I Don't Believe In Contests, But . . .

Today was supposed to be the deadline for submitting material to the Alaska Press Club Annual Contest.  These are awards the organization gives out to its members every year.  There are lots and lots of categories and not too much about how they are judged.  My understanding is that the submissions are sent out to judges out of state - a different judge for each category - and they decide.

Each submission costs $15 to send in by the early deadline and $20 by the late deadline.  Today was the early deadline, but I got an email saying it was extended until tomorrow.  The fees, from what I can tell, help pay for the Press Club, which puts on an annual conference that has pretty interesting speakers from around the country and beyond.  I've done a few posts from the conferences over the last couple of years.

I'm leary, though of these kinds of contests.  Do they really mean anything?  I submitted stuff for a couple of categories a few years ago in the hopes that there weren't many bloggers who would submit and if I won, I could then point to my Press Club award as some sort of independent evaluation that the blog was not just one of the thousands of Alaska blogs.  I even won a couple of awards which served my purpose.  The next year all my submissions were lost.  I got a refund eventually.  Last year I got a couple more awards - in the best news and current events blog category and in the best commentary blog category.  I even got an award in the arts reporting, which wasn't restricted to blogs.

I have continued to participate in the contest because I find it useful to go through a year's worth of posts and assess how well I did.  Are there posts I'm proud enough to submit?  Reviewing them makes me proud sometimes and often makes me cringe.

So I'm hoping to have a list of posts to send in tomorrow for the best news and current events blogs category again.  And also maybe a couple of other categories.  Looking through the list of categories, it appears they've combined the news blog and commentary blog and added a 'best feature blog' category.  I've been trying to review the year's worth of posts, and I have some long lists of potential ones to submit, but I'm glad for the extra day.  But winnowing them down to about ten to package together is hard.

I was trying to get posts that I thought were good and important.  But as I made a last sweep through Blogspot's back pages that shows number of hits and comments, I was surprised by which posts had the most hits.

Comments about computer problems score high.   I don't get that many hits.  It's hard to say because the two different measures I use differ wildly.  Statcounter says I average about 9000 page views a month or 300 a day.  GoogleAnalytics gives me about 1500 - 2000 page views a day.  That's a big gap.  Of course, those hits aren't all for the current day's post.  There are over 5000 posts in the archives and google send people into those older posts.

My hypothesis about the relatively low number of comments is that my writing is usually not confrontative or inflammatory.  It's more calm and reasoned.  People don't feel compelled to disagree or correct errors.  Another possible explanation is that many posts are so long and complicated that people never get to the comment button.  But I get enough feedback from folks that the people who matter in particular issues do read what I write about those issues.

So, this list is much longer than I can offer the Press Club, and these aren't necessarily my favorite posts, though some are.  They're just the posts with the greatest number of hits (from Blogspot.)  I'm putting the number of hits and comments next to them.  If there's only one number, it's the number of hits and there were no comments.

Here are posts that the most readers saw.

Sitemeter Out of Control  -  2374 hits  24 comments
http://whatdoino-steve.blogspot.com/2015/06/sitemeter-out-of-control.html

Happy Thanksgiving Political Correctness  1648    I do think this is an important post.  I was very surprised to see it had gotten so many hits.

Selma's Garbage Bag Problem  -  1156  6   Again, surprised about this.  This is not a very important post, though it does fit the 'how do you know what you know?' theme of the blog.

Famous People Born In 1915 - It Was A Very Good Year  -  1117   -  This is an interesting post and it makes sense that lots of people got here.  There was a follow-up post or two.

The Impact of Modern Day Shaming - 784  14   - Not a bad post, it looks at how people judging others on the internet can really disrupt others' lives.  A little herd mentality.  Another ways of knowing post.

Hello Statcounter Goodbye Sitementer - 567  -  This is a followup to Sitemeter Out of Control.

Why I Live Here - Quill Bailey and Rachel Barton Pine, and Eduard Zilberkant Play Down The Street - 507 4   I really like that this one did well.

