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Comment by lazyasciiart | Hacker News Reader

I don't know anything about her, but that suicide note also says "I haven't done anything wrong", which indicates at best confusion on her part.

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How tragic would it be if someone’s deep empathic nature made them feel personally responsible for a death beyond their control – to the point of suicidal ideation - and was then imprisoned for it?

The Australian case mentioned in the article had a similar theme. Kathleen Folbigg wrote diary entries blaming herself for her kids' deaths, and these were interpreted as admissions of guilt (in fairness they could definitely be read that way). She had four of her own children die of undetermined causes and was basically convicted on the diary entries and the improbability of them all dying. Has been a long and ongoing public debate here (she's still in jail).

Apparently there's new evidence that a gene mutation may have been to blame, and she could be released soon: https://www.theguardian.com/science/2022/nov/13/australian-m...

The evidence in her case does seem too circumstantial to convict, a real injustice.

There was a case in the Netherlands in which they got a nurse to confess to a killing spree.

Unfortunately it is impossible to explain to people that a confession is meaningless.

Good investigators withhold details about a crime from the public mostly to filter out false confessions. This speaks to the fact that false confessions are common enough to make filtering techniques common practice.

That's not the only goal. This also reduces the effectiveness of copycat crimes, and differentiates any would-be copycats from the original. Also, it enhances the ability of authorities to receive and authenticate tips from the general public. In fact, in a high-profile case, it's common practice to deliberately plant misinformation in the form of slight immaterial errors, for many of the same purposes.

Can you stop writing these garbage GPT comments, please? No one wants to waste time reading this shit.

I think you're talking about Lucia de B. The first sentence of the article :

  When a Dutch nurse named Lucia de Berk...

In fact, she never confessed. As per her Wikipedia page:

  Important evidence at the appeal was to be the statement of a detainee in the Pieter Baan Center, a criminal psychological observation unit, where de Berk had said during outdoor exercise, "I released these 13 people from their suffering". However, during the appeal, the man withdrew his statement and stated that he had made it up.

> How tragic would it be if someone’s deep empathic nature made them feel personally responsible for a death beyond their control – to the point of suicidal ideation - and was then imprisoned for it?

Haven't you ever read The Green Mile?

I haven't, but I think, outside of fiction, history is littered with examples of these kinds of witch hunts happening. What bothers me is that now, more than ever, we know about these outcomes – and as you point out there's even neo-folklore about them – and yet we haven't progressed enough as a species to stop them happening.

Too common and too tragic.

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