Cognitive Dissonance - Episode 455: Criminal Injustice PART 1

Episode Date: February 4, 2019

Deep dive on the criminal justice system.  Tweet and comment and let us know your thoughts, opinions or experience with the criminal justice system. Or email us if you need to remain anonymous.  and  

This week's show is brought to you by AdamandEve.com. Between now and Valentine's Day, you'll get a bunch of free stuff with every order. You'll get 50% off almost any item and 10 free gifts. And you'll still get free shipping. Just go to AdamandEve.com and enter the code word GLORY, that's G-L-O-R-Y, at checkout. Be advised that this show is not for children, the faint of heart, or the easily offended. The explicit tag is there for a reason. So before Tom jumps in and does the intro, a couple things I wanted to get out of the way. First, we had initially planned to record something this week, this last week on Thursday in Chicago.

But Wednesday and Thursday of this last week, it was bitterly cold here. Tom couldn't get his car started. I didn't even try to start mine. It was minus 50 windchill Fahrenheit, which is something like that in Celsius too. It was really just unbelievably cold. So we wound up skipping our normal recording session and we didn't have a chance to reschedule it. That being said, the previous week we were planning on taking a couple weeks off for other reasons and we had recorded a long form episode. We thought it was just going to be one episode. Turns out that conversation that we had was really long, almost three hours worth of conversation we had on the topic you're

going to hear about today, which is the criminal justice system, prison system, death penalty, that sort of thing. We covered a lot of ground in these three hours that we talked. So really, it's not a normal show that you're going to be listening to for the next couple of weeks. You're going to be listening to what we like to call a long-form show, which is sort of a deep dive on a specific topic. In this particular instance, the topics do range just a touch, but they all cover the same broad topic, which is the criminal justice system in the United States. So it's going to be a little different than our normal show. We still think it's funny and interesting, but it's definitely not the multitude of stories that you're used to. And that's going to be happening for the next two

weeks. We're going to be splitting it. It may seem a little arbitrary where I split the podcast this week, mainly because I don't want to just dump a three-hour show on people. So I'm just going to cut it in the middle-ish part. And there'll be a part one this week, part two next week. And then we'll be back in the following week to record a brand new show. But things just conspired against us to bring you a show that's about more current topics. But we hope you enjoy it. We really did enjoy the conversation that we had, and we thought the conversation was really good. So without further ado, I'm just going to throw it over to Tom. Tom's going to do the introduction, and we're going to get started.

Recording live from Glory Hole Studios in Chicago, this is cognitive dissonance every episode we blast anyone who gets in our way we bring critical thinking skepticism and irreverence to any topic that makes the news makes it big or makes us mad it's skeptical it's political and there is no welcome at this. This is episode 456, which I also knew and was not about to announce, perhaps 457. I was doing a little mental math.

I was trying to figure it out too. It might be 456. It might be 457. I think you're right. Maybe it is. Was it 455 this week that we just recorded? This is definitely an episode.

Recording live. Oh no, yeah, it is 456 because we're going to miss a week. We're going to miss a week. We're going to miss a week. So it's 456, I think. We'll see. All I know is. We'll see.

We'll see. I killed a man in Reno just to watch him die. And having said that. Oh, Jesus Christ. That will amount to my confession. And it turns out that's all that's needed. Yeah, man. to my confession.

And it turns out that's all that's needed. Yeah, man. We, with Tom and I this week, we're going to do another long form episode and it's going to range a lot. It's going to move a lot

because we found a lot of different resources. And so the resources will start, I think, on the death penalty talking about sort of the history of the death penalty

and how great it is and how amazing and how well administered it is. Yeah, exactly. And how we are good stewards of the death penalty in this country. So look forward to that. That's a spoiler here. And then, you know, I think, you know, we want to talk about like, you know, why we have it. There's some, there's some things we want to talk about why we have it. Then we want to talk about,

I think false confessions is another portion of this. We watched some documentaries, read some articles about false confessions. You know, we want to talk about also just bad investigations. And sometimes false confessions and bad investigations is one part of the larger Venn diagram. Yeah, I think. I'm trying to think of when they're not. I'm trying to think of when somebody did a bang up investigation. And there's not a false confession.

And a false confession also was a huge factor, right? I'm just saying there's a Venn diagram in there. It's connected somehow. Yeah. It's a Venn diagram. It's called one circle. Just at the U S justice system. That's what I know.

Yellow and green make blue. All right. And then we also want to talk about exonerations because it's a big part of the death penalty. I'm not pro. You're not pro exoneration. I'm giving that up. And recidivism rates,

I think is another piece and sort of why we get it all wrong. So we want to say, I mean, there's a lot. We don't get it all wrong. Sometimes, oh, what do we get right? We'll have to get there. I think we need to start there. Let's start from the top and work our way down. So we want to talk about the death penalty.

The reason why I think we want to talk about the death penalty, there's a couple of documentaries that we watched, Making a Murderer. And I want to, let's start. Let's start right there by saying Making a Murderer is a biased series. Like, everybody should know it's a biased series. They have a bent when they start out. They left off some information. If you, like, Google the information, you can find information that they did not include in the movies that was in the court case. Right. So there are, there's absolutely a angle. Yeah. And I will say too, like even season two of making a murderer, when you watch it, it's like, well, here's all this stuff that didn't come out in trial or that wasn't argued. Like, so even the documentary, which itself has a bias, if you just were to watch season one,

don't fool yourself into thinking that you have the whole picture. Yeah. Right. You don't have the whole picture. Right. And, uh, and there's another,

um, unlike cereal, which I feel like we know. Yeah, we know. Adnan did it. That's what we know. Did not.

I don't think so. I don't think so either. Who was it? There was someone like one of them. One of the podcasters, maybe it was Thomas Smith. One of the puzzle guys. One of the puzzle guys. It was no way. I think Thomas Smith both think Adnan? There was someone like one of the podcasters. Maybe it was Thomas Smith. One of the puzzle guys.

It was no way I think Thomas Smith both think Adnan did it because he's a person of color I guess. I mean, they're just racist. They're avowed racists. Turns out that's how the American system works anyway. But one of the things that, you know, we watched that. We also watched The Innocent

Man, which is John Grisham. Is that who the person is? Yeah. So John Grisham is an author who wrote a book. And then they did a series on Netflix about that. We watched a Ken Burns documentary, Central Park Five, which our current president had a piece in. There's a portion of the current president in there. He really helped him out.

Yeah, it was great. I'm glad he got involved in that, inserted himself. He still asserts that they're guilty, by the way. Does he really? Yeah, he still asserts that they're guilty. Oh, we'll get to there. We'll get there. Guys, I definitely want to talk about that.

Probably because they are. I mean, let's be honest. What's DNA, man? Person of color. Did you notice how black most of them were? Because I did, and one of them was Puerto Rican. So that's like diet black. That's like black light.

Look, here's the thing. It's not even American. When you're in a car and we're driving down the road, we're going to pull you over. You know what I mean? You will be racially profiled for shiz. Right. Yeah.

And we also listened to several podcasts and read several articles, many from the Atlantic. It seems like the Atlantic has a lot of writers and journalists who write about this particular topic. At length, by the way. At length. Absolutely. If you are looking for quality, long-form journalism, I subscribe to the Atlantic. I've subscribed for years to the Atlantic.

I love The Atlantic. I've subscribed for years to The Atlantic. I love The Atlantic. And when I have a good three and a half to four hours to kill, I'd like to read one article from The Atlantic. I'll tell you, one of the articles

in this particular set of articles that we're going to be posting on the notes for this episode had an audio attached to it. Two of them did, actually. And they were both about 40, 45 minutes long.

Yeah, that's how long the articles are. 45 minutes. I read the other one out loud and it took every bit as long as 45 minutes They're 30, they're 30 to 40 minutes. But all jokes aside, because they're quality articles, right? Like I also subscribed to the economist and it's funny because the economist has so many articles I'm interested in and they do such a great job of starting them. Yeah. And they're just like, and you're like, that would

be great if you wrote an article about it. It's a blurb, man. Is it really? In comparison? It's a blurb. Yeah. So I want to talk a little bit about a podcast that we listened to. It was Civics 101 talking about the history of the death penalty. Yep.