Would More Women Police Officers Reduce Police Violence?    - 496  A solid post.  One I'm considering for my list for the Press Club.

Soon I'll do the posts that I liked the post.

Serendipity? Coincidence? Or Is Everything Just Connected?

We tend to see coincidences all the time, that there's a million to one chance of these things happening.  But I'm convinced it's just that most people are bad at math and worse at statistics and probability.  I did a post in 2014 on a chance meeting I had once where it turned out the odds were not really as great as they first seemed.

That's all introduction to two connections that came from reading last week.  Amazing how reading books fills in holes in one's knowledge.  I'd picked up two books from my daughter and son-in-law's bookshelves while waiting for things to get moving.  One fairly deep, one more a sensational "action packed thrill ride" as the back cover described it.

1.  Here's a headline from last week:

"Putin's agents accused of killing Litvinenko left polonium radiation in British embassy"

Normally, I'd have just read the polonium part and it wouldn't have meant anything.  It would have been just another word.  Even though I didn't understand it, I got the context, and probably wouldn't have looked it up.  Though blogging has gotten me to look up things a lot more so I don't miss something before I post.

But I've been reading a biography of Marie Curie - Obsessive Genius  by Barbara Goldsmith.  As part of Curie's discovery of radioactivity and of radium, she and her husband Pierre also discovered another radioactive element which she called polonium after her native country Poland. (Her maiden name was Sklodowski.)  The discussion of the process of discovering polonium suggests the difficulty of separating it from other substances and of measuring it, but also of its power:

"Pierre scrawled in their workbook that Marie had produced a substance accompanying bismuth that was 17 times more radioactive than pure uranium alone, then two weeks later 150 times as radioactive, then 300, then 330.  The radioactivity of this last substance was so great that Marie was convinced she had discovered a new element.  But how to confirm it?  A sure way was by a fetid now as spectroscopy and the EPCI was fortunate in having a resident expert in this field, Eugéne Demarçay.  Spectroscopy involved the heating of an element until it became a glowing gas and then refracting the light it emitted through a prism.  This resulted in a rainbow pattern of light, or spectra.  No two elements produced the same pattern of light.  .  .  Demarçay tested Marie's substance but said it was not sufficiently pure to produce a spectrum.  Though bitterly disappointed, she marched back to the laboratory.  Within ten days she had, in her words, "obtained a substance 400 times as active as uranium alone."  Demarçay tested this substance, but once again could not produce a clear spectral line." [p. 86]

But given other researchers racing to publish, they published their results, with appropriate qualifications, and eventually, the existence of a new element, polonium, was established.


2.  Jack Reacher, the hero of Lee Child's Bad Luck And Trouble, finds himself in Seattle (as I do right now.)  He had to immediately get to LA.

"[He] bought a one-way ticket on United to LAX.  He used his passport for ID and his ATM card as a debit card.  The one-way walk-up fare was outrageous.  Alaska Airlines would have been cheaper, but Reacher hated Alaska Airlines.  They put a scripture card on their meal trays.  Ruined his appetite."

I did have to smile.   I fly on Alaska Airlines a lot.   I also had to look at when the book was published. Copyright was 2007.  I remember those prayer cards.  They were religiously fairly bland, but still irksome to have a corporation that had me locked in to flying tube for several hours telling me that I needed to pray.  But the cards are gone now.   Alaska Airlines didn't stop using the prayer cards until 2012.  Of course, the free meal trays on flights are also gone.  I wonder how long it took Alaska Airlines folks to find out they'd been slammed in a "#1 New York Times Bestselling author" as the book jacket proclaims.  I guess that means that at least one of his books had been number one, but not this one.


Coincidences?  That I read about polonium in the news and in the book at just about the same time?  No.  Many books I read connect directly to something else that's going on while I'm reading the book. If you read a lot, you're going to know more.  If you know enough stuff, you're going to find connections to what you know everywhere.  And as you know more, words like polonium take on deeper meanings, ideas grow from slogans to complex relationships.  You start seeing patterns.  Things start to make sense. The complexity part was one of the reasons I posted the cartoon the other day.

