
Remembering the Murder You Didn't Commit - danso
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/06/19/remembering-the-murder-you-didnt-commit
======
song
Quote from the attorney for the county

> The attorneys for the county argued that the six should get no more than
> three hundred thousand dollars each in damages, and suggested that it was
> Winslow’s fault that he had been repeatedly raped while he was serving his
> sentence. “Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think anybody should be abused like
> that in prison,” one of the attorneys said. “But you saw him testify here.
> You saw his video. Mr. Winslow is effeminate in nature.”

I can understand that it's his job to downplay the damages but this is
despicable.

~~~
watwut
That is beyond downplaying damages. That is literally "he deserved it because
he is not man enough". This being used as a serious argument is just wow-level
of highly wrong.

~~~
rmc
> _That is literally "he deserved it because he is not man enough"._

Or more obviously: "Look at him, he looks like a queer! Probably liked it and
all. Probably led them on."

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sharkweek
This is so fascinating -

To a much, much lesser extent than this story (thankfully), I have a very
distinct memory from my childhood of going to a live spaceship launch that to
this day feels so vivid and real, but I have never been anywhere near such an
event.

I remember even getting in "trouble" in school for telling my class that I had
gone to see a spaceship's launch at show 'n tell. My teacher tried to correct
me by saying I had seen it on TV or something, but I was convinced I had been
there in person.

It's funny how over time, though, it blends in well with other childhood
memories, it probably has compounded on itself enough times that my brain just
stores it with normal memories. I guess I just have enough rationale now to
understand that memories aren't always exact replications of events.

~~~
cpeterso
_This American Life_ had an interview with a man who remembers his wife waving
at Jackie Onassis, but his wife insists he was not actually there. He still
"remembers" the encounter clearly, but accepts that it couldn't have happened.
Here's an amusing animated version of the story:

[https://youtu.be/PxQ9Gx2-ceM](https://youtu.be/PxQ9Gx2-ceM)

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jopsen
> But after several interviews she gave up on the idea of her innocence.

The usual: gross police incompetence, interrogation techniques prohibited in
most sane countries, resulting in innocent people behind bars.

A pattern all too common in the US.

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nullc
> How should a town atone for its negligence? The jury determined that Gage
> County, along with Price and Searcey, owed the Beatrice Six, as they have
> come to be known, more than thirty million dollars, four times the county’s
> annual tax revenue.

The most remarkable part of this is that there might actually be negative
consequences for the mishandling of this for the parties responsible.

------
dagenleg
The article really made me feel for Joseph White. Poor guy, out of a sudden he
gets accused of a crime he never committed. That's pretty bad in itself,
especially when fighting with inhuman US judicial system. And then the
prosecutors find 5 other 'accomplices' who remember him committing a crime and
then testify against him! It says a lot that he was the only one who
persevered and continued to fight through this Kafkaesque horror ultimately
proving his innocence.

~~~
srrge
> inhuman US judicial system

Exactly this. The US is a remarkable country, but how can they suffer such
unjust and downright pernicious justice and health systems? That puzzles me.

~~~
bitexploder
It isn't like most of us sit around enjoying it. It has grown and changed over
the decades, even centuries. To understand America and the large systems we
have you have to start at the Civil War and work your way forward. The years
history complicate in subtle ways few appreciate.

The balance of the federal government and the states, and the three branches
of our government operate and interact in complex ways. Though we are
definitely one country, and you can generally rely on things to be consistent
from one state to the next, they are their own legal entities and things that
you can do in one state can land you in prison in another.

Factor on the modern age of media and the gravity of the interests that want
to keep things certain ways and it gets easier to see why it is so hard to
shift our society as a whole -- it truly is quite diverse, even if
predominantly white.

~~~
srrge
I can appreciate the complexity of those systems. Moreover all countries have
their issues...

But you seem such an innovative and industrious people! Therefore seeing how
your justice, health and even education systems are deeply dysfunctional -- to
say the least -- and possibly impossible to fix, is mind boggling.

~~~
striking
Most countries got a pretty long head start. The US is like, what, 250 years
old?

I think we're lucky to have gotten so far, so quickly (of course, with the
caveat that this thought shouldn't make us complacent).