And the history of the death penalty is really interesting. One of the things that they talk about in that particular show was they're talking about how we had the death penalty since the origin of our nation. We've had some sort of death penalty. Also, back then, we used to chop people's arms off and shit their limbs and whatnot, because in the Constitution, it says life and limb. But you know, like, I

will say, nobody should be surprised about that, because in the 1700s and prior, the 1600s, the death penalty, these folks came, many of the settlers came from England. England had a long and storied history of the death penalty during the same time period. It just makes sense. The same people would start a colony with the same systems of punishments, right? And one of the interesting points to this talks about how the country is a Christian nation, right? It's a Christian nation and they are actually trying to get these people to repent from their crime, like the crime that

they committed. They're trying to get them to repent and putting them to death is actually helping them on that path. And so they saw it as a sort of a, like a, like a righteous. Yeah. Well, not just righteous, but it's also rehabilitative to them. Because it rehabilitates the soul. Right. And I think that's an interesting, if insanely flawed idea, because there is an idea of mercy in there. Right. You know, when I listened to that, I thought like what really interests me is like they're trying to scare these criminals into a place where they do an ultimately right thing that that writes the wrong

right that in some way puts puts something other than just revenge at the end of the sentence i think revenge is still part of that sentence sure but i think it also is like look you know if they accept jesus christ as their savior or do whatever it is that they need to do religiously then you know when they go meet their maker their maker maker will make a decision. But at least we've put their soul right. We as a society have done something to try to address the problem, right? To try to say, like, how can we make something better from this terrible crime? And if you believe in those, you know, hierarchical angel systems and all that nonsense. Sure.

Right. And, you know, celestial space. There's a logic there. There's a kind of logic, a gentle logic there. Yeah. It's interesting because in that same piece, they're talking about how there was this giant meta study. And it was a meta study of many different studies that looked at whether or not the death penalty is actually something that people will consider as a deterrent. And what they found was no evidence either way, which is interesting. They found no evidence that it is a deterrent and no evidence that it isn't a deterrent.

But one of the things that the guy says is, it's kind of just think about it. You know, we don't kill a lot of people. So anybody out there who goes out and does a murder, chances are they might not get on death row. And then the chances when they're on death row that we kill them, that we murder them is low. So it's, you know, they,

they just don't consider like he, his assumption is that they just don't even consider the death penalty as even a real threat. Yeah. Like, but it just, I was kind of smiling because like, and they bring that up too.

We listened to an Intelligence Square debate thing. And that was one of the points that was brought up. Oh, I got to say, by the way, the fucking argument against like the people that were saying we should keep the death penalty were the worst. They were so bad at everything. I do want to talk about that

because the only person that I felt at all compelled had the least set of, well, we'll talk about it. But like, you know, what kind of makes me smile about that a little bit is, you know, like you have the burden of evidence should be on we're doing this thing because it works. Right. And then if you can't provide a study that shows that it works, if all you can do is provide studies that are neutral. Yeah. Then by any reasonable standard of the burden of evidence, because there's an action being undertaken, right? So not killing somebody is, you know, it only works in the one direction, right?

Right. So the burden of proof should be on the people who are saying, we're going to kill people and we're going to kill people because it's a deterrent. And then you have to say, well, show me a study. And you can't say, well, the studies don't show it's not a deterrent. Right. Like, think about how that logic is such a bad. Right. It's so positive.

Think about that. Like, when else in your life would you accept that? Like, well, you know, babies don't not grow out of trees. Like, well, I don't even can't even follow the system of double negatives necessary for me to get there. I mean, it's like it's it's it's it's very similar to keeping a stone to keep tigers. Exactly right. I don't see any tigers around. I don't see any tigers around.

I'd like to buy you a rock. We listen to a lot of things and read a lot of things. Why do you think that we still, like most Western nations have not, they're not doing this. Most Western nations don't do this. They've abolished this. Most Western nations also don't incarcerate at the rates that we do. Right. Why do you think? Most Western nations don't do most of the rates that we do right um why do you think

most western nations don't do most of what we do most of the and you know why do we still do it is your because i think culturally we're so different than other western western nations i think we are on the surface similar to western europe but in so many incredibly fundamental ways the united states is such a cultural anomaly that so much of how, not what, but how we think about who we are nationally feels to me so different. And just, I think is just so obviously so different from the rest of the world. We are a unique cultural people. And the United States looks at itself in very different ways that Europe just, I don't even know that like, because how many other core or fundamental issues does the United

States differ from the rest of the, you know, what we would call first world? I think we're first world in a sense that like, yeah, we're all rich. Yeah. But to some degree, like our cultural values just skew so much differently. differently. I think we still have it because we have a stronger sense of individualism and individual responsibility, a much stronger sense and much less a sense of collectivism and social togetherness, or I don't know how else to better phrase that, than any other nation in the first world. There is a sense here that like, I have an ultimate responsibility to my own fate for my own decisions. And that sense is stronger and more pervasive in the American cultural identity than it is anywhere in Europe. I think by leaps and

bounds. And so with that underlying everything, an individual who behaves so out of step with the social contract is so aberrant and deserves to be retributed against, that deserves some kind of vengeance against them. And to get to our conversation we were having and didn't finish about the Intelligence Squared debate, I will say that I did not find the arguments to keep the death penalty persuasive at all. I went into it with an open mind. I really tried to do that.

I did not find their arguments to be terribly persuasive. I will say the only argument that had any persuasive weight to me was the retributive argument. The practical arguments have no weight. They have no merit, right? Like we can go through them. You can check them off a box, right? They're very easy to check off a box. The retributive argument is sort of like a gut check for the individual. Where do you sit in terms of like,

how do you feel? It's a feelings. It is absolutely a feelings thing. And so I found myself responding in some ways to that sense of like, yeah, like if any told a handful of stories like, you know, this guy set these people on fire, right? Yeah, lit them on fire. And it is very difficult not to respond to that and to say like, Sure. That one person, would I shed a tear if they died? Yeah, of course not.

No. And then the immediate counterpoint, which I love because it brings you back to reality, is that's still bad public policy. Right. Right. Any examination of the death penalty as something other than a public policy. So when somebody says, here's how I feel about the death penalty, I don't give a shit. That's not it's not interesting. It's not useful. It's not valuable. I feel one way. Yeah. But I recognize that public policy is a different set of questions. Yeah. And any attempt to override what's good public policy with how I feel because I get mad when bad things happen in the world. If I can't, is it, if I can't mix those two properly,

if I can't separate them and say, look, yeah, I know that there are times when I can be angry and righteously angry. Sure. But that's not necessarily good public policy. Is it truly retributive if they aren't doing what they did though? Right. Like, like I feel, I feel like we just give them a little bit of something to put them asleep and then they die. Right. You know, like you give them like one guy got fentanyl and like died with fentanyl. Like they shot him up with fentanyl and he just fucking opioided himself to death. Like that was the end. Remember how we were going to die in a bulldozer fight?

I'm reconsidering our options is what I'm saying. But seriously, why not light him on fire, right? The guy lit two people on fire. You have, you know, DNA evidence that proves that he's there. You know, let's go with the 100%. This person did it. Gacy, right? Gacy killed people. You don't walk over to Gacy and knock

on his door and be like, you know, we're not quite sure. You know, we found all these bodies in your basement and all this DNA evidence all over your house. And I mean, I have DNA evidence back then, but you know, I didn't actually see you kill him. So you're free to go until, you know what I mean? You find all these, there are some some definitive yeses and this is a guy is a definitive yes gacy's a definitive yes and gacy's an interesting case because i stood outside of gacy when gacy was killed gacy john wayne gacy if you don't know who he is wikipedia the guy he killed 35 to 33 or something young boys and he used to dress like a clown he's a weird motherfucker yeah to his weird motherfucker and he was a murderer and, like, I think a pedophile, right?

But worse, he was a clown. But worse, yeah. Even worse, he was a mime. Let's talk about his real clowns. He was a quiet clown. He was a brooding, quiet clown in the corner that pretended he was in a box. He was creepy as fuck. But seriously, he was an awful, awful, shitty, terrible person.

Yes, he was. Bad person. Yes. They put him to death two miles from my house. I grew up right by Statesville prison. I drove to Statesville the night he was murdered. The night the state murdered Gacy, I drove to Statesville and I stood in an area celebrating his death with a bunch of other people. There was, you know, hundreds of people there. We were all celebrating his death. And there was a group of people that were on the outside. So they separated us, right? There's a group

of people on the inside. They're like, kind of like, are you with the bride of the groom? And they say, put us with different areas. I'm with the clown? I don't know how I feel about this. God damn it, the fucking groom is a clown. And he's a switch hitter, so it really doesn't matter. But no, he,

they put us in the center, like in this little area. And then they put all the other people outside and like another barricaded area, but they were close enough to all of us so that I could walk around and blow out candles. And I was blowing out candles as a 19 year old. I was walking on, maybe I was 20. I don't know. It's around that age, but I was a shitty kid. Yeah. And I hate, I hated the idea that this guy hurt other people. And in my brain, I thought, you know what? Fuck these. These people are idiots that are standing around here. And what I realize now as an adult is that they weren't holding a vigil, at least I don't think they were, holding a vigil because they thought Gacy was a person who should be

saved. They were holding a vigil so that the state would stop being the ultimate arbiter of justice and murdering another human being. And I think that there's a difference there, right? I can hate all the crimes that Gacy did. Right. But we didn't, you know, suffocate those people. Like, we didn't suffocate Gacy like he suffocated those people with a bag over their head and watch him die. We didn't do that. We injected him with, you know, I don't know if over their head and watch him die. We didn't do that. Right.

