just read this article Military.com article on Norfolk Four

And cant get my head around the "coerced confession" that the courts relied on to prosecute...personally I cant see anyone admitting a they committed a murder they didnt do...and think they may be guilty....some of the article below::::>thoughts?

Williams has said he was told he would face a capital murder charge - punishable by death - if he didn't confess. He said he caved because he wanted the 11-hour interrogation to be over.

"I just couldn't take it anymore," Williams said during an April 2015 hearing. "I couldn't take being called a liar, the pressure."

Tice and Dick have also said they were threatened with the death penalty. University of San Francisco law professor Richard A. Leo, an expert on false confessions, said at the April hearing that Dick came to believe he must have participated in the crime.

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I troll 2L.com to be a better person in real life

Remember the Central park 5?

NYT


(and no, I won't post a link to Trumps disgraceful conduct regarding this case, find that yourselves)

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"The truth is incontrovertible.
malice may attack it,
ignorance may deride it,
but in the end,
there it is." -Sir Winston Churchill

An outrage to be sure. Unfortunately, we sometimes get screwed up prosecutors who are going for glory, fame, etc., instead of justice. The Duke lacrosse team and Baltimore police prosecutions are two other examples.

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I :heart; Q

Not quite the same.
No forced false confessions involved in either of those, were there?

Just weak prosecution in the case of the murdered Freddie Gray.
And I think the Duke lacrosse team thing seemed to be just be made up by the hooker unsatisfied with her payment, right?


-------------------------
"The truth is incontrovertible.
malice may attack it,
ignorance may deride it,
but in the end,
there it is." -Sir Winston Churchill

The same from the over zealous prosecutor angle. As I said, it is their job to weed out stuff like this. Too many of them have motives other than justice. Right, Johnnyboy?

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I :heart; Q

Interesting links WG thanks.

I wonder if someone offers a service/training where the public can test their mettle against one of these trained guys, could be a good field trip LOL

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I troll 2L.com to be a better person in real life

Prosecutors don't do confessions, cops do. The longer and more miserable, the more likely that those same cops will get a false confession. At some point, the innocent individual believes he's been found guilty anyway and sees the confession, complete with the promise to a lesser punishment, as a better resolution than the threats for the death penalty, which they believe.

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"One of the reasons why propaganda tries to get you to hate government is because it's the one existing institution in which people can participate to some extent and constrain tyrannical unaccountable power." Noam Chomsky.

In Military POW training, we were taught and shown how "enhanced interrogation techniques" were quite good at getting people to sign false confessions.


-------------------------
"The truth is incontrovertible.
malice may attack it,
ignorance may deride it,
but in the end,
there it is." -Sir Winston Churchill

Liar. Everyone knows that torture doesn't work.

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I :heart; Q

That's awful lazy logic. Or just dishonest.

Torture doesn't work well to collect useful intelligence, that we were clearly taught, and anybody that knows will agree.

But it does work well to extract lies, and in fact the techniques that were demonstrated to (and on) us were developed by communists for exactly that purpose.

-------------------------
"The truth is incontrovertible.
malice may attack it,
ignorance may deride it,
but in the end,
there it is." -Sir Winston Churchill

Edited: 03/22/2017 at 12:48 PM by WG

Especially the guy in Git-MO who is blamed for the USS Cole attack---Article

Not saying he doesn't deserve it-but the lawyers supporting him site:

"The petition with hundreds of pages of supporting documents describes Abd al Rahim al Nashiri being sodomized, kept naked and kenneled like a dog, crammed into a box the size of an office safe and being threatened with a running power drill while hanging shackled and nude from a cell ceiling.

And that's from the portion that isn't blacked out."

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I troll 2L.com to be a better person in real life

I'd call a false confession a failure if torture is meant to be collecting actionable intelligence against future threats.

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...

We have been through this many times. Torture doesn't work because the tortured will say whatever the torturers want to hear. The proponents of torture like it because they think it feels like punishment. This also plays into an uglier cynical understanding that everyone is guilty (not even of the crime charged but something they don't know of) and so they are never wrong for torturing or punishing these wrongdoers. This is a defense mechanism against having to see themselves as lying sadistic punishers. They have labeled every Muslim and the entire religion as violent and extreme so that their actions against any Muslim would be the moral equivalent of an action against the worst terrorist.

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"One of the reasons why propaganda tries to get you to hate government is because it's the one existing institution in which people can participate to some extent and constrain tyrannical unaccountable power." Noam Chomsky.

"Their main evidence (for going to war in Iraq) was a confession extracted from Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi in Egypt, after he had been severely tortured and water-boarded into asserting that al-Qaeda had a link to Saddam in order to facilitate a chemical/biological attack against the West. The testimony of al-Libi has since been widely discredited after it became clear that it was extracted under duress.

"They were killing me," al-Libi later said.

The United States Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) later confirmed that the information the CIA had used was completely incorrect."
middleeasteye

A major Failure, result: billions of $ wasted, hundreds of thousands of people dead, several nations destroyed, spike in terrorism, birth of ISIL:


"As early as the third century A.D., the great Roman Jurist Ulpian noted that information obtained through torture was not to be trusted because some people are "so susceptible to pain that they will tell any lie rather than suffer it" (Peters, 1996). This warning about the unreliability of information extracted through the use of torture has echoed across the centuries."
We've Known for 1,700 Years that Torture Produces False Confessions

"Astonishingly, more than 1 out of 4 people wrongfully convicted but later exonerated by DNA evidence made a false confession or incriminating statement."
innocence project

Communist Chinese Torture Taught at Gitmo


-------------------------
"The truth is incontrovertible.
malice may attack it,
ignorance may deride it,
but in the end,
there it is." -Sir Winston Churchill

Edited: 03/23/2017 at 06:24 AM by WG

Ask McCain. He's an expert on this. He tried to tell Cheney Wolfy and rummy but they wouldn't listen.

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"One of the reasons why propaganda tries to get you to hate government is because it's the one existing institution in which people can participate to some extent and constrain tyrannical unaccountable power." Noam Chomsky.

McCain and other's experiences were part of the reason the US military adopted the training I got.
And this was 40 years ago.

-------------------------
"The truth is incontrovertible.
malice may attack it,
ignorance may deride it,
but in the end,
there it is." -Sir Winston Churchill

Those who do not learn history....

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"One of the reasons why propaganda tries to get you to hate government is because it's the one existing institution in which people can participate to some extent and constrain tyrannical unaccountable power." Noam Chomsky.