MythBusters Helped a Wrongly Convicted Man Prove His Innocence

&gt; In 2021, Illinois and Oregon became the first states to ban the use of deception during interrogations of minors ...<p>Is there any other modern democracy that allows deception as a method of interrogation to the same extent as the US?<p>In my country, Germany, deception during interrogations is forbitten even for adults. There exist only some minor exceptions, for example, that prior wrong ideas of the suspects may be exploited.<p>The central paragraph of the law is as follows:<p>(1) The accused&#x27;s freedom to decide and exercise his or her will may not be impaired by ill-treatment, by fatigue, by physical intervention, by the administration of drugs, by torment [Quälerei], by deception [Täuschung] or by hypnosis. Coercion may only be used to the extent permitted by the law of criminal procedure. The threat of a measure inadmissible under its provisions and the promise of an advantage not provided for by law shall be prohibited.<p>(2) Measures that impair the accused&#x27;s capacity to remember or to reason shall not be permitted.<p>(3) The prohibition in sections 1 and 2 shall apply without regard to the consent of the accused. Statements made in violation of this prohibition may not be used even if the accused consents to their use.<p>§ 136a StPO -- German text at <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.gesetze-im-internet.de&#x2F;stpo&#x2F;__136a.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.gesetze-im-internet.de&#x2F;stpo&#x2F;__136a.html</a>

What scares me about US legal system is; Elected prosectutors are motivated by high conviction rate for obvious reasons (re-election and politics of it all). Add the fact that their line of work requires competitive personalities and you become just but a number, especially if you don&#x27;t have competent cousel. I&#x27;m not saying ALL public defendors are incompetent, but we see to many cases of ineffective representation when the accused cannot afford a high powered attorney.<p>Yes - you should be scared of ordinary prosectutors in suits doing their &quot;best&quot; job more than a gang member for example! They want are motivated to win at all cost... short of obviously illegal ways.

Curb Your Enthusiasm was filming an episode during a baseball game. A man accused of killing someone walked into frame as part of the crowd and that was proof of his location at the time of the crime.<p>YouTube video of 60 Minutes Australia: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=3V5Cj8d43Yw" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=3V5Cj8d43Yw</a>

What kind of compensation do these people typically get? I can&#x27;t imagine what compensation would be enough for losing 35 years of your life, especially the years 18-53. There goes almost all dreams of becoming famous, meeting your soulmate, starting a family, etc.

&gt; But soon after, a judge later decided that they would only receive a suppression hearing — which would allow them to motion to suppress their false confessions — instead of granting them a new trial. At that hearing, their motions were denied.<p>One thing I&#x27;d like to know is what exactly happened here. Obviously there were multiple miscarriages of justice, but this seems like a pertinent one.<p>EDIT: (obviously not _the most_ pertinent one, but still one I&#x27;d like details&#x2F;reasoning on. Why would the judge do that, once they had the evidence in front of them).

Except, a lit cigarette <i>can</i> ignite a pool of gasoline. All those videos with stupid people holding cigarettes and igniting vapours at the gas station are proof that gasoline can be ignited with a cigarette.<p>What you need is for the cigarette to have enough time in contact with right concentration of vapours (2% to 8% by volume). Too little but also too much and you will not get it ignited.<p>Here is a handy table listing necessary concentrations: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.engineeringtoolbox.com&#x2F;explosive-concentration-limits-d_423.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.engineeringtoolbox.com&#x2F;explosive-concentration-l...</a><p>Now, if you just drop the cigarette into a bucket of gasoline it will not ignite. This is because on a typical small pool&#x2F;bucket of gasoline the layer with the right concentration of vapours is very thin and the cigarette does not fly long enough through it to ignite it before it reaches the surface and gets completely doused.<p>There is couple of ways this can be prevented, the easiest is if you let the cigarette lay close to the pool of gasoline but not exactly within it. Drop it on the part of ground that only has very little gasoline on it so that the cigarette will not immediately get doused with it and can lay there waiting for the right concentration of vapours to happen. Bonus points if part of the cigarette get damp with gasoline.<p>Another way is if the ground is hot and there is a lot of vapours. Or if there is very little wind. Or if the pool is somehow enclosed so that a fairly thick layer of vapour can form before it gets blown.