We injected him with, you know, I don't know if it was injection or electricity back then. I don't remember. It's probably electricity. But, you know, we killed him quickly. He was dead very quickly. And, you know, those people out there, they're not the type of people that I think were saying Gacy should be, you know, let to live. They're saying this is bad policy and we should stop doing this. Yeah. You know, and that's, and that's kind of, that's kind of the driving point is like, it's, I understand the desire for retribution. I am sympathetic to that feeling.

Me too. Me too. To that, like, and, and I, and I do think that there is a place and I know we'll talk about this and I don't even know that we'll agree on this, and it'll be interesting. I do think that there is a place for both rehabilitation and punishment in a justice system. I think both of them have a place. I think the way that we do it is irrational and capricious and arbitrary and counterproductive to the ultimate goal of building a safer society. Sure. But I think that there are crimes people can commit that are heinous, that are demonstrably heinous. And like there's definitively like this is a guy who did it. Like DNA can be exculpatory, but it can also be inculpatory. And there are times when we can say like this is a person who committed a horrible act. And I am sympathetic to the desire for

justice. I know for certain that if somebody were to victimize someone that I love, and thankfully, I've never been in that position personally. So I know that my desire to want vengeance would be intense. It would be absolutely intense. So I understand that society is just a soul writ large, right? So it's nothing more than the collective getting together and saying, here's probably what we should do because we all kind of feel the same way. I recognize all of that. But you have to separate all of those feelings from the reality of how we administrate all of this. We do such a bad job of it, the death penalty. We do such a horrible job of it that at this point, I can't,

we listen to that intelligence square debate. I can't come up with one excuse to feel good about doing it. Right. Even if I wanted to, something like even if I were to want to yield to my baser instinct to say, yes, I want to watch you die. I think that you're terrible. You have hurt me and society and whatever in this unforgivable way. I want you to be killed for it. Even if I were to yield to that instinct, I have absolutely no faith that as a matter of policy that we'll do that well, that we'll do that fairly. Because we know for certain we don't do it.

Yeah. You know, it's interesting, you know, when we talk about what the, why we still have it and your idea, you know, I think I agree with what you have to say, that we definitely do have a different mindset than the rest of the world. And this is something that, that when I was doing a little reading about prisons and the way in which they handle criminals in the Scandinavian countries, and they're sort of touted as the place where, you know, there is a very different way to handle people who have broken the law. One of the interesting pieces that I found was that they don't look to their leaders, their political leaders, to talk about that sort of thing. They don't come in. There's not a guy who comes in, at least the stuff that I read. And now this stuff may be out of date. It may have changed since then.

But up until at least recently, you know, when this thing was written, there's they don't come in saying I'm the law and order guy like President President Trump did. I'm the law, law and order, law and order. I'm the law and order guy. They come in saying I'm going to be the executive of this state, but I'm going to leave all of that stuff to the experts. And they do. They leave it to people who are on, you know, really on the cutting edge of figuring out the best way to rehabilitate someone who has broken the social contract. And that's from the very most minor thing to the most major thing that you can do. And they have, they, they, they don't, they don't tout that fear, right? We have, since the beginning of this country,

had the death penalty. We've also had slavery. And we also had a group of people that were freed that were now citizens that used to be slaves, right? And they used to have lynchings back in the day. And the reason why they kept the death penalty back in the South was so that they could calm the people who were lynching people, right? We still want to lynch people. All right. We're not, how about if we do it for you? We'll just get it done for you.

Look, the problem is you don't clean up. You don't clean up. I got to do it myself. And you're not filling out this form in triplicate. What's wrong with you? There's two dead guys hanging from this tree and there there's three half-eaten pieces of pizza on the goddamn table. There's three cups of water. What the fuck?

What am I, your mother? You get a Roomba to suck up all the dead people as it goes around. But there is a culture of fear. And one of the—we listen to a daily podcast where there's a guy in nebraska who for years has been for many years who is amazing and minces no words absolutely i love that guy so much he's one of the uh state representatives in nebraska and nebraska for a brief time overturned their death penalty right And they brought it back with fear, right?

They had the governor at that time spent his own money out of pocket on money, hundreds of thousands of dollars to, to put in commercials and things that sounded so terrifying. Like we were in like the fucking walking dead times, which I want to point out was Nebraska. Yeah. Like, like, you know, like this happened

as if like Nebraska is a hotbed for anything. It's not a hotbed for crime. It's not a hotbed for violence. It's not a hotbed. Yeah. Like you can't have a hotbed. Like you're only allowed

to have boring fucking lights off missionary sex in Nebraska. It is the least hotbed state in all of america we call that marriage time no but but seriously this guy like they sold fear that's how they sold it to you right they sold it to all those people and then they had a referendum on it so they voted it out said no more death penalty then they went out and fucking rabble roused essentially look it got essentially. They voted off the death penalty and it was vetoed. Then they overrode the veto.

And they were like, fucking game, set, match, bitches. And they were like, uh-uh, Nebraska, we can all just decide. Referendum. And then they decided. And they promoted fear as if you need this penalty. You need this thing. And it's not only a part of public policy, you know, when it comes to politicians, which it probably shouldn't be.

Right. And then it's also part of, you know, it's also this fear component that we've been, it's been part of our society, I think, because there has been a group of people who want to tell you how unsafe you are, but you and I have talked for many years how the violent crime rate's going down and down and down and down and down. Right. And they want to talk about how unsafe we are.

Yeah, well, it's funny because they'll use fear. Fear is what we use to sell, right? Fear is the greatest motivating tool for any salesman. I don't care if you're selling cosmetics or you're selling the death penalty. Fear is always the driving

sales point, right? I'm going to make you afraid of something and then I'm going to sell you the solution to fix it. It's everybody. It's the greatest tool in any salesman's toolbox. And it's cheap because it's or it's effective because it's cheap and because it's easy. And, you know, it's just it plays to that part of the psyche that you can do that in a place like Nebraska. And I made jokes, but like Nebraska is not an unsafe place. Yeah. You know, it's just, it plays to that part of the psyche. That you can do that in a place like Nebraska. And I made jokes, but like, Nebraska's not an unsafe place. Yeah.

You know, it's not. There's nobody that fucking lives there. I can't even name a city in Nebraska, to be perfectly frank. I know there's Lincoln, Nebraska. Omaha? Is that in Nebraska? I think I did.

I think I did it. Is Omaha, Nebraska? Omaha is in Nebraska, and that's actually where the Wild Kingdom is. So maybe they're protected against like, Omaha! Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom! is in Nebraska and that's actually where the wild kingdom is. So maybe they're protected against like, remember? Mutual of Omaha's wild kingdom. It's like lions.

Oh, that's like a, that's like an old school PBS joke. The nerds that listen to this will get that. Somebody is like, basically they have their, their PBS tote bag and they're spinning it over their head right now. It's like,

yes, finally one for me! Mutual of Omaha! But yeah, like we sell fear in order to sell solutions to that fear. But like, I think one of the points that you made about how like our politicians are tied in with this, whereas in Scandinavia, they cede to the experts. I think culturally, it gets back to one of the other core problems we have here in America is that we don't believe in expertise. I've been thinking about this lately. We don't believe in experts. We don't believe in experts

in America because it's elitist. And that idea that we have this idea here that we're all equal. And we don't understand that equality really relates to a quality of respect and opportunity. Absolutely, right. Equality should not relate to everybody is exactly the same. Everybody's opinions are equal sign, right? That's nonsense. Nobody with a brain that's ever functioned once should ever think that. But culturally, we believe it.

