
Reasonable Doubt: Innocence Project Co-Founder Peter Neufeld on Being Wrong - Kliment
http://www.slate.com/blogs/blogs/thewrongstuff/archive/2010/08/17/reasonable-doubt-innocence-project-co-founder-peter-neufeld-on-being-wrong.aspx
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edanm
Chilling interview, well worth the read.

Also check out this video: it's a criminal defense lawyer explaining why you
should never talk to cops, even if you're 100% innocent. This is followed by a
veteran police officer who mostly confirms what the defense attorney says:
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i8z7NC5sgik>

One thing though: this is a very inaccurate title for the article.

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iuhjytgfbnjhmk
So many cases were being thrown out on police IDs they had to change the rules
for photo id here.

The computer prints a picture of the suspect along with 11 other slightly
modified versions. The witness must turn over the photo sheet and select the
right image, police aren't allowed to touch it. This is supposed to stop the
trick of putting a heavily creased ID photo of the suspect on top and the
police officer pointing to it while showing them to the witness.

Of course it doesn't stop the police having a quiet word with the witness
beforehand and explaining who they want convicted. Surprisingly this is more
effective with 'innocent witnesses' - normal members of the public wanting to
help the police, than with coerced witnesses.

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CWuestefeld
_they had to change the rules for photo id here._

Where's here?

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nkurz
This is a really good article that is grievously mistitled in the submission.
Yes, there probably are police that 'trick' people, but this isn't the point
of the article.The original is "Reasonable Doubt: Innocence Project Co-Founder
Peter Neufeld on Being Wrong", which captures much more of the nuance.

Ignore the HN title, and read the article.

"One of the things we used to do at the Innocence Project is we would try,
just informally, to predict which cases would end up being exonerations and
which ones would end up confirming guilt when the DNA came back from the lab.
And I was wrong more than I was right. What that tells me is that I was raised
in the system before DNA evidence, where I relied on all these other types of
investigative tools to determine guilt or innocence. That's one of the
important things about DNA for me: It taught me how unreliable my own
intuition is. Now when people say, 'What do you think is going to happen?' I
say, 'Whatever happens happens, I have no idea and I don't want to
speculate.'"

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joe_the_user
While the title doesn't reflect the whole article, I don't think it's
_entirely wrong_ in the sense that the article does show that the police have
gotten false confessions from numerous people.

The central park "wilding" case: _"Five kids are picked up in the park that
night, they're all interrogated, the interrogations are not recorded but the
ultimate confessions are. Later the kids say the confessions were coerced and
that they're innocent, but they get convicted."_

Police Officers _do_ "follow their intuition" and thus use tricks to get
confessions from people they are sure are guilty.

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whimsy
>Correction, Aug. 18, 2010: This article originally misidentified Raymond
Towler as Raymond Fowler.

I don't usually post things like this, but this is hilariously ironic.

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marcusbooster
Police don't care about guilt or innocence, they care about clearing their
cases - and they rationalize this by shifting that responsibility to the
courts. Their goal is accountability, not in the moral sense, but because it
makes their job easier.

Every year their lobbies push for more invasive monitoring techniques that
they euphemistically call "tools in the toolbox", which of course are usually
granted during an election year.

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michael_nielsen
I've known many police officers who care deeply about guilt or innocence.

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Natsu
It's weird, because all the cops I hear about are bad cops (the only exception
being some during 9-11).

But all the cops I've met offline have been decent and professional, even when
they were giving me a ticket or warning. Granted, it probably helps that I've
never been in serious trouble, nor have I been suspected of anything bad.

~~~
nollidge
Shouldn't be surprising. How often are you going to hear about the mundane but
good works of 99% of police officers vs. the one bad apple?

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negativity_bias>

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notahacker
The article cites a number of cases of police defending their initial
conclusions long after they've been discredited.

Is this a case of police still believing their initial assumptions (or
reluctance to countenance the possibility they might have condemned an
innocent man), or are they simply trying to protect themselves from potential
lawsuits by not conceding a thing?