This reminds me of how people get angry at me whenever I poke holes in the science of movies. Movies affect people&#x27;s ideas of what is possible and what is impossible.<p>This is why I&#x27;m also quite against, in the general case, post-apocalyptic movies that predict a future based on non-science impossible things happening. Many spaceflight movies and TV shows for example show very bad things in the future giving people a false impression that the future will be worse than the past even that goes against direct evidence that throughout human history things have trended better, on average, every single year with a few moments of worsening.

Such a great show.<p>They also censored themselves when they discovered a recipe for an incredibly easy and powerful explosive. I throw that out there as a case of self-regulation in the marketplace of ideas.<p>Edit: Adam Savage talking about it -- <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;nerdist.com&#x2F;article&#x2F;mythbusters-destroyed-all-evidence-of-an-easy-to-make-explosive&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;nerdist.com&#x2F;article&#x2F;mythbusters-destroyed-all-eviden...</a><p>Apparently it was <i>not</i> well known, so not an original discovery but still a legitimate use of the word.<p>My comment was a point about censorship in that it can be the right thing to do. I&#x27;m curious AF about what the recipe is but am ok with not knowing and and knowing that effectively no one else does.

I could see some TV producer reading this title and pitching a Mythbusters like show where they try to recreate crimes to show if the official version is plausible.<p>I bet it would be a huge hit, add an extra often graphic layer to the hugely popular true crime with the added bonus of potentially creating another Serial like situation where your fan base are positive of someone&#x27;s innocence.

So if it’s impossible to light a pool of gasoline with a match, what is being used in movies when this appears to happen?

I wanted to donate to his GoFundMe, but the link says the campaign has been taken down??<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.gofundme.com&#x2F;f&#x2F;us2zh-free-after-35-years-in-prison-innocent%5D" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.gofundme.com&#x2F;f&#x2F;us2zh-free-after-35-years-in-pris...</a><p>(Click “donate now” button to see what I mean)

&gt; Deceptive tactics — like offering leniency in exchange for a confession or falsely telling children they can go home if they confess — have been identified as risk factors for false confessions, and young people are especially vulnerable to falsely confessing as a result of these tactics.<p>The great american justice system

So, what happened to the police officers that tortured multiple suspects across multiple cases?

So it took 10 years after they found the evidence to even have an evidentiary hearing and another 5 to get them out? This is enraging.