Culturally, we think that every vote means the same thing. Culturally, we believe that all people are fundamentally the same, that your opinion and my opinion are the same opinion, regardless of from whence we draw our information to form our opinions. And that is a problem. And it's a structural problem that is exacerbated by 200 years of misunderstanding our own fucking history and building a truck nuts culture around that misunderstanding. It's fundamentally wrong. And it means that we distrust experts because we don't believe in the pedestal. We don't believe in expertise. We don't believe that that guy who went to college and spent 10 years in fucking higher education and then, you know, 20 years doing research.

We don't think his thoughts on his subject are worth more than Joe at the steel mill. But they are worth more. We don't believe in expertise in this country, so we will not cede policy to experts. We think anybody we elected, oh, he's a man of the people. Like to have a beer with him. Yeah. He's got some things to say about crime. What does he know about crime? We know lots about crime. Crime can be studied. Crime can be considered. It can be studied. It should be. It's like any other sociological phenomenon. It should be studied and evaluated. There's science that can be done. There's good science. We don't believe in that, Cecil.

There's science that can be done. There's good science. Yeah. We don't believe in that, Cecil. We as a people have decided expertise is not valuable. And what we like is easy solutions like Joe Arpaio, right? Let's put him out in the desert. We'll put him in pink to humiliate him. And then we'll put him in tents and make him live outside.

Because it gut checks. That's why. Because it gut checks. It makes us all feel good about how bad those people are. Right? It's the same as like spanking our kids. Like, kid did a bad thing. Gave him a wallop.

Like, it just feels like. It feels good. Well, you did bad. You got immediately punished. Beat a kid. God, that feels great. Even your hand. You know what I love is like when your hand stings from beating your kid.

And you're just like, you get that like that. You've never harmed a hair on your kid's head? I would never hit my children in any way. When your kid lights the house on fire, you hug them. Okay. Yeah, maybe. I mean, but what if they were sad they did it? They were super sad.

We do. It's all kind of part and parcel of the same thing. It's like we have, and it's part of why we don't understand our own economics either. We believe we're ultimately rational actors. Yeah, absolutely. And what we do is we get,

we hate elitists, so we hire billionaires to do the job. That's what we do. I think that's the key. Well, yeah. I mean, it kind of is, right? It's like, well, he made a lot of money. Well, let's look at that.

We don't look at things. That's not part of how we do things. We're not good at looking. Adam and Eve wants to spice up your Valentine's Day with free stuff. If you're a loyal CogDesk fan and have been using the code word, you probably have swings in every room of your house, on the porch, on the tree outside. But right now, between now and Valentine's Day,

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I mean, nobody would act against their own best. Jesus Christ. That poor making a murderer kid. You know, making a murderer is one of those things that even if you don't care about the chubby one, right? Even if you don't care about the fat one. They're all the chubby ones.

Well, that kid initially wasn't the chubby one, but then he went to jail. No, he was chubby thin chubby. Yeah, right. He went he went. Yeah. Oh, yeah. That prison is a yo-yo. Depends on how much they send them for the commissary. So they, this kid, one of the kids in there, the kid in there. So there's an adult and a kid.

If you've never seen Making a Murderer, it really sort of tries to tell a story about how, and the bent on this is that they that they really do imply that the police officers really did sort of frame this guy who was previously exonerated and currently in a case, a civil case for the bad police work that the same police department had done prior to put him in jail for many years. Extravagantly bad. Yeah, right. Over the. Extravagantly bad. Yeah. Right. Over the top, like genuinely intentionally bad. Like,

like you imagine there's, they're in the fucking court and they're keystoning around, running around, hitting each other, playing that horn sound. Yeah. But it's, it's comical bad. I mean,

it's comical bad. And so he was currently at that point trying, he was at that point trying to get a civil suit through, um, look like it was probably going to go through. And then he got arrested for this murder and they try to imply in there whether or not he was part of like that. He,

that the, the, the police officers did some shady shit to try to get them in there. And the more you watch that show and the more evidence that they show, it feels like the police officers did some shady shit to try to get him in there. And the more you watch that show and the more evidence that they show, it feels like the police officers, at least, at the very least, were very stupid. Right.

And at the very most were completely involved. And stupid to me is a stretch. Right, right. Yeah. And so you watch this show and like we said earlier, definitely go out and get all your facts. Watch, go read the Wikipedia.

Go read other articles. Read contrary articles to it that talk about it. I wouldn't say that this is not the fountain of truth that you can dip your magic cup in and understand. But watch it with a critical eye. But when you watch it, I don't care what you think about the guy who, the main guy who got caught. Watch those tapes of that kid and that confession and tell me somehow that that kid was involved because I just don't believe it. And that speaks like, let's talk about that as it relates to the Central Park Five documentary and as it relates to so many other cases that continue

to come out around this false confession. That's where you're driving. Like, you just got it. You got to like watch some of this. Just watch with your own eyes. You can watch and see. So you look at like the Central Park Five case

and it's just like the Brendan Dassey thing, right? Like the stories don't match each other. The stories are not consistent. But most importantly, the stories that are being fed to these people by the police, they don't match the established facts.

They don't match the things that we know to be true in really important, fundamental ways. Like the who, how. Like the Brendan Dassey case is crazy. Like he describes a situation that literally could not have occurred. Yeah. There is no evidence whatsoever that it is even possible that the story he told around his confession could have happened. It's even worse than that. He starts a totally different story. Right.

And gets fed every piece of information. Right. To figure out what they were saying. Because he starts with, there's a part where they're talking about the head. When they're talking about his head, the woman's head. Yeah. What happened to her head? And he said, he cut her hair off. That's what he starts with, there's a part where they're talking about the head, when they're talking about his head, the woman's head. What happened to her head? And he said,

he cut her hair off. That's what he starts with. He cut her hair off. Doesn't make any sense. No. Literally makes no sense. He's clearly just guessing. He cut her hair off.

No, come on, Brandon. What happened? And then he shifts to, he punched her or something. Like he keeps on going. Like he shifted. He doesn't know. He's guessing. guessing. And then they finally feed to him at the end of five

or six guesses who shot her in the head. He shot her in the head. Why didn't you remember that? Oh, I just thought of it. Because he doesn't know. Because he's getting fed all the information. If you watch it, it's a clear case of him being fed information. And it's not just my dumb ass who has no legal expertise that

sees this. It's federal judges that saw this and fucking ruled against it. Oh my God, this is like the most false confession I've ever seen. Well, you know,

what's crazy about that is like, let's talk about the, I want to talk about the appeals process. Yeah, yeah. I thought up until extremely recently,

very naively, I will admit, I thought that the appeals process was an opportunity to re-examine the facts of whether it's innocent. And it is not. The appeals process is a process by which you can challenge the legality of your conviction, whether your conviction was legally permissible or not. It is not a re-adjudication of the facts of your guilt or innocence. I didn't know that. I really thought that in these murder trials specifically, that an appeal was a retrial of the facts.

That's what I thought too. Before I started watching these documentaries, I had no idea. And it's super duper ultra not that. Right. And the appeals process is really so heavily weighted in favor of the state as to be nearly meaningless. The Brennan-Dassey case, the state of Wisconsin, I think the only way, the only way I can understand what happens is that they're so embarrassed and they need so much to be right and to save

face after all the national attention that this case and the surrounding cases received as Stephen Avery and Brennan-Dassey cases received, that they have to maintain these convictions, that only maintaining these convictions in their minds, that's the only way that they don't look like a bunch of fucking clown car cops, right? That's the only way for me to understand what's happening. Sure. Because the case goes through this process and it's overturned again and again and again. And the state doubles down and doubles down and doubles down up until the point that they get the right number of people who appear to have a mindset of you wouldn't be here if you weren't guilty.

And how do you get to be a federal judge like that, by the way? But can you can you understand it any other way than that? Because I can't understand. I can't understand. There's there was five people on that final panel. I think five people, three of them were women. Yeah. And two of them were on the previous panel that voted against the one guy. It was two to two to one. So they come to the first appeal. The first appeals, two women and a guy and the two women, both of them,

because you could hear the tape, right? So in the second season, it's making a murder. You can hear the tape playing in the federal court and in the federal court, these people are saying that the judges that are on the bench are saying this is literally the most egregious way in which anyone has ever had been, you know, been, been questioned. I can't believe that all of these things went wrong. Yes. His appeal, you know, it goes through,

basically it was unconstitutional what you did to him, right? Like it broke his rights. You fucked with his rights. And so then it goes back to the state and the state then shoves it back up another level. And they do decide to hear the case. And it's five people now. It's three women and two guys. And I'm thinking to myself,

I'm like, there's no way. You know, you got two of the women who already said, you already have two votes. You only need one vote out of these other three people. And they lose. I was blown away by that.