What If Media Audio For Black and White Street Violence Were Switched?

We took our granddaughter to a music class.  You know, sit in a circle, move your arms and legs to the music, dance around, keep time with sticks, and other toddler appropriate rhythm activities.  The teacher singing songs to children and making them all feel comfortable and getting them involved.

But there was more to this talented woman that playing with toddlers.  We got to talking before the class and she said she was really interested in how things seem versus how they really are, about how people know things.  As we talked more she suggested this video, which is a pretty good followup to yesterday's post.

It looks at media coverage of street violence - black lives matter demonstrations and white students after a sports loss.  Amazing the different rhetoric - thugs vs. students,  riot vs. party gone awry, criminals v. young people.  Coverage of black demonstrations questions "where's the leadership" but when white students turning over cars and burning the campus there are no question about where their parents are.

Then they replay the shots of white violence, but use the audio from coverage of black protests.

A great way to get people to see how the media subtly projects racist views that see blacks as bad guys and whites as just getting a bit out of hand.




This comes from a group called Brave New Films.


[Yet another Feedburner problem.  This seems to be getting all too common. I add these notices for two reasons. 1.  For those who found this post another way, I'm sorry if you were fooled into coming back. And 2.   I'm also keeping track of how many times Feedburner takes more than an hour or two to kick in.]

"They stomp on our neck, , ,"

This is the kind of rhetoric that gets conservatives telling black protestors to stop whining.

Except this wasn't black lives matter folks who said this.  No, this was my former governor when she endorsed Donald Trump the other day.

From New York Times (Palin's Trump endorsement speech):

“They stomp on our neck, and then they tell us, ‘Just chill, O.K., just relax.’ Well, look, we are mad, and we’ve been had. They need to get used to it.”

It's amazing how people can feel their own pain and get outraged about it, but have no patience for the pain of others.  And that goes for liberals who can't get into the heads of poor white males who see their position in the world declining rapidly.  I'm not saying these folks are right, but at least I can imagine why they're mad.


And here's another Palin bit I picked up at Immoral Minority that he got from ABC.

"My family is no different than other families that are dealing with some of the ramifications of war. And just really appreciate people who will support our troops and make sure that they are treated better than illegal immigrants for one."

Let's look at that second sentence.

"support our troops and make sure they are treated better than illegal immigrants for one."

First, let's look at the term 'illegal immigrants.'   What makes an immigrant 'illegal'? I think what people actually mean by this term is something like 'immigrant who broke the law coming into the US"?   Cause if that's the case, shouldn't we call US citizens who break the law while living here "illegal citizens."?  Like people who drive over the speed limit?  Or drive while legally drunk?  Or who punch out their girlfriends?

Second, what about our troops who ARE illegal immigrants?  What do you do then?  Distinguish between our troops who are fully documented US citizens or residents and those troops who are not?  We could come up with a catchy slogan, "Support our troops, but only if they are legal US residents."

Yes, for those scratching their heads about 'illegal' troops, the military has a program to take in undocumented immigrants.  A couple of 2014 bills, for example, to expand this practice were sponsored by Republicans: Reps. Mike Coffman, R-Colo., and Jeff Denham, R-Calif.

Why, you might ask, do I even bother looking at what Palin says?  Mostly I don't, but these quotes were in my face online (another good reason to be online less) and I like to have tidbits like this ready in case I run into a Palin/Trump believer.  Unfortunately, most of them seem to be so busy being righteously indignant about their loss of privilege with the erosion of racial and gender discrimination that facts and rational arguments don't make an impact.

A Bit of Exercise

The sun's been finding big holes in the clouds that dumped a couple of inches of rain yesterday here on Bainbridge Island, so I grabbed my daughter's bike and moved my legs.  I stopped at Manitou Beach, a tiny stretch of rocks and shells and driftwood with a mirage of downtown Seattle floating out in the distance.

Looking closer to in.

A driftwood shellf.

