Confessions by This American Life - Article Example

The paper "Confessions by This American Life" is a worthy example of an article on social science. Confessions were meant for those who admittedly did something wrong, and if there was no wrong done then saying something about it, even a confession done under pressure does not count as a confession, says Kim, a woman wrongly accused of murder told an interview (This American Life). This was true in the cases that were discussed in the radio show about the nature of confessions, in which an officer that finds out he was guilty of contributing for Kim to make false confessions about a crime that she was innocent of, and that a man chooses to be silent about his innocence despite being accused and suspected of a murder. In the officer’s case, after forcing out a false confession from Kim and realizing that he contributed information that she used to create stories to jive with their investigations, he came to admit that what he and his colleagues did was wrong. To atone for this, this same officer did as much as he can to prevent Kim from getting sentenced, and after 20 years apologized to her for his mistakes (This American Life). His confession came about because he found fault with his actions after reviewing the interrogation tapes and saw evidence of the woman’s innocence. Confessing to faults come to those who realize that they did something wrong, and the innocents profess themselves to prevent them from false accusations. But this was not the case for Jeffrey Womack, a man falsely accused of murder, because instead of telling the public that he was innocent he only kept quiet about it, making him even more suspicious of hiding something. However, he reasoned out that because he did not do anything wrong, he does not have any reason to say anything, thus he simply kept quiet about himself (This American Life). Even long after the issue has died down, when the murder charges against him were dropped, and when the actual murderer was charged, Womack remained solid about his beliefs about what happened to him: that he has nothing to confess because he did nothing wrong; and by remaining silent he felt he was doing the right thing. He also did not blame the murder case in his life struggles and has come to accept that he must move on whatever happened in the past (This American Life). As such, the two cases support Kim’s stand on confessions: that confessions only count as confessions if something wrong was done and the doer admits to the wrong-doing freely, otherwise it is not at all counted as one.