I couldn't believe it. But like, that also speaks in the Central Park Five thing is very, very similar. Like it's, but you know, one thing that they have in common, I want to talk about this too, is like, it is inexcusable, inexcusable to question children. Oh, I agree. Without, not with their parents.

Their parents don't mean shit. Don't fool yourself parents. Their parents don't mean shit. Don't fool yourself there. Their parents don't mean shit. It should be an attorney. Yeah. The only thing. Yeah. Your parent may or may not be more or better qualified. They may or may not be more or better able to handle confrontation with authority figures. You could have a parent that's, that's weak-willed. You could have a parent that's also mentally disabled. You could have a parent that's, you know, fucking negligent. Yeah. Like your parent that's also mentally disabled. You could have a parent that's fucking negligent. Your parent is not a fucking legal expert. A parent that had problems with the police in the past? Right.

None of that. I don't give a shit who you are as a parent. If your kid's being questioned, it should be law. It should be mandatory that before they're asked anything other than their fucking name and age, they get a fucking attorney. That's it. We need to all just decide that. It's fucking insane,

insane and inexcusable. And I will refuse to hear any argument about this, that at an age of under 18, I cannot enter into any contract. I can't sign a fucking... I'll give you a fucking dumbest example ever. When I was like 16 or 17, do you remember Columbia House and BMG CD clubs? I do, I do. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I signed up for them. I sent them my fucking penny or whatever. I signed up. I got a bunch of CDs. Then I bought a bunch of shit. I racked up a bunch of fucking debt with Columbia House and BMG as a 16-year-old kid. And then they started calling. And I'm like, I don't have any money. I'm like 16. I kind of just fucked this up.

And they're like, you're 16? And I was like, yeah. And they're like, okay. And they let it all go. They let it all go because I can't enter into a contract. Right. Right? I can't.

Under 18, I can't be bound to a contract. But I can be bound to a confession? Yeah. That's crazy talk. Yeah. I don't. The legal theory should hold the same way. Under the age of 18, I can't enter into a contract. I can't buy a house without guardianship. I can't do these

things because we understand that I'm not an adult. I'm not able to make adult decisions. I'm not able to make adult decisions because I don't understand the ramifications of what I'm doing and what I'm saying. I simply have not reached a level of maturity necessary for me to enter into a financial contract. But a 14-year-old can confess to murder. And that confession solicited by interrogators, one-on-one or three-against-one or whatever it is, alone and without legal representation, holds more weight than all the strength of evidence for or against that person.

Yeah. That is wrong. There's no, I can't get past it. Right. And it's not just that they ask these kids questions. Right. It's that they put these kids under duress for very long periods of time. And then they fall.

They don't know any better. And they get lied to. Yeah. You know, all you got to do is just say this stuff. You can go home. They get lied to all the time and they might not say those exact words. Right. And I don't know that they can say those exact words, but they definitely say we need to finish this up. You know, those sorts of things, they imply that it's, you know, you're, you're going to be okay. Basically they imply it very, very strongly. Like Brendan Dassey on tape and

the central park five, Brendan Dassey on tape. the Central Park Five. Brendan Dassey on tape. He's like confessing to this and he's like when can I go back? I've got a project due in sixth period. And they're like don't worry about that. We'll take care of your project. That's not the same thing as you're confessing to a crime you're never getting out of here. That I would think

as a kid who's still worried about his sixth grade fucking homework project. I would think like oh you'll get me like a hall pass sure so i can turn it in tomorrow right yeah but he's not instead they're they're gonna keep you there for the next 10 or 15 years yeah you know and it's what what it is is they're they're putting these kids under duress and they're questioning them for hours and hours and know, the central park five is a perfect example of this. When I was watching the central park five, listen to the timestamps that the, that the DA reads off. It's 10 to five in the morning. Yeah. It's 10 to five in the

morning. Yeah. You're still questioning this kid at 10 to five in the morning, right? You guys question him for how long, when did he come in? You know, when did he, you know, this, this is a kid. He probably wanted to be in bed. Like he probably was going to be in bed around 10 or 11. Right. Right. And it's five in the morning now. How long were you questioning before that? You've kept him up for, and it's not just one kid, right? There's a couple of them. And like you said, the parents are in the room for some of these. The parents are sitting right next to the kid while he's confessing because what they did with the Central Park Five, if you're unfamiliar with the case, there was a jogger who was running down, running around in Central Park. She was

beaten and raped. She was beaten and put into a coma for several days. Doesn't remember the incident either. She was beaten and it knocked it out of her memory. She does not have any memory of that incident. She wound up being this big, huge case. They needed to find somebody. And so there was a bunch of kids running around the park that night being shitheads, right? Yelling at people, chasing people, beating people up. They were being shitty, shitty kids, but they wound up being like a bunch of them got wound up being grabbed by the police. And then they, the police basically separated them and said, hey, your buddy's blaming you. You should blame him.

They're lying to the kids. Right. And the kids are thinking, well, I got to get out. I want to get out of here. And if they're lying about me, I'm sure as fuck going to say something about them because I, you know, I don't want to get I don't want to catch this case. Their game theory is not strong. Exactly. And so everybody lied about everybody else and

said he was the one, he was the one, he was the one, he was the one. And so everybody's pointing the finger at everybody else. And they're all telling totally different stories that the police are feeding them and they still get convicted. Their confessions. It's crazy. It's the craziest thing ever. But like we put so much weight on confession, but like their confessions don't make any sense. Their confessions don't match the facts of the case. The confessions don't match each other. As soon as the confessions don't match each other, like that should be enough to say like this confession is in doubt. But like one thing that is abundantly clear is that although we use lip service called, you know, guilty beyond a reasonable doubt, right? Or,

you know, innocent until proven guilty, preponderance of evidence, things along those lines. We don't mean any of it. No, we don't. We don't act in a way that demonstrates a commitment to any of that meaning, right? We don't at all. Yeah. Because as soon as somebody's in court, there is a presumption that they're there for a reason, right? You wouldn't be here if it probably almost certainly wasn't you. Right. So we're actually presumed to be guilty as soon as we start our trial. Yeah. So you go in with the weight of the world stacked against you when you're in trial. You're not really by the jury being perceived as, yeah, you know, I have no idea. I could go either way. Right. I don't know't know. That's not true.

And then when people confess, we look at the confession as the ultimate. Because, again, like- Why would you do it if you didn't do it? Why would you confess? Yeah, why would you confess? And it's because these people are absolutely psychologically beaten into it. Yeah. And it's so funny because, like, the Brendan Dassey case, when it goes to the five federal judges, you know, one of them's like, look, he wasn't like, he wasn't smacked around.

He wasn't like, yeah, right. And it's like, as if that's the only way to put somebody under extreme pressure. And, and it's interesting because I found this article in the Chicago reader and I can't post it because it's a paper copy that I have. Jesus. But, but I want to read, there was a guy in Chicago. It's not just mental torture. Chicago is famous for physical torture. Right. And so there was a guy in Chicago from Area 2, Area 2 detective.

His name was John Burge. Chicago paid over $100 million in civil settlements because of this guy. Right. Because he would torture people. And I want to read some of the people that he tortured and how he tortured them. Someone at their trial testified that he was denied access to attorney and that he never made any confession, though he was suffocated with a typewriter cover, poked in the throat, punched in the ribs and chest, kicked in the groin and the shins.

And in court, in the interview, he claimed that his handcuffs were applied extremely tightly, causing great pain in his wrists wrists and that they made racial remarks and including one comment about blacks favoring pork chops, which is interesting. I don't know. I mean, I favor a pork chop. I don't know. And also, I don't feel like that's torture. Favor over what? Yeah, right.

Right. Right. OK. The day after he allegedly received treatment, photographs showed scrapes on his wrists and a bruise on his chest. So there was there was some evidence that he was beaten. There was a gas station robbery and a person was arrested in a pair of shorts

that he had worn. The area two detectives took him to a vacant railroad viaduct where they beat him with nightsticks and flashlights. According to the suit, he suffered multiple trauma, abrasions and bruises to his neck, chest, head, shoulder, abdomen, back suffered multiple trauma, abrasions and bruises to his neck, chest, head, shoulder, abdomen, back, groin, thighs, and legs. I think that's all of it.

I think you could just say he received a giant bruise. Can we just write down where he wasn't beaten? Exactly. What is this, Charles Dickens writing it paid by the word? Exactly. Christ. He was beaten so badly that he had involuntarily urinated and defecated on himself, which actually helped prove his case against the police. The detectives removed his trousers because they couldn't stand the smell and then took him in an area too where television crew cameraman

filmed his arrival wearing a pair of shorts. The police report, however, showed that he was wearing jeans. And that was one of the things that wound up helping his case and proving that he was actually beaten. So can we just pause real quick? Because I think that there's a lesson here.

