him as the attacker--when in fact his father was already dead when found by authorities. Marty was sentenced to 50 years to life in prison for a murder that he did not commit. Fortunately, Marty's family hired a private investigator, and new evidence was later found to support his innocence. However, it wasn't until July 2008--almost two decades after the original crime--that a State Supreme Court Justice dismissed all charges against Marty for the violent murder of his mother and father. What do these incidents reveal about our justice system? More importantly, what do these incidents reveal about our own human nature? Here is what i think: we are all obsessed with finding scapegoats for our problems. All of us are guilty for this. This happens on a mundane, daily basis with our own personal problems. If we are unhappy, we want to blame our parents, our spouses, our career, our upbringing, or the rude cashier at the supermarket. On a larger community level, we blame the economy, the administration, a certain ethnic group or political cause. On a global level, we blame certain countries, certain religions, certain ideologies. In nearly all of these cases, it does not matter whether or not the scapegoat truly is the cause of the problem. The point is that a scapegoat exists, and thus the darker aspects of our human nature are grotesquely satisfied. This is what I suppose Eckhart Tolle and other spiritual teachers mean when they tell us, again and again, how dependent we are on our own personal narratives. We feel threatened and vulnerable without the scapegoat to blame. Who would the police be if they had to admit to their own community that they have not captured a murderer still on the loose in the midst of their own suburban neighborhood? What would our country represent if we did not have a War on Terror? Who would we be if we did not have our unhappy childhood to source all our problems from? We love our scapegoats because it keeps us from confronting our own difficult and oftentimes painful responsibility to evolve into better people. The recent news of Laura Ling and Euna Lee being condemned to 12 years in labor camp in North Korea reveals to us the horror of our universal addiction with scapegoating. Never mind that Laura Ling and Euna Lee are two women with families back home who are terrified for their safety and well-being. Their personal identities and dignities as human beings have been erased to fit the ideological narrative of North Korea: they are to blame for what is wrong with this world. They must be severely punished. Tempting as it may be, we cannot use North Korea as a scapegoat for what happened to Laura Ling and Euna Lee. Doing so makes us no better than them. Even worse, it absolves all of us of our own individual responsibility to do what we are capable of doing to transform this world towards global peace.