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Comment by PhasmaFelis | Hacker News Reader

A public defender of my acquaintance has a client who's in prison for a murder he definitely did not commit, because the police showed him a bunch of entirely falsified evidence, snowed him into thinking he'd gone crazy and then forgotten afterwards, and took down his bewildered "I guess I did do it" as a confession.

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FWIW, here in the UK we have an entertainer called Derren Brown. He specializes in psychological "magic". A while ago he did a show where he set up a punter to believe he had committed murder. The mark reacted exactly as your friend client. IIRC, he actually gave himself up to the police, really believing was guilty. IMO, very disturbing and going by the TV episode, even though Im sure it didnt show everything, too simple.

If any one is interested in tracking it down, Derren Brown - The Experiments. Episode The Guilt Trip.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_works_by_Derren_Brown#D...

Added: Sorry, the point is that Im shocked that you are saying your police actually do this, in this way. When watching these shows its easy to assume that there is some extra trickery going on, so it cant happen to a real person in real life. Your case shows that it can.

I have long lost trust that anything Derren Brown does is legit. I was already suspicious it was bullshit and then he "predicted" the lottery numbers

I now have no reason to believe any of it is anything but actors and TV magic

Well, i found the explaination of him winning against a group of chess grandmasters by playing them against each other and only playing the weakest player quite convincing, and memorizing 10 moves as well as playing a good game of chess isn't really too far out there. The little bit of predictive magic with the number of pieces is almost certainly trickery though.

That's incredibly disturbing. I guess a lot of the criminal justice system has a bedrock, usually unstated, assumption that people know what they did and didn't do. That assumption is already questionable some of the time, but I suppose falls apart further when evidence can be fabricated to an extent that makes defendants doubt their sanity.

I wonder if this will occur more frequently in an era when people can start to create highly realistic video that appears to be of a particular person performing a particular act (so someone can show you full-blown "surveillance camera footage" of you doing something that you didn't do).

From the little I understand of psychology, essentially all you need to do is get the accused to doubt their memory, then push them over the edge. Consequently, I think that high quality CCTV wouldn't be necessary. A blurry hint would be enough to convince a softened defendant.

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