Remembering the Murder You Didn't Commit
newyorker.com
newyorker.com
> 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.
Or more obviously: "Look at him, he looks like a queer! Probably liked it and all. Probably led them on."
I don't way to go too far afield but I would recommend the Paradise Lost documentaries. In the third one, the lawyer for the state of Arkansas argued that maintaining a conviction was more important than determining actual guilt.
Jury trials are used to determine guilt or innocence, and judges are extremely hesitant to second guess a jury decision under any circumstances. Appeals aren't for relitigating guilt, they are for ensuring that the original trial was conducted fairly and properly. Furthermore, there's a strong bias in all circumstances against reopening closed legal matters. In general, the US court system prioritizes consistency and finality above correctness.
On paper at least, the proper legal remedy for someone who was convicted, who does not argue that their trial was conducted properly, and who nevertheless maintains their innocence is a pardon or commutation from the governor.
This undeniably sucks, but the alternative is to have the court system essentially DDoSed by felons demanding frivolous retrials.
There was witness tampering by the police and jury misconduct. Either of those should have been enough to generate a new trial on procedural grounds.
I do not know if you're familiar with the case in those documentaries but more than a decade after their conviction, new material was discovered and a DNA test linked a new and different suspect to the crime and under the Arkansas DNA statute, the convicted men should have received a hearing on the matter.
The state's attorney argued that the legislative intent of the statute was only to use DNA evidence to prove the guilt of people who had already been found guilty at trial and that no new evidence should be admitted to the hearing.
The Arkansas Supreme Court ruled in favor of the defendants.
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.
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.
The most remarkable part of this is that there might actually be negative consequences for the mishandling of this for the parties responsible.
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.
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.
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.
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).
As some have pointed out, the American dream is a type of 'just world hypothesis': that people get what they deserve.[1]
This belief sometimes cuts both ways. If people are poor, it's their fault, if people are sick, it's their fault.
I think it is not despite being a remarkable country, but precisely because of America's exceptional growth and prosperity that this belief persists.
Even though the nearly unlimited land, cheap (or even free) labour and geographical isolation that fueled this mythical prosperity are not the case today, I think many Americans still hold on to this belief, and that it colour's their attitudes to people who face structural disadvantages.
Am I a bad person for laughing at this? They just keep executing the same routine, unaware of how ridiculous it's becoming.
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.
He was convicted of eight murders. All confessions were "repressed" memories induced by therapists.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/special/2014/newsspec_7617/index.h...
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
He makes the point that a lot of people "wants to help" and play along, and some people are easier to get to play along than others, and it is hard to decide where someone wanting to play along or being easy to convince crosses over the line into someone who is "put in a trance" and "compelled". Not least because the appearance of altered states/trance as well can be a result of someone "playing along".
Further, he makes the claim that what matters isn't the rituals, but making the subject believe. He recounts a story of someone who came to him when he was learning hypnosis. Brown believed he had hypnotised this person before, and when he did he would leave a "trigger" to make it easier to hypnotise the same person next time. He claims he simply snapped his fingers and went "sleep!" to the person in question, who then apparently immediately closed his eyes and appeared to go into trance, before Brown realised he'd never hypnotised him before: What mattered was that this person came to him thinking he would hypnotise him, and either this was actually enough to bring him into a "trance", or it was at least enough to make him believe he was going into a trance and act accordingly because it was what he believed would and should happen.
The entire chapter on hypnosis in that book is full of doubt and questions about whether or not he is actually causing something, or whether people are simply doing it to themselves. It's one of the things I like about him - he's a sceptic who is open that what he is doing is tricks, and that he doesn't even really know for sure exactly what goes on with some of what he does - just that it works in the sense of creating the show he wants.
Anyway, this guy was also a stage hypnotist and he said he wasn't sure whether he believed there was such a thing as hypnosis either, in very similar terms. Some people just want to please, others are looking for license to act up in public. Of I tell you to go over there and kiss that woman n the cheek, you might do it, you might want to do it, and via the magic of hypnosis, you have ceded responsibility for the act to me.
But also that yes - if people are doing what is suggested to them, then what is the functional difference?
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.
He also said it was impossible to tell whether those who said this were telling the truth, just wanted to please him, or wanted to act up or get attention.
Perhaps those in your group who stayed were more inclined to just go along with it.
"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://deprogramwiki.com/deprogramming/deprogramming-modali...
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.