Making a Murderer depicts miscarriages of justice that are not at all rare

[octoberlib]

One of the most gut-wrenching scenes is when one of the characters, Brendan Dassey – Avery’s cousin, who is a shy and sad teenager with mental difficulties – is coerced into confessing to the murder that is the subject of the majority of the documentary. His public defender briefly refers to the “Reid method” of interrogation then quickly moves on without explaining what they meant. But it’s an important point.

The New Yorker published an excellent article a couple years back reporting on the highly controversial technique, which is used by police around the country despite not being based on any actual science. It turns out the method – where interrogators suggest and push events onto those they are interrogating for hours and constantly tell the suspects they are lying – is great at getting confessions but terrible at getting the truth, and it often leads to putting innocent people behind bars.

In another must-read article about the subject of false confessions, Judge Jed Rakoff explained in the New York Review of Books in 2014, “Research indicates that young, unintelligent, or risk-averse defendants will often provide false confessions just because they cannot ‘take the heat’ of an interrogation.” He cites an expert’s estimation that between 2 and 8% of all those who have pled guilty are actually innocent. Projected out over the United States’s two million prisoners, that is a massive number

Making a Murderer also examines examines the nature of plea bargains and how defendants can be forced into taking them, even if they are innocent. Just because defendants pleads guilty – even if they aren’t represented by the cartoonishly evil attorney in the series, who is basically shown working for the prosecutors rather than his client – doesn’t mean they did it. According to the National Registry of Exonerations, 47 of the 125 criminal exonerations in 2014 involved defendants who had originally pleaded guilty. That’s over 37% of them.

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jan/06/making-a-murder-netflix-series-miscarriages-of-justice-are-not-at-all-rare?CMP=twt_gu



6. Confessions are infallible because innocent people never confess. We now
know that this is not true. Innocent people do confess with surprising regularity.
Harsh interrogation tactics, a variant of Stockholm syndrome, the desire to end the
ordeal, emotional and financial exhaustion, family considerations and the youth or
feeble-mindedness of the suspect can result in remarkably detailed confessions that
are later shown to be utterly false.

10. Police are objective in their investigations. In many ways, this is the bedrock
assumption of our criminal justice process. Police investigators have vast discretion
about what leads to pursue, which witnesses to interview, what forensic tests to
conduct and countless other aspects of the investigation. Police also have a unique
opportunity to manufacture or destroy evidence, influence witnesses, extract confessions
and otherwise direct the investigation so as to stack the deck against people
they believe should be convicted.48 And not just small-town police in Podunk or
Timbuktu. Just the other day, “[t]he Justice Department and FBI [] formally acknowledged
that nearly every examiner in an elite FBI forensic unit gave flawed testimony
in almost all [of the 268] trials in which they offered evidence against criminal
defendants over more than a two-decade period before 2000.”49 Do they offer a class
at Quantico called “Fudging Your Results To Get A Conviction” or “Lying On The
Stand 101”? How can you trust the professionalism and objectivity of police anywhere
after an admission like that?
There are countless documented cases where innocent people have spent decades
behind bars because the police manipulated or concealed evidence, but two examples
will suffice:

http://georgetownlawjournal.org/files/2015/06/Kozinski_Preface.pdf

[AuntPatsy]

1. Not surprised, should be required learning..

[hfojvt]

2. except they ARE rare

First of all, most people are NOT in prison. In 1999 a mere 3.1 percent of the adult population was in prison or on probation or parole.

So right there it is less than 5% of the US population. Now, how many of those convicted are actually innocent?

What would you consider to be "rare"? Is 10% rare? Seems to be far less common than 90%.

To read point ten in your OP, you'd think that NOBODY in prison was actually guilty.

I guess all crimes are really committed by the police and they just convict random citizens to keep us all living in fear.

I see no attempt to measure and a whole bunch of wiggle words "flawed" "almost all" "nearly every".

You know what does NOT seem to be rare in our society? - bad journalism

[angstlessk]

3. I'm with Blackstone...and the presumption of innocence...

"It is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer",

[hfojvt]

4. that is rather meaningless

Suppose you had an ideal system. One, let's say, that made one mistake in every 10,000 tries. Isn't that a very good system? Isn't a mistake very, very rare? 0.01% of cases would then be wrong, and presumably a whole bunch of guilty people would be going free too.

Even in that ideal world, with 6.3 million in prison or on probation and parole, you would still have 630 innocent people in that system, and 6,300 guilty people free to commit more crimes, and create more victims. Every guilty person who escapes to commit more crimes, also means more innocent people suffer - their future victims.

That's quite a few people, more than twice as many as I graduate high school with.

I think it is somewhat unreasonable to expect our system to be that perfect. But the real question is - how imperfect is it? Is there one bad conviction per 1,000 or 1 per 100 or 1 per ten?

I would be surprised if it was more than 1 in 100, and that, I would say, is still pretty rare, although that would make 63,000 wrongly convicted.

Admittedly that is nothing more than a wild guess, but the articles in the OP do not make any attempt to measure it, only look at ONE case and then claim "it is not rare" and then quote some report that "almost every" law enforcement expert witness gave "faulty" testimony. As if it happens 6 times out of ten or something.

[hughee99]

5. While I certainly understand the sentiment behind that quote, I suspect that most people,

if confronted with 10 murderers were told 1 of them was innocent and given the choice between setting all of them free or putting all of them in jail, would find it difficult to stick to that principle.