and how LE often contaminates the defendant with the "facts".

I hope is drives home the point that when confronting LE:  STFU

anytime the officers are performiing an official duty, the public could monitor it.

Haven't you committed perjury by falsely confessing to a criminal charge in a court of law under oath that you didn't commit?  Or is pleading guilty in court under false pretenses not considered to be lying, and thus not perjury, somehow?  To me, a false confession in court would be considered perjury, and would prevent me from pleading guilty, even if the evidence against me was circumstantially overwhelming.  To thine own self be true...  

Note that the victims were often underage, mentally disabled, and subjected to high intensity interrogation without (denied?) legal representation.

Regardless, if anyone is ever arrested, for anything, the best immediate defense seems to be to invoke your 5th Amendment right to remain silent, and not talk to LE until first having consulted with a competent attorney.  In other words, STFU!  

They're classified!

(groan here)

-- Modified on 9/15/2010 7:12:02 AM

As bad as the police practices mentioned here might sound, here is a little history.

My criminal law professor (in the 1960's) had worked for the police department in a large city.  He said one common practice in the 1930's to "encourage" a suspect to confess was to repeatedly hit him in the head with the city telephone book.

The first is that the statement in question be false.

The second is that the person who made it has to be shown that they knew it was false (Or in other words, "knowingly false".)

The last is that the statement has to be relevant to some issue at hand.  In other words you can swear  that the sky is pink, but what of it?  That is not perjury.

It would seem that a person who pleads guilty and/or signs a false confession under oath could be acquitted if they are mentally incompetent under the terms of #2 above.

There have been cases where a person (Often a gang member without a record or much of a record.) has been found to commit perjury by confessing to a crime committed by another gang member with a more serious record for the purposes of shielding that other member from a more serious jail sentence, often in return for some kind of consideration.

In that circumstance, it is indeed a serious crime to confess to a crime that one did not do, and the public is well served by LE who do serious investigaton to prevent such miscarriages of justice from occuring.

(still not a lawyer)

There is a difference between a confession and perjury. Confessions are usually made to law enforcement agents and must follow a strict set of rules (Miranda) because of extreme common abuses in the past. Confessions are not made from the witness stand as in “Perry Mason stories.” Simply put, perjury is a knowingly untrue statement under oath. Although the public likes to believe that this is a strictly applied rule that provides a strong check against liars, the fact is that although it is common to threaten to prosecute a person for perjury, particularly on TV shows, it is a very rare prosecution.

  False confessions are quite a different thing and are often the result of a person being coerced to confess, or when a suspect is mentally unbalanced or driven by some compulsion to confess. An example of such a compulsion is  a born again Christian who confessed the other day to fondling a sleeping teenager's tit six years ago. It would be unfair to apply the standards of perjury to such persons. (just smack them silly with a big bible) Perjury is more often applied to tax evaders or crooked CPAs and can lead to a 5 year incarceration under Federal Code. In states such as Florida it only considered a misdemeanor and punishable by 1 year maximum. Keep in mind, I repeat, that it is rarely invoked, but do not confuse the two situations; one is not the punishment for the other.




-- Modified on 9/19/2010 8:28:21 AM

I like the quote:

“You become so fixated on ‘This is the right person, this is the guilty person’ that you tend to ignore everything else,” he said. The problem with false confessions, he said, is “the wrong person is still out there, and he’s able to reoffend.”

Apparently wrongfully convicting someone, putting them away for years, and in some cases even executing an innocent person isn't a problem.

One of the most basic principles the founding fathers had was that it was better for a guilty person to go free then it was to violate the rights of an innocent person.  We seem to have drifted far from that idea.

I don't know if it is fair to ascribe that principle to the founding fathers and mothers, many of whom were guilty of tax evasion, smuggling and of course insurrection; it might have its roots deeper in older British law.

We have a long tradition of finding and punishing the culprit, whether he is guilty or not. The old adage of the police was that it did not matter if the criminal was guilty of that specific crime he was charged with, the fact was that he was guilty of other crimes that he was not charged with. The idea was to get the bad guys off the street and not play by the rules. That explains why many of these criminals who were unjustly convicted years back, when released are soon arrested for the new crimes they have committed. Things are not always what they seems.

Men are neither demons nor angels; maybe they are bit of both. As for women, what do you think?