If you're ever arrested, poop yourself, shit yourself. Yeah. Basically be a skunk. Try to shoot that on the people. That's why Pepe Le Pew gets away with all that rape. Is he just another case area to detectives beat this guy,

suffocated him twice to the typewriter cover. I, after the second suffocation... The typewriter cover is not a unit tasker. I will tell you what. They went out of their way to find interesting shit to use. They got bored with just like, nah, don't bring in the paper bag. Let's use this typewriter.

Typewriter cut. Jesus. At this point, another person entered the room, had not been involved in the prior brutality, and urged the guy. This is Detective McWeenie, by the way. Are you serious right now? Detective McWeenie comes in

and says to this guy, look, do something. They're about to do something serious to you. So they beat him up a little. Yeah. And then he comes in, they're about to do

something serious to you, so you better confess to this crime. And then this guy who's been, you know, suffocated, he finds a paperclip and he starts scratching under the bench that he was suffocated and beaten and whatever inside the thing. And that was part of his case that they found. He's like, it's like fucking Alexander Dumas novel, Count of Monte Cristo.

It's crazy shit. This all happened in Chicago. I'm going to finish one more. Banks testified that three officers put a gun in his mouth and threatened to blow his head off, beat him with a flashlight, kicked him in the ankle and the stomach and said, we have something for, for, you know what I'm going to say. And he put a plastic bag over his head. They didn't use a diaper to cover it, suffocating him twice before he agreed to give a statement confessing involvement in the murder. So, you know, this is this was a very common occurrence here in Area 2 in Chicago. And I can't believe it's isolated, right? I can't. You can't make me believe that somehow not all over the country there aren't frustrated officers who, when it comes to something that they have to solve,

aren't either manipulating someone through mental torture or are just physically torturing someone to confess. Well, you know, like one thing I found interesting, I want to make a point of comparison. We watched a couple of documentaries, listened to a bunch of stuff, we read a bunch of stuff. And in several of them, there is a prevailing thread when they talk to the jurors. And one of the things that the jurors say is like, look, I was in this jury for a long time. And there was one or two people who were in there and they were just kind of browbeating me over the course of time. And so eventually, even though I had severe doubts about the case, I gave in to the consensus. And so that's how they reached verdict.

I gave in to the consensus. And so that's how they reached verdict. And I thought to myself, if regular people are willing to concede that under the most minor of social pressures, they will agree to things that violate their conscience. Why in the world would it not be the case that under significantly more intense pressure, right? A juror who has, no, he's not going to go to jail. He's not, you know, the worst thing that's going to happen to a juror is that he'll continue to have to deliberate and somebody, he'll have to have a mild confrontation. But we as people don't

like confrontation. Most people are non-confrontational by nature. Most people go out of their way to avoid confrontation. So then you put these people in a seriously confrontational situation that we are not good at contending with. And you do it over the course of many, many hours and you strip us of parity in that situation. We are not co-equal to the person we're in confrontation with. We don't have anywhere near the same power dynamic

in that situation as the cop or cops. They can bring in cop after cop when they get tired. They can get drinks. They can take a piss. They can have something to eat. You're shackled. They're not. You have none of the power.

There's no equivalency in that situation. In that, is it hard to believe that people will act against their own best interests when we can listen to juror after juror confess to violating their own conscience because they're afraid of a little bit of social anxiety. We know for certain, you can look at just the other end of the system and watch it happen. And you can hear people,

crazily, the same people who don't believe in false confessions are the same people who will concede to collapsing under less significant pressures. Yeah. It's just look at it. Just look at it. Yeah.

And one of the things that we talked about briefly, and I'd like to bring it up. Yeah. I think we should have something like a professional juror. I think that there should be someone. And I know that someone's going to send us a message and be like, that's a judge. And I get it. I get it. I think you're right there.

We can you can request a judge trial instead of a jury trial. Right. And I think there are benefits in the system for requesting a jury trial. Right. Why is a judge trial not more frequently requested? I don't know. I don't know the answer to that. And I'm sure there's listeners out there that can certainly school us on this. And I, this is a, this is a, you know, again, I'm throwing something out there that I'm probably going to get email on. There's going to be lawyers who listen who are going to say, no, that's a bad idea. And that's okay, right? I'm okay. And I'm willing to read those emails.

I actually welcome those emails that say, no, it's a bad idea to have those things. And here's why. And I'm anxious to read them. And I'm anxious to be educated on this subject. But what I find time and time again, when I hear these stories is, is that if a person was, that was their job, I don't think that that would happen. And that's what I feel like when I hear, you know, when, when I hear that they're getting bombarded with all of this type of testimony, right? There's, there's no expertise. The guy could be a, you know, he could have any job and I'm not going to pick on a job. I'm not going to

pick on some job. All jobs are, you know, essentially could have any job. And I'm not going to pick on a job. I'm not going to pick on some job. All jobs are, you know, essentially equal in this case. All jobs are not professional. Because I will say, like, I'm a video and audio editor in my mundane life. That's what I do for a living, right? I'm what they call a media specialist. And an adjudicator of forensic science. Right? Do I have to come in and have to be an expert on, you know, forensic science?

Because here's what they have to do. They have to, I have to come in and have to be an expert on forensic science? Because here's what they have to do. They have to I have to trust your expert. And then the defense might have an opposite person who's going to come in and say no. And, you know, for example, in the in this John Burge case, right in this Burge case, this is the guy who just talked about area to detective who was torturing people. He was the main guy who's torturing people. There was a case that they were trying where they had broken this guy's shoulder because they had basically stretched him out. He was, they were shocking his balls with fucking an electric machine. They had a machine.

Hold on. Yeah. I think what you're doing right now is you're telling me a story about medieval England. That's called the rack. Let's go back to a more present time. Yeah. Let's go back to a present time when they had a black box with electricity in it and they would hook it up to your balls or your ears. Right. And so that's how they would. That was an obituary. It would shock the fuck out of people. Dead serious. It's crazy to me because I read this and I was like, how the fuck did that happen?

He had a black box. He bring it in the room, called it his N-word box, by the way. Just want to say that. Did he say N-word? Because that would be kind of great actually. If he said, I just want to say that. Did he say N-word? Because that would be kind of great actually if he said I am going to I am going to shock the heck out of you.

That's what he said. You're going to do to your pants. It's going to make you feel like this is H-E double hockey sticks. But anyway. Well, gosh, it would be great if this happened in Minnesota. You know, where somebody comes in all Fargo like, boy, hey there. We're going to go in and hook these

up. It was your bottom swingers there. I got the alligator clips now. You tell me if this hurts. No, I'm kidding. It's going to hurt, okay? Don't worry about it. I made you some lemon bars for when we're done. But they have these clips, and they're clipping, they clipped it on his balls, and they clipped

it on his ears, they clipped it on his hands, and he kept using his shoulders to rub it off his ear, and they clipped it on his ears. They clipped it on his hands, and he kept using his shoulders to rub it off his ear because it would clip it on his ear. It would fucking hurt. And it would basically shock the fuck out of him, and they're shocking the fuck out of him. And it hurts, and he can't control it. He can't stop it. They keep shocking him, and he keeps knocking it off with his shoulders.

So they stretch him out. They stretch him out so far with two handcuffs that they break his shoulder. They break his shoulder, and while they're stretching him out. They stretch him out so far with two handcuffs that they break his shoulder. They break his shoulder. And while they're stretching him out, they are pressing his chest up against a steam radiator. So he gets steam radiator burns on his chest. They basically burn him on his chest. He goes to the doctor afterwards because he's got a broken shoulder and burns on his chest and and scorch marks everywhere. And then they go to trial afterwards. And this guy is saying, I did not, I fucking, they beat the fuck out of me before I confessed to this. And the jury of course is hearing, I confessed to this. That's what they're

hearing. They're not hearing. I beat the fuck out of you, whatever. So that the prosecution brings in their own witness and their own witness, uh, expert, not witness their own expert on these injuries. There's a guy from Loyola who says, there's no way that these injuries were burns. These are scrapes. He must've did this. He self-inflicted this. The thing is from when he fell down or whatever the broken shoulder. Well, the prosecution brings in a torture expert that went, that was in like Serbia and Croatia and places like that, that has like traveled the world and dug up bodies, you know, when there's like genocides and whatnot

and looked at these autopsies and stuff. And so he says, no, no, those are clearly burns. And they clearly broke his shoulder. And he demonstrates to the jury in a really interesting portion of this case, the prosecution tries to shame him in some way and be like, well, how could this possibly happen? This dude gets on his knees in front of the judge, in front of the bench. This guy jumps down and starts showing the courtroom how it could happen.

