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MythBusters Helped a Wrongly Convicted Man Prove His Innocence

198 points by gbourne 4y ago

pstuart 4y ago
Such a great show. 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. Edit: Adam Savage talking about it -- https://nerdist.com/article/mythbusters-destroyed-all-evidence-of-an-easy-to-make-explosive/ https://nerdist.com/article/mythbusters-destroyed-all-eviden... Apparently it was not well known, so not an original discovery but still a legitimate use of the word. My comment was a point about censorship in that it can be the right thing to do. I'm curious AF about what the recipe is but am ok with not knowing and and knowing that effectively no one else does.
- dtx1 4y ago
  meh, they also censored how to make thermite (iron oxide powder and aluminium powder ignited by magnesium) and you can get explosive material easily almost everywhere gunpowder is available. They censored how to make Nitrocellulose as well which requires strong acids that are arguably more dangerous than Nitrocellulose itself. Anyway that recipee is available on wikipedia anyway https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nitrocellulose#Guncotton https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nitrocellulose#Guncotton
- vore 4y ago
  I don't think that's so much self-regulation as it is the producers would probably not let them publicize something like that on TV and avoid some 3-letter agency knocking on their doors.
  - louwrentius 4y ago
    Some people have a basic sense of morality, doing what's right.
- mlindner 4y ago
  They didn't "discover a recipe". Anyone who was a kid at that time could look up on the internet the recipes for these things, and even pre-internet in things like "The Anarchist Cookbook" and other such literature.
- anon_cow1111 4y ago
  I had to look this up, it seems it was related to the myth of a LOX tanker truck spilling/crashing and turning the road asphalt itself into an explosive. Seems kinda weird to omit this though as it's not really arcane knowledge (Pretty sure "The Martian" had a scene where they blow open an airlock with something similar). Other mythbusters censors include dropping an entire episode about credit card hacks/fakes because Visa and friends threatened to pull ads from the network, and another episode where they accidentally caused their test mice to cannibalize each other.
mlindner 4y ago
This reminds me of how people get angry at me whenever I poke holes in the science of movies. Movies affect people's ideas of what is possible and what is impossible. This is why I'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.
- walrus01 4y ago
  > 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 I think The Expanse got it right, in that we're more likely in the near to medium term to get a bunch of oligarch type Jules-Pierre Maos (Hi Bezos!) running things behind the scenes. Not a utopia type technology + spaceflight + social inequity problems solved future.
  - mlindner 4y ago
    The Expanse is one of the TV series that I was thinking of actually when I wrote that comment. It'd be too long to write down here but I feel like while The Expanse got many things right it also portrayed all sorts of fundamental things that were completely off. For example even in the first season things that are fundamentally off that result in very different futures: * The idea that we would actively intentionally re-create the situation of MAD in another context. MAD was an accident of historical happenstance and now that we know about it, we wouldn't try to re-create it. * The idea that a magical new engine would suddenly appear that made many of the things in the tv series possible. * The idea that Earth will for some reason simultaneously become a massive welfare state, yet still somehow have solar-system spanning power. * The idea that there would be a complete backtrack in labor rights and labor safety (the ice asteroid mining scene).
    - samatman 4y ago
awb 4y ago
A couple things misleading about the title. 1) Mythbusters wasn’t aware of this case 2) His confession under duress was the major factor in the release > 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.
- ergocoder 4y ago
  The insulin inventor wasn't aware of millions of diabetic people either. MythBusters's episode was the starting point for him. The title is okay.
  - boomboomsubban 4y ago
    >MythBusters's episode was the starting point for him. The title is okay. He already had an attorney helping appeal his case when he saw the episode. It's making a tiny part of his lengthy story the main theme, but that's not a huge issue.
woojoo666 4y ago
What kind of compensation do these people typically get? I can'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.
- mlindner 4y ago
  None by default AFAIK. They can sometimes start a civil lawsuit against the state.
- caminante 4y ago
  Here's info for wrongful incarceration compensation at the federal and state level [0]. [0] https://www.law.umich.edu/special/exoneration/Documents/Key-Provisions-in-Wrongful-Conviction-Compensation-Laws.pdf https://www.law.umich.edu/special/exoneration/Documents/Key-...
  - lucb1e 4y ago
    Takeaway from that link: around 50k/year in the USA, more or less depending on the region, and you have to go to another court (or similar) to get it, depending on the region. Additionally, in some regions you might get "tuition assistance", "medical expenses" (national healthcare for the rest of your life I think this might mean?), "job search assistance", and other things that you expect to get in a prosperous country without having to have been wrongfully convicted, and these benefits aren't even universal across the USA after a wrongful conviction. But the 50k×35=1.75 million USD should make for a nice retirement fund regardless of anything else.
- hammock 4y ago
  Many municipalities have an online database of all the wrongful death settlements, etc that they (aka the taxpayer, split with e.g. the police pension fund) have paid or are current paying. Once out of curiosity I googled the name of the officer who simply “took” my online stolen property report, and found out both they and their partner had multimillion dollar judgments against them
hanniabu 4y ago
> 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. The great american justice system
- pstuart 4y ago
  The American Legal System. Justice is for sale.
louwrentius 4y ago
Maybe this has always been obvious to everybody but the American justice system is not about truth or fairness. The goal is to convict no matter what. That is how the incentives are lined up. 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. You are very unlikely to ever be judged by a jury of your peers. You are much more likely to not 'risk' that and take the plea deal. From the perspective of a European (and we have our issues) it sounds the system is fundamentally rotten. The mythbuster story only highlight how basic truth finding isn't really an issue.