A stray rain cloud blew by while I was stopped at the beach so I decided to head back.  But the sun was out again on the way home.  It's setting now, still light, but the temp has dropped about 20 degrees since earlier this afternoon.  

Bittersweet Humor - Science v. Everything Else And Delta's Breakup Letter To Juneau

This certainly is relevant to this blog's theme of how we know things.

Click to enlarge and focus - Found in LA Times Jan 20, 2015

My immediate reaction was a bittersweet smile.  So true.  So sad.  But this really depends on how one defines science.

Full blown rigorous western science with quantification and experimenting doesn't answer every question, but not everything can be broken down and measured.  Particularly social behaviors.

And there are less rigorous (in a pure science sense) ways of knowing.  Scientists in Alaska have learned to pay attention to traditional Native Alaskan knowledge on things like weather, animal behavior, ice conditions, medicinal herbs etc.  There's just a long accumulation of knowledge over generations.

Even the divide between simple, quick, superficial answers versus more complex ones can be questioned.  Many biblical justifications we hear are long and complex.  They can also be just wrong. And there is also a lot of wisdom in the bible, but like with the Constitution, it has to be interpreted in the context of what science has since revealed.  For instance the requirements to rotate crops, to leave the leftover harvests on the ground for the hungry, the ideas about jubilee years when debts are forgiven, are all good for social animals to heed.

I'll leave it at that.  It's a heavy, grey, rainy day on Bainbridge Island, makes Anchorage inviting, especially with the reports I'm seeing on great auroras.   I've got a short time here before I'm playing grandpa again..

So let me offer you, for another bittersweet smile,  this link to Delta's breakup letter to Juneau posted on One Hot Mess Alaska.  

Why Our Factory School System Fails Many Students

I'm reading a biography of Marie Curie and I was struck by the description of two key players - Curie's husband Pierre and New Zealand born scientist Ernest Rutherford.  Both were very slow in learning to read and write, but their minds were already working overtime on science. Consider what would happen to these kids in your local school district.

From Obsessive Genius:  The Inner World of Marie Curie by Barbara Goldsmith:

"At an early age [Pierre Curie] was unable to read or write but had an ability to visualize mathematical concepts far beyond his years.  His father, unusually enlightened for his time (1860's France), had realized that his son's spirit would be broken in a regular school.  He had decided on home schooling Pierre, aided by his wife an Jacques  Today, one would diagnose Pierre Curie as dyslexic.  His handwriting remained that of a child and his spelling was abominable.  .   .
At fourteen, Pierre developed an attachment to an excellent tutor who taught him mathematics and latin.  By the age of sixteen he had received his science baccalaureate and  . . . taking a degree in physics at the Sorbonne and enrolling at the School of Pharmacy in Paris . . ." (p. 57)

And later he would get a Nobel Prize in physics with his wife Marie.

And then there's a similar account a little later:

". . . [in] 1883, a boy of eleven, Ernest Rutherford, stood on the porch a New Zealand farmhouse while a thunderstorm approached.  His father, awakened by he storm, went downstairs to join his son.  What was he doing?  Ernest replied that he had figured out that by counting the seconds between the lightening flash and the thunderclap and allowing one second for the sound to travel 400 years, he could tell how close they were to the storm's center.  Until then Ernest, one of twele children of a potato farmer, had like Pierre Curie been considered slow.  Home-schooled, at eleven he could read but not write.  At twelve, he was lucky enough to find the first of a series of gifted teachers who inspired him to learn.  When he received his first full scholarship he told his mother, "I'e dug my last potato." [p. 80]

Ernest Rutherford went on to get the Nobel Prize in chemistry, though this bio doesn't mention that he  was slow to reading and writing.  A shame.


Why Is This Important?

Schooling used to be reserved for those who could afford to hire tutors for the kids.  As we moved to mass production schooling, we adopted the rationale of mass production factories.  Except in factories, the raw materials are relatively the same, whereas kids aren't.

