"I just finally told them what they wanted to hear. I just repeated everything they said. [More]I'll never get it.
I can understand being naive enough to talk to the cops. I can even understand being naive enough to allow them to search without a warrant.
I get that there are people that uninformed about their rights and that trusting of the police.
But confessing to a crime you did not commit?
There has to be some kind of mental/emotional deficiency at play here. A whole person would just never do that.
Which makes coerced confessions like this especially contemptible--bullies picking on the disabled...
[Via FFFW]
9 comments:
Ive spent the last 16 or so years talking with incarcerated inmates on a daily basis.
Folks would be astounded at the number of people in jail as a result of plea bargain confessions to crimes they actually didn't commit.
I recently found and purchased a book at Barnes and Noble entitled - Three Felonies A Day, How the feds target the innocent - by; Harvey A. Silverglate. The book describes only abuses by federal prosecutors and agencies, but state and local prosecutors and LEO's are just as guilty of like excesses.
The Korean War taught us that most men have a breaking point and at some point will confess to almost anything in order to obtain a respite from discomfort, pain, mental anguish, isolation, etc...
LEOs who want a conviction at all costs, regardless of the morality factors involved, don't have a problem with using psyops against their own civilian population.
[W-III]
It's hard to imagine now, but in my youth I actually figured that I would most likely die of old age. Only later came the realization that at some point I might have to fight someone for the privilege of so doing...and later still the realization that the "someone" might not be a freelancer, but actually the very state that had always claimed to protect "the public" (and by convenient inference, me) through its "law" and uber-benevolent "peacekeepers".
At some point after that, the real realization hit: that the "most likely way to go" scenario had at some point been completely replaced, and I am now convinced that I will probably die at the hands of the enforcement apparatus for some "crime" that hasn't even been invented yet, and which will be no "crime" at all, but rather which boils down to this: I do not belong to the state, and although I will bring no aggression myself, will resist when the essential choice is put to me personally.
I don't even remember when that happened any more. All I know now is that I try to live every day with the knowledge that it could be my last, and with this question in mind: if my daughter (now a one-year-old) must some day look up for herself what sort of man her father was, that he died in such a fashion, what will she find?
Old age is my preference, and always will be--I will even fight for it if I must. But it is not as important as the answer to that question.
Ancient Jewish law forbide confessions as evidence.
This was to preclude torture.
The use of testimony against oneself is the hieght is immorallity in a legal system abased on immoral laws.
Twenty years ago I was a police academy cadet. A state police detective was called in to investigate a reported theft. It was later discovered that there had been no theft, but being a police academy it was taken deadly seriously. Everyone in that class area was interviewed.
The detective interviewed me for almost two hours using the "Reid Technique". He sat so close to me that his knee was between my knees, and his face was within a foot of mine.
He questioned me on every minute detail of that day, over and over again. He told me repeatedly that he knew I was guilty and kept throwing out scenarios of how I might have done it. He would almost whisper for long periods, then yell to startle me when it looked like I had relaxed. It only stopped when I agreed to a polygraph. He never had me actually take one though, and never asked me to until the end.
I was a fairly tough guy who had grown up working cattle and raising cotton. But by the end of that interrogation I was crying and physically shaking. The detective and academy director brought me some water and told me I did fine. They let me wait in the office until I gained my composure.
Here's the thing - if it had gone on for much longer I may have told them I did it just to make it end. I would have confessed to a theft that never actually happened just to make the interrogation stop. It was one of the most awful things I've ever been through.
A few weeks later I graduated from the academy with honors. I passed my state certification exam with high marks. And I immediately began pursuing a different career. I wanted nothing to do with any occupation that could break people down in that way.
I have been in similar situations and very convincingly assured them they would pay a price they couldn't afford.
In one instance, they hid a deputy sheriff from me, because they knew I was going to kill him if I could find him. They knew because I told them.
Funny thing is, when they thought they could roust me for no reason and no consequence they were all "bad". But as soon as they found out how I was turned when fucked with, you couldn't melt one of those sonsofbitches and pour him on the same block with me.
I lived there another six months and went where I wanted did what I wanted and was left alone. I was also actively searching for said deputy. And they knew it.
I not only told the sheriff, but I called the prosecuting attorney and told him.
That was when I lost all respect for law enforcement. They violated my home when I was absent, thought they would hard-ass me because I was supposedly a bad man (not true, they had the wrong guy) and they could do anything they wanted. I didn't do a damn thing to convince them I wasn't the guy, I just informed of the price to pay, and all of a sudden, no matter how bad they thought I was, I was off-limits.
No respect at all remained for me for law enforcement. They would let a bad guy go if there was a price to pay, but fuck all over somebody if they thought it was for free.
RP, if that had been me, the cop would have been crying before it was over. At some point a man has to give up his fear and embrace his anger.
That was 1976. I have had several run-ins with sonsofbitches in blue. A good part of the reason was because I was in heavy industrial construction so that I was, along with others, always temporarily living in somebody else's town and having no friends or relatives or "people" seemed to make us "fair game".
Been there myself.
Simply refused to say anything. Closed my eyes, stretched and started to take a nap. One of them poked me, and I spoke my first words during the "interview":
"Sleep deprivation is a form of torture."
The cowards left. Another cop came by later, woke me up, kicked me out, and trespassed me, as these clowns hadn't even filed paperwork on me.
straightarrow
I hear ya, and if the same thing happened now the interview wouldn't have lasted two minutes, much less two hours. But as a 19 year old cadet who didn't know how things "really" work I thought I had to just sit and take it. I'm sure a lot of other people think the same thing.
It took a while, but it sounds like the Ogden police and DA earned themselves a multi-million dollar penalty at the taxpayers expense. It is to bad the police and DA are not personally liable as well. I wonder if the city or taxpayers can sue them.
Rob in California
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