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MythBusters Helped a Wrongly Convicted Man Prove His Innocence

innocenceproject.org

181–184 of 184 posts

Re: MythBusters Helped a Wrongly Convicted Man Prove His Innocence

#181
post #5

This reminds me of how people get angry at me whenever I poke holes in the science of movies. Movies affect people's ideas of what is possible and what is impossible. This is why I'm also quite against, in the general case, post-apocalyptic movies that predict a future based on non-science impossible things happening. Many spaceflight movies and TV shows for example show very bad things in the future giving people a…

There is also the massive problem of torture and confessions through torture being so commonplace in movies and TV, which makes people more comfortable with it. It also gives people the false idea that it's effective.

In the real world (and the article here is a good example of it), generally most confessions from torture tend to be false because people will make up whatever they think they need to say to make it stop (unless they're trained to resist it, but obviously in that case they'll feed the interrogator false information).

Re: MythBusters Helped a Wrongly Convicted Man Prove His Innocence

#182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yet this case had zero evidence other than a coerced confession. There was 100% (of zero) evidence available. The original judge and jury had nothing to go on but the confession.

Are you sure? You sat there in that courtroom decades ago and heard all the testimony and viewed all the evidence? Or are you going off of a blog post written decades later?

Read the article again.

Re: MythBusters Helped a Wrongly Convicted Man Prove His Innocence

#183

Maybe this has always been obvious to everybody but the American justice system is not about truth or fairness. The goal is to convict no matter what. That is how the incentives are lined up. Case in point: the (famous) Serial podcast started about the (now evidently) wrongful conviction of a teenager. He was recently released after 20+ years because of a note found written by a prosecutor that pointed to other plaus…

> The goal is to convict no matter what. That is how the incentives are lined up. No, the goal of the prosecution is to convict no matter what. The goal of the defense is to prevent the prosecution from winning. In order to win, one side must convince a jury. This is an intentionally designed adversarial system. The European system, where a judge is essentially an inquisitor trying to discover the truth rather than a…

If that’s what you want to believe I can live with that.

Re: MythBusters Helped a Wrongly Convicted Man Prove His Innocence

#184

> In 2021, Illinois and Oregon became the first states to ban the use of deception during interrogations of minors ... Is there any other modern democracy that allows deception as a method of interrogation to the same extent as the US? In my country, Germany, deception during interrogations is forbitten even for adults. There exist only some minor exceptions, for example, that prior wrong ideas of the suspects may be…

>... may not be impaired by ill-treatment, by fatigue, by physical intervention, by the administration of drugs, by torment [Quälerei], by deception [Täuschung] or by hypnosis.

Has there ever been a documented case of a suspect hypnotised by law enforcement to (rightly or wrongly) confess? That would be an interesting story.

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