But our schools have curricula that assume a kid's ability in all subjects will be at a certain level at a certain age.  If they aren't, the kid is considered a bit dim.  I've posted on the subject before.  Kids who do not have an academic bent, often learn fairly quickly that they are not as good as the others.  Instead of seeing where each kid is and then designing a curriculum for the kid, we design a curriculum for all kids a certain age and force the kid to conform or fail.

In doing so, we waste so many brains.  We cause kids to grow up feeling inferior and marginalized.  I'm sure a lot of home schooling parents and charter school supporters are people whose own school experiences weren't positive.

And this is one of those areas where the people on the left and the right agree there's a problem, but disagree on the solution.


UPDATED 1:30pm:  I probably should have said I'm not necessarily endorsing the book or the NYTimes review of it.  The best thing about the book is that it's short and gives some insight that I wouldn't otherwise have on Curie.  But I also wonder about how Goldsmith chose what to include and what not?  I'm sure it's not an accident that she put in the two references quoted above about kids who learned to read late, but were otherwise geniuses.  But the example of the thunderstorm in Obsessive Genius leaves out a part listed in the Rutherford link.  That he'd gotten a book on science in school that had an experiment about how to figure out the distance away of a cannon.  It's still clever to transfer that experiment to the thunder, but not as original as it might seem.  It's also at odds with the quote about him being kept out of school still when he was eleven.  There's not enough detail in the notes for me to understand how she determined what was the more accurate interpretation of the paper trail on Curie and others.

I'm adding this because there's yet another Feedburner problem.  This seems to be getting all too common. I add this for two reasons. For those who found this post another way, I'm sorry if you were fooled into coming back. And I'm also keeping track of how many times Feedburner takes more than an hour or two to kick in.] UPDATED 6:30pm:  The second try didn't catch Feedburner either. I found some unnecessary html code had gotten into the post (probably from cutting and pasting the quotes). Let's see if getting rid of that helps. But this one is a little trickier because there was a comment which gets lost when I delete the previous version of this post (so it's not up on the blog twice) and so I'm including the comment here at the end of the post.

UnknownWednesday, January 20, 2016 at 2:43:00 PM AKSTRemember when they would teach children to ask questions? Now they drug the kids who ask too many questions.

This time it got picked up within a minute.

Confessions Part 2 As We Leave Anchorage

I posted some thoughts on confessions just before boarding a plane to Seattle.  But I had more thoughts as we took off and before we got into the clouds.

Cook Inlet Ice as we take off

Making a Murderer is a disturbing yet compelling Netflix documentary series.  I gave some details of the confession - what it sounded like in the news and how it was actually obtained - in the previous post.

Here are some more thoughts the show raised for me.

Some specific issues for me:

The Certainty of the prosecutors and the defense attorneys.  The prosecutor and the investigators - even the initial court appointed defense attorney - were all certain that Steve Avery (Brendan's uncle) was guilty and that Brendan was an accomplice.  They didn't even consider other leads.  This certainty seemed to justify the way they got the confession.  They knew for sure that Brendan was guilty and they just needed to get him to admit it.  The defense attorneys were also certain.  The first court appointed attorney was sure of his guilt.  Later, the better attorneys who took over were sure of Steven Avery's and Brendan's innocence.  It's the job of the defense attorney to defend the accused.  But it's the job of the prosecutor to uphold justice.  His job in court is to present the evidence against the accused, but when information comes out that raises doubts, he should just relentlessly go after a conviction.  If the wrong person is convicted, it means the actual murderer is still loose and liable to find new victims.


Getting a Confession - How far to push?  If someone is guilty, it's better for the prosecution to get a confession.  It makes it easier to convict and you can get evidence on other culprits.  Prosecutors even make deals with suspects - 'We'll offer you less time in prison if you confess and cooperate with us on others involved in the crime."  It can also save the time and expense of a long trial if the suspect confesses and pleads guilty.  And if there is still an imminent danger - an unknown partner in crime still on the loose and dangerous - there is the added urgency of protecting people from harm right now.

Foraker and Denali Get Some Morning Sun

But what if the suspect is not guilty?  How far should the interrogator push?  This was a big issue with Guantanamo prisoners and waterboarding and other torture.  If the suspect is not guilty, one is inflicting unnecessary pain and/or anguish to an innocent victim or one gets a false confession when the suspect says whatever the interrogator wants him to say.

