Thankfully, no death penalty!

[PiLFy 3]

Kelly,

When bad Cops n DAs pull crap like this. Don't the good Cops get pissed at them? When you hear about a Cop getting killed during a nothing traffic stop, for example. I wonder who the asshole Cop was who had mistreated that person in the past. When bad Cops abuse their authority. Another Uniform will have to answer for it. Is the climate still too much like in Serpico's day?

[shropshire 0]

Cops should police themselves too not cover shite up.... a cop that covers stuff up is just as corrupt as the scum that did the deed.

(.)Y(.)
Chivalry is not dead; it only sleeps for want of work to do. - Jerome K Jerome

[PiLFy 3]

shropshire

Cops should police themselves too not cover shite up.... a cop that covers stuff up is just as corrupt as the scum that did the deed.

No, a Cop who engages in that behavior is far worse than common street scum.

[Amazon 7]

shropshire

Cops should police themselves too not cover shite up.... a cop that covers stuff up is just as corrupt as the scum that did the deed.

^
This!!!!


The thin blue line knows who is making all of them look bad. The $60,000 question is can they man up and get rid of those who make the rest of us who used to be protected and served by our police question who they are really serving.

[GeorgiaDon 385]

Kennedy

This is why all interrogations should be video taped and all witness statements should at least be recorded for audio (detectives and at-station interviews). There really isn't any reason not to force this into policy. There's no excuse.

Side note: each state should work to reduce/eliminate their DNA backlogs.

Absolutely in agreement.

Everyone assumes innocent people would never sign a confession, but experience shows that it is surprisingly easy to get them to do so with a combination of threats and depriving people of sleep, food, water, and access to a bathroom. If you look at the exonerations achieved by the Innocence Project, you'll see a surprising number of false confessions, later proven to be completely false by DNA evidence, that were signed after 20-30 hours of non-stop interrogation without sleep, food, water, or being allowed to use the bathroom. People will sign anything to make the abuse stop, wrongly thinking they will be able to challenge the confession later. Recording everything would prevent such abuses.

Plea bargains can be a useful tool, as the court system would collapse under the burden if every case had to go to trial. Unfortunately, the system lends itself to easy abuse. Even if you know you are innocent of a charge, imagine the dilemma if you don't have an ironclad alibi (you were home alone for example), you are facing life without parole if convicted, and you are offered a plea that would result in a five year sentence. In the case the OP linked, a 15-year-old kid insisted for hours of interrogation that he and his friend had nothing to do with the murders, but signed a confession when offered a much reduced sentence if he would just implicate his friend, and was threatened with life without parole if he refused.

In addition, there should be national "best practices" standards for collecting eyewitness information, and photo and "in person" lineups. People in general, and it seems police in particular, assume that human memory is just like a photograph or audio recording, fixed and unchanging once acquired. A huge body of research proves that this is not true; we "rewrite" and update our memories, incorporating new information, every time we recall them. This is how learning works. As a result it is shockingly easy to unwittingly change a witnesses' memory, for example replacing a memory of a fleeting glimpse, or a memory acquired under extreme stress, with an image obtained from the photo lineup, or the actual lineup. Again referring to the Innocence Project, most of those people were convicted based on mistaken eyewitness testimony. It's shocking to read cases where the initial description of the suspect is a complete mismatch with the person picked out of the lineup, and cases where a very uncertain lineup ID turns into absolute certainty in the courtroom. It's likely that almost none of those victims were intentionally lying on the stand, rather their memory had been corrupted by common police practices.

Twenty or thirty years ago much of this information was not available, so police were not being corrupt when they used techniques that were in common practice, techniques that were based on two "common sense" but false premises: innocent people will never sign a confession under any circumstances, and memories are fixed and unchanging. What I think is deplorable is that there is so much resistance to modifying practices to avoid preventable errors, now that we know how fragile memory can be and how easy it is to coerce a confession.

Don

_____________________________________
Tolerance is the cost we must pay for our adventure in liberty. (Dworkin, 1996)
“Education is not filling a bucket, but lighting a fire.” (Yeats)

[BIGUN 1,503]

PiLFy

***DNA

Such a trustworthy system. Not.
Successful convictions, not truth.

This doesn't make the Death Penalty wrong, Normiss. It makes some reprehensible people on the LE community deserving of being thrown in prison for decades, themselves. There has to be much more penalties for such repugnant behavior by LE. Only then will such egregious instances of Injustice, cease.

To me; the issue is not LE. The issue is sovereign immunity for prosecutors.

Nobody has time to listen; because they're desperately chasing the need of being heard.

[PiLFy 3]

"To me; the issue is not LE. The issue is sovereign immunity for prosecutors."

I include them in my view of the LE community.