- twblalock 4y ago
  > The goal is to convict no matter what. That is how the incentives are lined up. No, the goal of the prosecution is to convict no matter what. The goal of the defense is to prevent the prosecution from winning. In order to win, one side must convince a jury. This is an intentionally designed adversarial system. The European system, where a judge is essentially an inquisitor trying to discover the truth rather than a referee, is not better, it's just different. It is not more immune to abuse or bad results than the Anglo-American system.
  - louwrentius 4y ago
    If that’s what you want to believe I can live with that.
dghughes 4y ago
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. YouTube video of 60 Minutes Australia: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3V5Cj8d43Yw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3V5Cj8d43Yw
- JoshGG 4y ago
  There's a short documentary "Long Shot" about this on Netflix that is pretty good: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_Shot_(2017_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_Shot_(2017_film)
- mijoharas 4y ago
  So, first off, given that they were trying to incarcerate an innocent person in the case I think that the detectives in this case were either incompetent, or immoral. It did somewhat throw me, in that documentary, to have the policeman that they used to say that be mark fuhrman[0] from the OJ simpson case. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Fuhrman https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Fuhrman
  - mijoharas 4y ago
    unrelated, the audio in that clip keeps cutting out for me which is very distracting.
  - addicted 4y ago
    > given that they were trying to incarcerate an innocent person in the case I think that the detectives in this case were either incompetent, or immoral. It really doesn’t need to be that exciting. For the most part, it’s much more mundane. A detective comes up with a theory (let’s not forget…American “detectives” are poorly trained in actual detection), and they need to close a case so they are highly primed to prioritize any evidence that supports their theory.
pkrotich 4y ago
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't have competent cousel. I'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. Yes - you should be scared of ordinary prosectutors in suits doing their "best" job more than a gang member for example! They want are motivated to win at all cost... short of obviously illegal ways.
- caminante 4y ago
  False positives are rare in the US [0]: estimated at only 1% of incarcerations according to the Innocence Project (mentioned in HN article) and go even lower depending on who does the analysis. Are you aware of legal systems in other countries with lower false positives? [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miscarriage_of_justice#United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miscarriage_of_justice#United_...
  - tremon 4y ago
    Does that 1% include the number of people who accepted a plea deal, or only the number of wrongful convictions after a case has gone to trial?
  - polygamous_bat 4y ago
    If every time you enter the legal system and you have a 1% chance of being falsely convicted, that is a broken and dangerous system regardless of how other countries fare at that metric. Especially if you consider that certain underprivileged demographics are already at a higher risk of having more run-ins with the police regardless of their criminal state.
    - caminante 4y ago
      > that is a broken and dangerous system regardless of how other countries fare at that metric. No. It's on topic because the parent singled out the US, and I'm curious if other countries are taking procedures that could be adopted in the US to reduce false positives and ALSO false negatives.
gnicholas 4y ago
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?
- MichaelDickens 4y ago
  I would think any fire on film is either CG or, if real, is lit by a hidden fuse being controlled by a pyrotechnician. It would probably be too dangerous to have an actor directly light a fire using a match.
- suzzer99 4y ago
  I've lit a pool of gasoline with a match before. Screwing around in junior high melting our plastic toys in the driveway - not something we should have been doing.
- giantg2 4y ago
  A lot of times it looks like they're burning alcohol to me. It's even more funny when they show them lighting jet fuel with a match or lighter.
- anon_cow1111 4y ago
  Cigarette, not a match, which is an important detail. Gasoline absolutely will ignite if you drop a burning match on it (assuming the match doesn't go out as it's falling). If a movie shows a close-up slow motion shot of a match hitting the ground+igniting gasoline, it's probably "real", but the larger shot of the building or whatever going up is filmed separately. They usually use propane/natural gas for large fires because it can be piped in and turned on/off easily.
  - gnicholas 4y ago
    Ah yes, good point. So what is it different about a match and a cigarette? Is the latter always successful?
    - boomboomsubban 4y ago
giantg2 4y ago
So why is deception wrong in an interrogation? I can see some of the other tactics as problematic, but not that directly.
- lupire 4y ago
  Why is deception right? Even the 10 commandments oppose it. Deception leads to false convictions.
  - giantg2 4y ago
    "Deception leads to false convictions." How?
    - viiralvx 4y ago
      I can't tell if you're being willfully dense or serious. If you're deceiving people and pressuring them to lie in order to close a case, they will say anything to be released, potentially not knowing the implications.
      - giantg2 4y ago
        I'm only talking about deception. The other pressures I can understand. Why is deception without the other pressures bad?
        Dove 4y ago
        People make plea deals and write confessions to reduce the punishment if they think they will be convicted. That motivation remains entirely the same even if they think they will be falsely convicted.
        giantg2 4y ago
        With access to a lawyer (one of the other issues) this shouldn't be a problem. And there are ways the police are supposed to verify the confession (changes to ensure that could be better).
lucb1e 4y ago