Findlaw tells us this was the reason for the protections against self incrimination in the US Constitution:

"The right against self-incrimination is rooted in the Puritans’ refusal to cooperate with interrogators in 17th century England. They often were coerced or tortured into confessing their religious affiliation and were considered guilty if they remained silent. English law granted its citizens the right against self-incrimination in the mid-1600s, when a revolution established greater parliamentary power.
Puritans who fled religious persecution brought this idea with them to America, where it would eventually become codified in the Bill of Rights. Today, courts have found the right against self-incrimination to include testimonial or communicative evidence at police interrogations and legal proceedings."

Getting a Confession - Use of Guile:  

Another issue is the use of lies to get a confession.  Interrogators led Brendan to believe that by telling the truth he would make his troubles go away.  He told them he needed to get back to school so he could turn in a paper and they implied that he needed to answer the questions first.  They asked if he wanted to go to prison for the rest of his life and when he said no, they said, then write down what you did.  They told him, "We know what you did, we just want you to say it."  Well, they didn't know.

About to fly up Eagle River valley 

Frontline tells a similar story about a girl name Troung:

"The detective also tells her that, if she confesses, they’ll “walk right out here, to special
crimes juvenile” to “talk to a social worker.” If not, he’ll consult with the medical examiner and start working on a murder case against her. . .
Finally Truong confesses, after being reassured by the detective that “maybe something good will come out of all this,” and that the courts will decide on what “treatment” she should get in the juvenile system. . ."

When you are dealing with a guilty suspect, you may have to use tricks to break them down and confess.  There are lots of strategies that we see in cop movies all the time, like Good Cop/Bad Cop.  But how does that work with the not guilty suspect?

The Frontline show goes on to say false confessions aren't as rare as people think.

"But are false confessions actually that rare? Brandon L. Garrett, a University of Virginia School of Law professor who recently wrote a book called Convicting the Innocent, says his research “suggests that innocents actually confess to a lot.” Forty of the first 250 people exonerated based on DNA evidence, or 16 percent, falsely confessed."

And why do people confess falsely?  They quote Troung about why she confessed, which sounds similar to Brendan's story:

So why did Truong confess to something she says she didn’t do? Why would anyone? “It was a pretty long two hours,” she told Boeri, “and all I could hear throughout those two hours was that they were going to give me help if I confessed.”

They falsely told her and Brendan that all they had to do was confess and they could go home.  In Brendan's case, that's all he wanted - to go home.  But they lied to him and chained him up and imprisoned him.  Is that kind of lying acceptable?

I think that different techniques are acceptable in different circumstances.  I'm not sure where the lines should be drawn, but introverted kids, like Brendan, with a low IQ and an inability to understand what is happening, are clearly on the no guile side of the line.  More important than locating that line, may be to insure that the person has an attorney present, though in Brendan's case, his attorney was part of the problem - enough so to be kicked off the case by the judge.

And over the Chugach 

Innocent or Guilty Presumption And The Need For Closure

We have trials to determine guilt or innocence.  The defendant is presumed innocent until proven guilty.  Yet in the Avery case and in Brendan's case, it's clear that even Brendan's attorney considered him guilty.  (see the previous post on this.)
The Sheriff - It's critical police keep open some doubt about the suspect's guilt, simply so they don't stop looking for other suspects.  In Steven Avery's case, the sheriff's office ignored a tip from the local police that there was another suspect they'd been surveilling, except for the time of the crime.  That other suspect eventually - after Avery served 18 years in prison - was proven to be the culprit.  And he committed more crimes in the meantime.  And Avery, through DNA tests was proven not to be.
The Victim's Family - They want to believe the person who did that to their family member has been caught and punished.  In the Avery/Dacey cases, the victim's brother was certain from Day 1 that Avery and Dacey (Kevin) were guilty.  They ignored the inconsistencies.  But the family really does have an interest in the real perpetrator being caught and punished.  In Avery's original conviction (when he was proven innocent later) the victim positively identified him.  But later on, when the DNA proved he hadn't done it, she apologized.
The Media - They want to sell advertising.  They have a strong incentive to report the most titillating stories they can.  The reports of Brendan's confession dripped with blood and sex and murder.  The reports made it sound like Brendan, after stewing on this for months, came in and spilled his guts.  There's no hint the police picked him up at school and painstakingly fed him the story they believed and manipulated him until he eventually wrote what they wanted him to write.  The media didn't ncecssarily presume guilt as much as presume that sensationalism gets ratings.  But in going for gore, they planted the the presumption of guilt in the minds of their viewers and probably in their own minds.