So they tried to make him feel like, how could it happen? He's like, oh, I'll show you. Let me show you how it could happen. But you got to be a guy in that jury who understands and now has to decide between these two things. And they don't have any expertise in the area and they have to trust that expertise. And like the deck is stacked because then the question we think we're asking is who's more believable, the cop or the scumbag? Yes. But that's not the question we're asking. Right.

But we think that we're asking that. Like I was thinking about the professional juror. We talked about this a couple of weeks ago and I love that idea. But, you know, I would concede if you had just one court-appointed expert that the jury could then go to. I was thinking about a couple of things. I love the idea of professional jurors. I just like, how many are you going to have? Yeah, and how many court cases? Yeah. But what about if you did a couple of things? What about if the jury was seated with an expert

based on this evidence that was going to be presented, right? There's going to be one expert that's outside the 12 that the jury can go to and ask questions. That is a neutral expert that just says, here's how forensic science works, right? Just, I don't know, you know, and they can go out. And the other thing we do that I think is fucked up is we make the jury all get in a room and kind of fight it out until they all verbally agree. Yeah. Because what that means inevitably is that the side that wins that day is the side with the biggest, strongest personalities and the people who have reservations but have weaker constitutions will frequently seed. And we know this is true because they just say it. They will frequently seed their opinion to the bigger personality in the room.

What should happen instead is they get in a room, everybody talks, and everybody says, okay, I've made up my mind. And then they don't share what their mind is. There should be an admonition that they are not allowed to. And then they all write down yes or no, and they hand it. If it's all the same, cool. And if it's not all the same, then it's not all the same. And that's it. This thing where we go into a room and we all have to verbally fight it out means that rhetorical rules win the day. It means that big personalities win the day. It means that people are going to get tired and want to go home. Two, three days in a hotel, basically taken away from your family

like that. I saw something like the OJ Simpson thing was like eight or nine months sequestered. Can you imagine being pulled away from your life for eight or nine months? You're essentially in jail. My family would be in duress. Yeah. Like there would be huge, massive problems in my life if I were sequestered from my family

for eight or nine months. Like, yeah. And not earning money and not, you know, all those things. Right. It would be a massive problem. Like not a you know, all those things. Right. Yeah. It would be a massive problem. Like not a minor.

Sure. Rokidoki. Yeah. You know, like we do it wrong. Yeah. We do it in a way that like seeks quick answers. And like, by the time these guys get there, they've been in jail for a year. Yeah.

By the time they even show up for trial to decide whether or not they're guilty, they've been in jail for a fucking year or longer. Yeah. I want to talk, I want to shift gears a little bit. Another thing about that you could do to improve when talking about false confessions, Tom, I think is we could talk, we could talk about the system in which we record these things. Yeah. You know, we have essentially unlimited space now. We have, the technology has gotten to a point now where it doesn't cost anything to have, you know, five terabytes worth of stuff that you could just record on. There's, it doesn't cost anything anymore. And I, I have, I know someone who is a Chicago police officer retired now,

and they were a murder police here in Chicago. So they were a detective in the murder, murder, whatever it is, the murder division. And so they just, all they did was try to go out and solve murders. Every day there'd be a murder case and they'd try to solve the murder, try to solve the murder. And he said to me, he's like, you know, when I bring somebody in and I want to question them, I bring them in on a rape charge so that I can have the cameras off while I question them. And then when I have the confession, then I turn the cameras back on. I say, oh, they confessed to a murder. Now I got to turn the cameras on

because that's the only time at that point. And I don't know if that's still true for the Chicago police. But, you know, think about how different it is if you could see the 14 hours leading up to the Central Park Five and them confessing. Because what we get to see

is their confession on tape back then. Now, back then you needed like a fucking entire room full of equipment to record someone video. Right. So, you know, I understand.

I mean, flip my laser. Exactly. Means they didn't have it as much right back then. Right. But now it's, it's cheap and it's tiny and you don't have to worry about it. And you could put a fucking GoPro in the corner of a fucking place for a couple hundred hours. You know, it's not, it's not that expensive

to record the entire time the door opens. Right. And we also let people get away. This is, you know, we're going to get into bad investigations here in a minute, but we also let cops get away with, oh, my, my camera malfunctioned, my camera malfunctioned while I was, you know, investigating this crime and arresting this person or whatever. And, you know, I feel like if the camera goes out from a standpoint of, oh, it malfunctioned, that's on you. Well, you got to monitor that shit.

That's not on anybody else. That's on you, man. That's on you. There's a saying in baseball, the tie goes to the runner, right? And we always do this in the legal system where the tie always goes to the cops, right? The cops always get the benefit of the doubt. Always, always, always, always. So they arrest somebody and their camera went off. So you didn't get a chance to see. And they come in with a black

eye and they're like, oh yeah, well, they fell when the camera was off. We've got to be, I think, a lot more diligent about things like that. And we aren't. We don't push back when that happens. We're purposefully not diligent, right? We're purposefully not diligent because structurally, we know we can fix a lot of these problems. And we're not even talking about massive, massive costs, right? You know, some of the solutions that we were talking about today, like, all right, well,

if you're a juvenile, you just get an attorney before we're allowed to question you. Not your fucking parent. That's bullshit. You get an attorney, you right, well, if you're a juvenile, you just get an attorney before we're allowed to question you. Not your fucking parent. That's bullshit. You get an attorney, you know, that's, that would cost nothing, right? But it wouldn't result in as many wins for the prosecution. Sure. And like you were saying, like this tie goes to the runner. It's the ideals, the ideals of our justice system are all based on that concept for the defendant, right? You're innocent until proven guilty, etc., etc. But we don't act in ways that relate to that meaningfully. We act, in fact, very much the opposite. We want the prosecutor to get wins. The more wins a prosecutor has, the better his career goes.

That's just a true thing. I have a relative who was, and he was guilty, but he was guilty of a relatively minor drug offense. And he ended up with a felony in part, well, in large part, because he confessed to it immediately because he's an idiot. He confessed immediately. And then even though he's a first time offender and all these other mitigating factors, the prosecutor is up for reelection. And that win shows that he's tough

on crime. We have a system where we look at prosecutors, we look at the district attorney, the assistant, we look at these people and we say, look, if you're not locking people up, you're not doing your job. Locking people up is not the same thing as finding the truth. And every time we get this wrong, every single time we get this wrong, that means that somebody who committed the crime did not receive justice. It means that the victim of that crime did not get justice. It means like somebody else. It's a domino effect.

Yeah. And somebody else is out there getting raped. Like, you know, like if somebody gets raped, for example, and then we put the wrong person away, at least three people have been victimized. Right. The person who was, well, potentially three. Like you've got the person who was, well, potentially three. Like you've got the person who went to jail for the wrong thing. They've become a kidnapped fucking victim of the state, right? The state kidnapped them.

That's a fucking huge, massive problem. And then whatever happens to them in prison, every single thing that happens to them in prison is now on us. If they're assaulted, that's a state assault. Like all of that's on us now. And then the victim doesn't get any relief. The victim is just fucked over on that. And then the assailant is still out, probably committing additional assaults.

So all of those are additional compounding factors. So when we don't get this right, it's massively important. Unlike so many sides of that triangle, it's massively important. But a system that rewards prosecutors just for their wins rather than for quality investigative work is hugely problematic. It just contributes to that problem. Yeah. I want to talk about, we sort of shifted gears a little into bad investigations because that's what leads to these false confessions is they didn't do a good enough job collecting things and figuring things out.