Even if the cigarette gasoline thing were possible, just, how the heck does this situation even happen? Doesn't this belong as an example in a war movie about nazi germany or north korea? > 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]. 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'd be curious how murder through arson in the USA and other countries turned out if anyone happens to know of any. 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 https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levenslange_gevangenisstraf https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levenslange_gevangenisstraf). 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't be, but quite a difference from "you will stay incarcerated and then you die". > The court concluded that without John’s false confession, which he did not give voluntarily, “the State’s case was nonexistent.” I listen to a podcast sometimes called Napleiten, which is quite interesting. It's not super legally technical, but it sounded like, in the Netherlands, it'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 https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valse_bekentenis https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valse_bekentenis and https://wetten.overheid.nl/BWBR0001903/2022-10-01/0/BoekTweede/TiteldeelVI/AfdelingDerde/Artikel341/informatie#tab-wijzigingenoverzicht https://wetten.overheid.nl/BWBR0001903/2022-10-01/0/BoekTwee...). Even without torture, false confessions are a thing, which I thought was well known. And then to top it all off, the thing described in the confession isn't even physically possible. But fair enough, that's not something one would necessarily think to question (in the lawyer's words: "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"). 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 https://nos.nl/artikel/2336792-zweedse-om-moordzaak-premier-palme-gesloten-hoofdverdachte-overleden https://nos.nl/artikel/2336792-zweedse-om-moordzaak-premier-...
Archelaos 4y ago
> In 2021, Illinois and Oregon became the first states to ban the use of deception during interrogations of minors ... Is there any other modern democracy that allows deception as a method of interrogation to the same extent as the US? 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. The central paragraph of the law is as follows: (1) The accused'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. (2) Measures that impair the accused's capacity to remember or to reason shall not be permitted. (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. § 136a StPO -- German text at https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/stpo/__136a.html https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/stpo/__136a.html
- aikinai 4y ago
  Not that it makes it okay, but Japan also extensively uses deception in interrogations. Japan and America seem to be similar as highly-advanced, rule-of-law democracies with abhorrent criminal justice culture.
  - david38 4y ago
    If you anything about Japan you wouldn’t say this. Japan’s criminal justice system is so bad as to rival Central America, not the US.
    - Retric 4y ago
      I think you misunderstood, abhorrent means disgusting, loathsome, terrible etc. So he’s saying Japan’s criminal justice system is unconscionable just like the US, not that they are equally bad.
hedora 4y ago
So, what happened to the police officers that tortured multiple suspects across multiple cases?
- saithier 4y ago
  Full pension, and a gold watch I'm sure. What else?
twawaaay 4y ago
Except, a lit cigarette can 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. 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. Here is a handy table listing necessary concentrations: https://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/explosive-concentration-limits-d_423.html https://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/explosive-concentration-l... Now, if you just drop the cigarette into a bucket of gasoline it will not ignite. This is because on a typical small pool/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. 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. 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.
- lamontcg 4y ago
  > 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. The ones I've seen are all consistent with static electricity sparks being the source of ignition, or else someone is screwing around with a cigarette lighter.
- mytwocentsworth 4y ago
  >Here is a handy table listing necessary concentrations The table lists concentrations but not ignition temperature. And temperature is a key factor mentioned in the article: "Based on the ignition temperature of gasoline and the temperature range of a lit cigarette [...] the team determined it was highly unlikely that dropping a cigarette into gasoline could cause a fire."
boomboomsubban 4y ago
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. 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's innocence.
ummonk 4y ago
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.
mijoharas 4y ago
> 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. One thing I'd like to know is what exactly happened here. Obviously there were multiple miscarriages of justice, but this seems like a pertinent one. EDIT: (obviously not _the most_ pertinent one, but still one I'd like details/reasoning on. Why would the judge do that, once they had the evidence in front of them).
- pas 4y ago
  judges in many places are elected, but even if not, they still simply reflect the biases of the electorate. and of course this leads to an ugly feedback loop.
TedDoesntTalk 4y ago
I wanted to donate to his GoFundMe, but the link says the campaign has been taken down?? https://www.gofundme.com/f/us2zh-free-after-35-years-in-prison-innocent%5D https://www.gofundme.com/f/us2zh-free-after-35-years-in-pris... (Click “donate now” button to see what I mean)
franga2000 4y ago
This is even more fucked up than the title suggests. It's not that a Mythbusters episode helped a man prove his innocence, it helped him overthrow a false confession he gave under coercion! 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 fabricated and coerced confession. Like yeah, "yay science!" and it's a great thing he finally got out, but how is the real story here not that once you sign a confession, you'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's scary to me as an outsider from a (yes, I'll say it) actually developed county!
silexia 4y ago
I see lots of these "wrongful conviction" 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.
- JoeAltmaier 4y ago
  Yet this case had zero evidence other than a coerced confession. There was 100% (of zero) evidence available. The original judge and jury had nothing to go on but the confession.
  - silexia 4y ago
    Are you sure? You sat there in that courtroom decades ago and heard all the testimony and viewed all the evidence? Or are you going off of a blog post written decades later?
    - JoeAltmaier 4y ago
      Read the article again.