Need For Closure
I suspect that the quick presumption of guilt in this case reflected a very human need for closure.
The Sheriff - When a brutal crime is committed in a small town, law enforcement has to feel some responsibility for not having prevented it.  Thus the sooner they catch the culprit, the closer they are to redeeming themselves.  And there has to be at least subconscious antagonism toward the suspect for making them look bad.
The Victim's Family - They too want to put this to rest as quickly as possible.  Knowing the person who hurt or killed your family member has been caught and is being punished, for many, is a big part of the grievance process.  Retribution seems to be part of human society.  So much so that punishing the wrong person is not a worry for most victims' relatives.  I'm not saying they knowingly will accept any culprit to punish, guilty or not, but rather their need for retribution helps them see guilt, even in the innocent.
The Media - They probably have the least need for closure, as the 2014 Republican presidential race demonstrates.  As long as an issue gets viewers and sells advertisements, they'll feed it to us.
The Public - They share the police and victim's family needs.  They want to know the perpetrator is off the streets and they are safe so they can go on leading their lives normally.  They want to believe that justice will prevail.  They've watched enough police and lawyer television shows that they believe that in the end, the smart defense attorney will pull her client out of the fire.  Until they experience their own injustice at the hands of the police or the courts, they just want the culprit caught and punished and they don't probe too deeply into the matter.


One Other Issue - Media Manipulation Of Trials

My sense is that the filmmakers seriously made this film because they thought an injustice was done.  At least that's how it came across to me.  But how do any of us know whether they fairly represented all sides of this case?  Because they were taking the side of the economically and educationally poor, outsiders of this community against the establishment - particularly the sheriff department and the court system - that their motives are relatively clean.  But then, how poor are the Avery's?  They've got 40 acres of land, they've got a great vegetable garden.  Is there a bigger story that the filmmakers missed that someone is trying to get their land?  Probably not.  It's upstate Wisconsin and there is probably plenty of land available.  You see how many threads one could unravel and follow here?

The film makers here did a great job of mixing entertainment and documentary.  A documentary should be accurate and explain complicated relationships AND be interesting to the viewer so they watch the whole thing.  That happened here.  I know my wife and I were totally pulled into the story and we were rooting for the good guys and angry at the bad guys.  The filmmakers succeeded in their mission.

 But will others see this model and do similar types of films, but with a sponsored message?  Will corporations use this style to push their agendas?  Will criminal organizations make similar films to make their own members look innocent?  This documentary wasn't available when El Chapo met with Sean Penn, but maybe he was thinking along the same lines.

OK, there are all kinds of directions this can go.  Lots of issues.  But enough now.

Laugh Hard

I'm trying to get Part 2 of the confession post up, but in the meantime, somehow my granddaughter and I got on the subject of frogs catching flies with their tongues.  In 2016, you can then say, "Let's find an example on Youtube."  The first one's we found were frogs catching flies, not with their tongues though, just jumping fast with their mouths open.

But then we found this one and we both started laughing and laughing.  I finally had to say, just one more time after she watched it five or six times.

Enjoy!


 

[Sorry for those seeing this reposted - Feedburner problems again. This seems to be getting all too common. I add this for two reasons. For those who found this post another way, I'm sorry if you were fooled into coming back. And I'm also keeping track of how many times Feedburner takes more than an hour or two to kick in.]

