Reasonable Doubt: Innocence Project Co-Founder Peter Neufeld on Being Wrong | Hacker News Reader

Reasonable Doubt: Innocence Project Co-Founder Peter Neufeld on Being Wrong

slate.com

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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.

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.

they had to change the rules for photo id here.

Where's here?

It doesn't require any careful analysis to see that. Even if you look 100% unlike a seal, it's still more risky to swim in the water with a great white than it is to not.

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.'"

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.

>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.

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.

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

Well, surely there exist some police officers/detectives/etc who see their personal career as more important than the ideals of their profession. It would also seem reasonable that, on average, these officers are better at advancing to powerful positions than those who care about ideals.

It would also seem reasonable that, on average, these officers are better at advancing to powerful positions than those who care about ideals.

It does not seem reasonable because you have cited no statics or data. It would seem reasonable to assume, that on average, ants are all red. You can't just say something and it become true.

I think you're confused by the word "reasonable." GP post is using it in the sense of "a plausible hypothesis", which it is -- it is plausible that people who care about their careers to the exclusion of all else (e.g., ideals) will advance farther and faster. Whether it is correct is a separate issue -- that is where the statistics and data come in.

Actually, "on average, all ants are red" is a good counterexample for plausibility -- talking about a universal truth that applies "on average" is not logical even at a casual glance, therefore it is not reasonable.

The problem is that the opposite hypothesis is also plausible, and without no data about why one is likely to be more "reasonable", the statement doesn't really say anything.

Agreed. I think that's the common ground between marcusbooster's sentiment and michael_nielsen's experience with individual officers.

To expound just a little, I think it's likely that there both exist police departments where careerists do well, and others where responsible officers do. I think we can also all agree that we ought to encourage a legal structure where officers can't advance their careers by falsifying evidence/extracting confessions from innocents/etc.

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.

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

> But all the cops I've met offline have been decent and professional, even when they were giving me a ticket or warning.

Tickets and warnings are no big deal. Let me know how you feel about them if you're ever arrested.

In the article itself, the officers in question did care deeply about guilt and innocence. They were simply wrong about it.

"Police" don't care about anything. Individual police officers care about guilt or innocence, or don't. Please don't commit the type error of ascribing an emotion to a group noun.

This is so common that it's been named the Ultimate Attribution Error:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultimate_attribution_error

Apple doesn't care about design? A group does have a nature that is reflective of it's driving members which is why we have corporate law and can treat corporations as individual legal entities.

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?

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