~~~
bonzini
Even several European countries have only been sovereign states for less than
200 years. Finland became independent from Russia in 1917.

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FeepingCreature
> Dean’s blood wasn’t Type B, either. The deputies urged him to try to recall
> whether a sixth friend had been in the room.

Am I a bad person for laughing at this? They just keep executing the same
routine, unaware of how ridiculous it's becoming.

~~~
lawless123
Yes, they're just re-rolling the dice until the get the 6 they want,

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ajuc
I remember early primary school experience where I wanted to say to a girl I
liked her. For several years when I was around 15 I remembered actually doing
it and getting "friendzoned", until I found a diary from around 10 where I
described that I wanted to do it, but never actually did.

It made me realize how remembering imagining doing something is very difficult
to distinguish from remembering actually doing something, if it's distant past
and you only remember fragments without context.

EDIT: also reading stuff you wrote when you was 10 removes all illusions you
had about your past genius.

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708145_
A Swedish scandal with a man who confessed to more than 30 murders, which he
did not commit:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sture_Bergwall](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sture_Bergwall)

He was convicted of eight murders. All confessions were "repressed" memories
induced by therapists.

~~~
averagewall
It also happened in Iceland in the 1970s:

[http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/special/2014/newsspec_7617/index.h...](http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/special/2014/newsspec_7617/index.html)

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pitt1980
I wonder what really going on inside the mind here

My sister tells a story-

when she was in college, a hypnotist came to her school to do a show, she was
the one of the people called up on stage and hypnotized

anyway... she did what the hypnotist told her to do, but she's unsure of
whether she was actually hypnotized, or whether it was merely the social
pressure of being up on the stage, and playing the expected role

Clearly humans are susceptible to psychological manipulation or bullying

I'm not entirely sure it follows that that's how the neurons are actually
firing inside the mind

~~~
LordKano
Out of curiosity, what college did your sister attend?

When I was a freshman, they brought in a hypnotist and I volunteered. I went
through the motions and when he asked us to visualize ourselves in a
situation, I went with it and played along. After a couple of minutes, I was
sure that there was nothing special going on. I walked back to my seat and
observed the rest of the show.

~~~
pitt1980
Carnegie Mellon

~~~
LordKano
OK. My experience was at Lock Haven University but I was thinking that it
would be cool if by random happenstance, I was reading a story about an event
I had attended.

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hunterjrj
Lawrence Wright published a book titled Remembering Satan which describes the
case of Republican Party Chairman Paul Ingram and his confession of satanic
ritual abuse of his children, which was later suggested to be a case of
false/suggested memory:

"Psychologist Richard Ofshe claimed that Ingram, because of his long-standing
and routine experiences in his church, was inadvertently hypnotized by
authority figures who conducted his interrogation, although no mental health
professionals were present, and that the confessions were the result of false
memories being implanted with suggestion."

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thurston_County_ritual_abuse_c...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thurston_County_ritual_abuse_case#False_memory_hypothesis)

~~~
qb45
I once found this wiki, complete with OCRs of multiple books on the subject,
devoted to recovering from satanic rituals, brainwashing, mind control,
programmed false identities, etc.

[https://deprogramwiki.com/deprogramming/deprogramming-
modali...](https://deprogramwiki.com/deprogramming/deprogramming-modalities-
for-trauma-mind-control-survivors/#PREFACE)

Not sure what's more scary: that this may be really happening, that people may
be capable of imagining and really believing it, that people may be not
believing it but still writing about it.

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thijsc
Check out
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-P2vYIgPdKg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-P2vYIgPdKg)
for a very well executed attempt to have somebody admit to a murder they did
not commit.

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kcdev
Not the same, but reminds me of this selective attention test:
[https://youtu.be/vJG698U2Mvo](https://youtu.be/vJG698U2Mvo)

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bombela
unable to read because an add keep popping over the article text. this is so
frustrating.

~~~
theprop
Try the Epic Privacy Browser..its ad blocker worked great for me ;-)

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theprop
She longed to be the kind of person who was confident enough in her own sense
of goodness that she would know definitively that she could never commit
murder.