Why Do People Confess To Stuff They Didn't Do?

We watched Making A Murderer on Netflix this last week.  I didn't know how to write about the show without talking about what happens.  But then I saw a short article in the paper yesterday saying that Steven Avery has filed an appeal.

So, if you are in the middle of watching Making of a Murderer, you probably should stop reading right now.  Not that I'm going to give any spoilers.

There's a newscast early on that talks, in the normal urgent, almost astonished tone of news broadcasts, about the confession of Brendan Dacey, the 16 year old burdened with guilt, who told investigators in gory detail how he went to his uncle's trailer and found a naked woman handcuffed to the bed.  She begged him to help her.  Instead, at his uncle's urgings, he raped her an slit her throat, and shot her in the head.  Then they burned in in the burn put out back."

Sounds pretty damning doesn't it.

But as the show continues, you see the hours it took to get the confession from this low IQ, quiet, introverted kid.  They didn't use physical force.  They didn't even raise their voices.  But they constantly told him they were there to help him - his court appointed lawyer wasn't there and his mom said she wasn't even told about the interrogation - and all he had to tell the truth.  He kept denying things until he starts guessing at what they want to hear.

"What did you do to her head?"
"Nothing"
"We know, we just need you to tell us."
On and on until
"Hit her."
"Is that all"
"Yeah."
We know there's more.
What else did you do to her head?
"Cut off her hair?"
It goes on and on until the detective asks if they shot her in the head.
"Yeah."

The cops were sure they had the right guy and they used every trick to get him to confess.  It wasn't hard with a very immature, slow, quiet teenager, with no record at all.  (At one point he's on the phone and tells his mom, "they said I was inconsistent.  What does that mean?"  His mom doesn't know either.)

Here are some pictures of his court appointed attorney's investigator interrogating Brendan.  This guy is supposed to be working for Brendan, but he's working hard to get a confession.

"Do you want to get out and have a family someday?"  Image from Making a Murderer

"Well, that means you have to cooperate with me" - Image from Making a Murderer

He tells Brendan to draw a picture of the woman handcuffed to the bed, and Brendan does as he's told.  In a conversation with him mom, when she asked why he confessed to something he didn't do, and where did he get these ideas from, he says, "I guessed what they wanted, like I do in school."

Here's that same interrogator, in the courtroom responding to Brendan's new attorney, one with experience in coerced confessions.  Remember, this guy was supposed to be on Brendan's side. He's talking about Brendan's family, the Avery's.

These people are pure evil  - image of Brendan's mother and grandmother

"A friend of mine suggested 'This is a one-branch family tree'"

"Cut this tree down.  We need to end the gene pool here"

 The only thing positive I can say about this guy is that he seems to believe in evolution if he's talking about genes.   He gets this guy to acknowledge that he was trying to get the confession to help the prosecutors' case against Brendan's uncle.  (I didn't use 'admit' because he doesn't seem to think he did anything wrong.)  Brendan's new attorney is incredulous about the interview and this testimony.

While Brendan's confession is not allowed in Steve Avery's trial, it is allowed in Brendan's.

The film makers clearly believe that Steve Avery is innocent and that Brendan's confession is coerced and pure fiction.  There's a lot they left out - the trials lasted weeks.  One tantalizing lead I would have like to know more about was when they asked if the story about the assault and murder wasn't true, where did he get his ideas.  Eventually he says he read it in a book and names the book.  The show didn't say if anyone followed up and found a copy of the book.


My flight to Seattle is about to board, so I'm going to post this, but I may add some more later.  Or make a Part 2. (My granddaughter said, "I want you to come to my birthday party."  What could I do but say yes?)  But I can say, I'll never 'hear' a reported confession the same again.



Confessions Part 2 is here.

UPDATE Jan 20:  Here's an LA Times article about LA settlements with two men wrongly convicted of murder who served 34 and 26 years in prison and who were awarded $16 and $7 million.  I don't think confessions were involved, but there was enough wrongdoing by police officers that city attorneys argued against going to court.