Even if the cigarette gasoline thing were possible, just, how the heck does this situation even happen? Doesn&#x27;t this belong as an example in a war movie about nazi germany or north korea?<p>&gt; When Mr. Galvan asserted his innocence, Detective Switski beat him, Mr. Galvan said. Through the walls, his older brother Isaac listened helplessly to the detective’s yelling and John’s cries. [...] Detective Switski also threatened John, telling him he would face the death penalty and end up “laying next to” his late father. [...] [The defendants] — 18, 20, and 22, respectively at the time — were all convicted and sentenced to life in prison without parole [for setting one building on fire which lead to the death of two persons].<p>A lifetime in prison, for an 18-year-old, for setting one house on fire? Even with the intent to kill, that seems very excessive. I&#x27;d be curious how murder through arson in the USA and other countries turned out if anyone happens to know of any.<p>A quick check on the Dutch wikipedia for Moord reveals that the maximum sentence for murder is thirty years. Belgium and Germany have life sentences, but then the Netherlands is the only EU country where a life sentence is actually the rest of your life (from <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;nl.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Levenslange_gevangenisstraf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;nl.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Levenslange_gevangenisstraf</a>). Depending on whether the person was already 18 at the time the arson was committed, in Germany the highest amount of prison you can get as a minor is 10 years. All not mild at all, and if the motive and method are all firmly established then indeed it shouldn&#x27;t be, but quite a difference from &quot;you will stay incarcerated and then you die&quot;.<p>&gt; The court concluded that without John’s false confession, which he did not give voluntarily, “the State’s case was nonexistent.”<p>I listen to a podcast sometimes called Napleiten, which is quite interesting. It&#x27;s not super legally technical, but it sounded like, in the Netherlands, it&#x27;s effectively impossible to convict someone solely based on a confession. There has to be other (even if only circumstantial) evidence supporting the claim. (Edit: this is correct, already since 1926 it seems, according to <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;nl.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Valse_bekentenis" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;nl.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Valse_bekentenis</a> and <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;wetten.overheid.nl&#x2F;BWBR0001903&#x2F;2022-10-01&#x2F;0&#x2F;BoekTweede&#x2F;TiteldeelVI&#x2F;AfdelingDerde&#x2F;Artikel341&#x2F;informatie#tab-wijzigingenoverzicht" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;wetten.overheid.nl&#x2F;BWBR0001903&#x2F;2022-10-01&#x2F;0&#x2F;BoekTwee...</a>). Even without torture, false confessions are a thing, which I thought was well known.<p>And then to top it all off, the thing described in the confession isn&#x27;t even physically possible. But fair enough, that&#x27;s not something one would necessarily think to question (in the lawyer&#x27;s words: &quot;I feel like all of us have seen [this in] movies [...] and I really had never given much thought to whether or not that might be real&quot;).<p>Edit: as an interesting aside, I found while reading up on false confessions that, in Sweden, 130 people confessed to the same murder. The prime minister was shot in 1986, leading to the longest running murder investigation in the country. 788 firearms were tested but not one could be conclusively linked to the bullets found. 10k people were interrogated, some more than once. 130 confessions were obtained. The person who they now assume did it (but has since died) was not among the confessions. Source is unfortunately in Dutch <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;nos.nl&#x2F;artikel&#x2F;2336792-zweedse-om-moordzaak-premier-palme-gesloten-hoofdverdachte-overleden" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;nos.nl&#x2F;artikel&#x2F;2336792-zweedse-om-moordzaak-premier-...</a>

So why is deception wrong in an interrogation? I can see some of the other tactics as problematic, but not that directly.

This is even more fucked up than the title suggests. It&#x27;s not that a Mythbusters episode helped a man prove his innocence, it helped him overthrow a false confession he gave under coercion!<p>TL;DR: 18 year old was forced by a detective with threats and violence to sign a false confession and despite that detective having been accused of multiple cases of forced and falsified confessions, the way he finally got out after 20 years of a life sentence later was by finding a scientific impossibility in the <i>fabricated and coerced confession</i>.<p>Like yeah, &quot;yay science!&quot; and it&#x27;s a great thing he finally got out, but how is the real story here not that once you sign a confession, you&#x27;re basically fucked no matter what the circumstances of the confession were?!? I guess this might not be a surprise to people in or more familiar with the US, but holy shit it&#x27;s scary to me as an outsider from a (yes, I&#x27;ll say it) actually developed county!

I see lots of these &quot;wrongful conviction&quot; articles that are not very convincing. Claiming that we somehow know better decades later with less than 1% of the evidence still available that the original judge and jury had seems egotistical and foolish.

A couple things misleading about the title.<p>1) Mythbusters wasn’t aware of this case<p>2) His confession under duress was the major factor in the release<p>&gt; In 2019, the appellate court granted John post-conviction relief on the grounds of actual innocence — a rarity in Illinois — largely based on the abuse used to coerce a false confession from John.

Maybe this has always been obvious to everybody but the American justice system is not about truth or fairness.<p>The goal is to convict no matter what. That is how the incentives are lined up.<p>Case in point: the (famous) Serial podcast started about the (now evidently) wrongful conviction of a teenager. He was recently released after 20+ years because of a note found written by a prosecutor that pointed to other plausible suspects, information never shared with the defence.<p>You are very unlikely to ever be judged by a jury of your peers. You are much more likely to not &#x27;risk&#x27; that and take the plea deal. From the perspective of a European (and we have our issues) it sounds the system is fundamentally rotten.<p>The mythbuster story only highlight how basic truth finding isn&#x27;t really an issue.