The Gas Vans: A Critical Investigation - Holocaust Handbooks

126 SANTIAGO ALVAREZ, THE GAS VANS
with witness statements (chapter 4), I will return to this issue. Right
now I want to focus on the desperate situation in which defendants can
find themselves when the profound legal standard “innocent until proven
guilty” is violated, which happens even today in states under the rule
of law. In order to clarify the problems we are dealing with, I want to
point out only one legal case here which unfolded in the U.S. in 1997.
This case is so powerful, exactly because it has nothing to do with the
topic of this book, as will become immediately clear.
In 1997 a young U.S. American navy soldier was accused of having
committed a rape-murder against a female neighbor. Although he denied
any involvement and passed the lie detector test, the interrogating
officer did not believe him and kept him under pressure, demanding a
confession. After many hours of relentless interrogations the man finally
confessed. When a DNA test showed that the defendant’s DNA did
not match the rapist’s DNA, the interrogation officer, instead of releasing
the innocent man, assumed a gang rape and demanded that he be
told the names of the assumed others involved. After days and days of
interrogations, the accused finally uttered names of other soldiers he
knew. They, too, were arrested and went through the same ordeal. They
all initially denied any involvement; they all passed the lie detector test;
yet they all confessed after so many hours and days of relentless interrogations.
None of their DNA matched that of the rapist, so the interrogator
asked for more names. Eventually seven soldiers were under arrest.
Only by chance was the real rapist found shortly afterwards, who
had raped two more women in the neighborhood and whose DNA had
even been on file. Yet nobody cared to look for a DNA match in the police
database.
The tragedy was that, when the case went to trial, neither the prosecutors,
nor the judges or the jury members could believe that perfectly
innocent men would confess a horrible crime they had not committed.
Even though they all had initially insisted, and some of them even during
the trial, that they were innocent; even though the DNA showed that
they were; even though they had changed their stories multiple times
along the way to adjust it to what the prosecution wanted to hear; even
though the final story they had concocted about what had allegedly
happened was at times absurd and contradicted material evidence; and
even though the true rapist insisted that he had done it alone – the court
and the jury still found the four innocent men guilty of gang-raping and
murder.