So they made a lot of assumptions and then they got the guy in there and then they figured out, let's just make sure that this guy confesses so it's an easier court case for us. There's an article that talks about, it's from the New York Times, and it talks about mug shots. Oh, yeah. Crazy. It basically take now, now they're Now it's almost like you're picking out carpet like you walk in and they just lay mugshots out in front of you and then you fold through the book and eventually. I mean, really, what they're saying is it's got to be someone in here. Find the right one. And the statistics on this are crazy. It's that one study of robbery investigations in

Houston found that eyewitnesses who claim to recognize their assailant in a police lineup had actually selected a person known to be innocent about 47% of the time. An aggregate of similar studies found the error rate closer to 37% because that's how they do it. That's what they do. They're just like, that's a lazy way to do police work. It might lead to something. But what we do is we put this idea that it's got to be somebody in here. And it leads back to one of the things you said earlier. They got to be guilty of something, right? They're in the wrong place at the wrong time. They got a mugshot. Somehow in the past, they had a mugshot. And so, well, then they're probably just a bad person because they already have a mugshot in there. Right. You know, they're already did something bad. I want to tell a story about my youth. I grew up pretty poor and I grew up in an

area of of a town that was sort of like the low rent area in this in the place where I lived. Right. It was a place where everybody, you know, cockroaches, terrible, you know, housing. But it was cheap. Right. And that's where all the poor kids lived on this one street. And it was, you know, about a five block area where there was just cheap ass apartments all up and down this area. And that's where I grew up. And while I was there, I did have run-ins with the law and I did break laws. I know I broke laws when I was a kid. And I was questioned many times throughout my life. I was picked up by the police many, many times throughout my life. I'd just be hanging out and they'd pick me up and question me. And they do it all the time because I was, you know, I wasn't just, I wasn't

just a bad kid because I was kind of a bad kid and I'll admit it. I was a bad kid, but I also wasn't like, I clearly didn't do all the things that they picked me up for. But at a certain point, they just assume that you're a bad kid, right? Yeah. You're a usual suspect. And I remember this very vividly. One night I was leaving my house with my friends and we were heading over to one of our other houses, one of their houses to spend the night. And it was a Friday night and it was coming up on curfew. So curfew in our city was 11 o'clock. And I was around, I would say I was between the ages of 11 and 13 at this point. Maybe I was a little older. Maybe I was between 11 and 14, something like that. I'm on my way to my friend's house. It's 1045. I tell my parents, I'm going

over to spend the night at their house. Okay, go walk over there. And we're trying to get over there before curfew. So we just start walking quickly down the street. Also on the same street that all these apartments are on, there's a bunch of bars, right? So there's a bunch of like, you know, just bunch of bars on the street as we're crossing the street, we're across the street and it's just three of us. We're walking, we hear out of the bar, Hey, you fucking douchebags. And these are adults. These are like in their forties adults. Right. And so we look and we don't think they're talking to us. Like, what were they talking? They start running at us.

They start running like as fast as they can across the street. And this is two drunk guys, adults running at us. Jesus. So we don't know what to do. And they're like, get the fuck over here,

you motherfuckers. So we just bolt. And you're like middle school, early high school? Early high school, middle school. You're young. We bolt. We run as fast as we can.

We're all three of us. We're just going. Well, as we start running, we're like on the same street, just coincidentally, is the police station. And so we start running as fast as we can.

Me and my buddy Stan decide we're going to go inside the police station because fuck, you know, like these guys are chasing us. There's a cop in there, whatever. Our other buddy runs off. Our other buddy runs

past the police station. He figures he can outrun him. They were old, smoking, drinking. He's right on this, by the way. He's right. I should have followed him. We run into the cop, the police station. They run in after us.

They grab my buddy Stan and start shaking him. They're shaking him. They're waving their finger in his face. I mean, they're physically assaulting him. Assaulting this kid, yeah. And we're screaming. There's guys chasing us. Right before they come in,

we're banging on the plexiglass window. There's guys chasing us. There's guys chasing us. Help before they come in, we're banging on the plexiglass window. There's guys chasing us. There's guys chasing us. Help us, help us, help us, right? Jesus. They come, these guys burst in, grab Stan. They're yelling at him. They grab me.

They're yelling at me. And we're like, what the fuck? They're like, you fucking robbed our house, you little fucks. You ever fuck with us again? And they're yelling. I mean, they're right in Stan's face. He's crying.

I'm crying. We don't know what the fuck to do. A cop walks in the room, right? Because they're plexiglass separating us. Cop walks in the room. The cop does nothing. The cop does absolutely nothing. He watches these guys yell at us. One of the guys threatens to kill my friend. He says, if you ever fuck with me, and I remember these words as if they were spoken yesterday. If you've ever fuck with me or my crew again, I'm going to fucking kill you is what he said. It's exact words. I remember it in the police. I remember it as I remember it as if it were yesterday, Tom, Jesus Christ. And we are bawling. We literally are just

like traumatized because we're, we're being threatened by an adult and this cop is watching it happen. And he's watching it happen because he thinks just like when they pick us up for all the crimes that we didn't do. You're fucking with them. Then we just, we probably deserve what these people are saying.

Right. We never saw these guys before. We don't know who these guys are, but they just presumed that we were guilty. They presumed already that we were guilty and the cops didn't care. The cops didn't give a fuck. How often is that the case when they find these kids on the street or when they find

somebody on the street that they already just assume that this person is a bad person? Yeah. Well, it's, it's, it's part of that pattern that emerges when you read these article after article and watch these documentaries that there is, Hey, I got a guy. So now let's make the evidence fit my guy. Yeah. We're going to make our, because we know you're a bad dude. And look, if there's a, there's a thought like, look, if you didn't do this, you probably did something. Right.

So let's go ahead. There was, there was an article. I don't remember which one you have to forgive me, but there's an article where a juror is, is quoted as saying something along the lines of, look, I was willing to throw him in jail for a little while, but I didn't want to give him the death sentence in case he was innocent. Right. And I thought like. It's actually worse, by the way.

Yeah, right. Yeah. It's actually worse. Being thrown in jail with life without the possibility of parole means you don't get the same legal protections as the death penalty. In many ways, the death penalty, if you're innocent, is better. Tire on the triage list. Right.

You know what I mean? Like they're going to try to make sure that they adjudicate and go after those people and more lawyers are going to go volunteer their time pro bono for things like that. Yeah. Like think about what that says. I was willing to throw this person in jail, but I'm not willing to kill this person. I sort of, I got to thinking about that. It's like, what degree of certainty should you have before you take away somebody's life by putting them in prison? You know, it's not just the years they lose. It's not even close to just the years somebody loses. If you put the wrong person in prison, our prison system is not rehabilitative. It's, it's, no, it's, it's completely, yeah, it's completely vengeance

based. Yeah. So that's going to change who you are. Think about like traumatic experiences. I mean, think about traumatic relationships you may have had in your life and how they form future relationships. You take somebody, especially in a formative year of their life, but really anytime, and you throw them in jail for months, weeks, months, years. At what point do they emerge? It's not like they emerge into the same person they went in as. They emerge different. We are the result in many ways of the experiences that we have. You're going to emerge a different person. It's not just I lost seven years, but I'm the same person. He didn't hit the fucking stop on your stopwatch, age seven years, and wake up. You had seven years worth of experiences that form who you are and how your psychology works and how your

emotional response system to things works. And then you get out and the world has moved on and you feel different and you don't have relationships that you used to have. And the ones that you do have and are used to for the last seven years are non-functional in the rest of society. It's fucking hell on earth to do that to somebody. We watched that Intelligence Squared thing and there was a guy who I remember saying something like, you know, we throw these guys in jail and life without parole isn't so bad. That's what he said. Yeah. They get the TVs and shit. Yeah. He's like, it's not even punishment. It's like, are you fucking kidding me? Are you kidding me? Like everything we know about how people feel, how their psychology is affected, the violence, the brutality, the lack of opportunity. It's incredible punishment to strip somebody of

their freedom. Yeah. To lock somebody away. When he said that, I almost hit the fucking floor. Yeah. It's interesting because, you know, this idea that it's a cushy thing is so, it's so blown away by the actual facts of what prisoners have to deal with, right? Um, these people that go in that are, uh, that are convicted of crimes that they didn't commit, that is irreparable. You know what I mean? It's irreparable. There's no money that makes that back.

Right. And it's funny because a while back, I used to think the reason why we don't do the death penalty is because you just can't change your mind. You can't change your mind. And it's one of those things that you just can't get back. You can't get back. And then I started thinking about it. You can't change your mind, right? You can't change your mind. And it's one of those things that, you know, you just can't get back, right? You can't get back. And then I started thinking about like, you know what? We also do that to people who spend a lot of time in prison, 20 years. You can't get that back. You're never 18 again, right? You're never without that entire experience, that 20 years in jail, that PTSD that that causes. You're never without that. That's yours forever. We gave that

to you. The state gave that to you because we're lazy and we're overworked and we just don't want to have to deal with it. So this is going to be continued next week. We did not get to everything we wanted to talk about. Tom and I had a lot to talk about. We covered a lot of ground this time. We're going to cover, it's going to be another serious show next time, but we think it's interesting enough to split into two shows. So tune in next time, but we're going to leave you

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