I really like George F. Will’s powerful column about a new documentary exploring the innocence of the young men convicted of raping and beating the Central Park jogger, and why they pled guilty to a crime they didn’t commit. Here’s Will:

After up to 30 hours of separate interrogations by detectives who are paid to be suspicious of suspects, four of the five confessed to a crime they did not commit. Why? Watch this documentary by Ken Burns, David McMahon and Sarah Burns. To see the old videotapes of the interrogations is to understand the dynamic that sent the five to prison despite the absence of evidence to bolster a rickety case that consisted entirely of those contradictory confessions.

One of the five recalls his interrogation: “They pulled my father aside. Then my father came back in the room, it was like he just changed. He was like, ‘Listen.’ He was like, ‘Tell these people what they want to hear so you can go home.’ If he just, if he just would’ve stood his ground, I would’ve told the truth. I would’ve stuck to the truth.”

People determined to see every American social problem through the lens of race are missing the fact of class: Would the fate of these five frightened, confused, exhausted and skillfully manipulated adolescents — badly represented by counsel, disastrously influenced by unsophisticated and bewildered working-class parents, and all swept up in a prosecutorial and media storm — have been different if their skin had been white? Probably not. Remember: Confident, affluent, educated, law-abiding Americans can be reduced to bewilderment by encounters with the IRS or even the local DMV.

Will concludes:

Finally, this recounting of a multifaceted but, fortunately, not fatal failure of the criminal justice system buttresses the conservative case against the death penalty: Its finality leaves no room for rectifying mistakes, but it is a government program, so . . .

That is exactly why I turned against the death penalty over a decade ago. It’s not that I don’t believe that cold-blooded killers deserve to die. It’s that I don’t trust us to get it right all the time — and that I would rather see 999 killers rot in jail for the rest of their lives than to see a single innocent man go to his death. The Oklahoma scandal involving forensic chemist Joyce Gilchrist was what changed my mind about capital punishment.