198 points by gbourne 4y ago

Such a great show. 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. Edit: Adam Savage talking about it -- https://nerdist.com/article/mythbusters-destroyed-all-evidence-of-an-easy-to-make-explosive/ https://nerdist.com/article/mythbusters-destroyed-all-eviden... Apparently it was not well known, so not an original discovery but still a legitimate use of the word. My comment was a point about censorship in that it can be the right thing to do. I'm curious AF about what the recipe is but am ok with not knowing and and knowing that effectively no one else does.

dtx1 4y ago
meh, they also censored how to make thermite (iron oxide powder and aluminium powder ignited by magnesium) and you can get explosive material easily almost everywhere gunpowder is available. They censored how to make Nitrocellulose as well which requires strong acids that are arguably more dangerous than Nitrocellulose itself. Anyway that recipee is available on wikipedia anyway https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nitrocellulose#Guncotton https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nitrocellulose#Guncotton
vore 4y ago
I don't think that's so much self-regulation as it is the producers would probably not let them publicize something like that on TV and avoid some 3-letter agency knocking on their doors.
- louwrentius 4y ago
  Some people have a basic sense of morality, doing what's right.
mlindner 4y ago
They didn't "discover a recipe". Anyone who was a kid at that time could look up on the internet the recipes for these things, and even pre-internet in things like "The Anarchist Cookbook" and other such literature.
anon_cow1111 4y ago
I had to look this up, it seems it was related to the myth of a LOX tanker truck spilling/crashing and turning the road asphalt itself into an explosive. Seems kinda weird to omit this though as it's not really arcane knowledge (Pretty sure "The Martian" had a scene where they blow open an airlock with something similar). Other mythbusters censors include dropping an entire episode about credit card hacks/fakes because Visa and friends threatened to pull ads from the network, and another episode where they accidentally caused their test mice to cannibalize each other.

mlindner 4y ago

This reminds me of how people get angry at me whenever I poke holes in the science of movies. Movies affect people's ideas of what is possible and what is impossible. This is why I'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.

walrus01 4y ago
> 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 I think The Expanse got it right, in that we're more likely in the near to medium term to get a bunch of oligarch type Jules-Pierre Maos (Hi Bezos!) running things behind the scenes. Not a utopia type technology + spaceflight + social inequity problems solved future.
- mlindner 4y ago
  The Expanse is one of the TV series that I was thinking of actually when I wrote that comment. It'd be too long to write down here but I feel like while The Expanse got many things right it also portrayed all sorts of fundamental things that were completely off. For example even in the first season things that are fundamentally off that result in very different futures: * The idea that we would actively intentionally re-create the situation of MAD in another context. MAD was an accident of historical happenstance and now that we know about it, we wouldn't try to re-create it. * The idea that a magical new engine would suddenly appear that made many of the things in the tv series possible. * The idea that Earth will for some reason simultaneously become a massive welfare state, yet still somehow have solar-system spanning power. * The idea that there would be a complete backtrack in labor rights and labor safety (the ice asteroid mining scene).
  - samatman 4y ago

awb 4y ago

A couple things misleading about the title. 1) Mythbusters wasn’t aware of this case 2) His confession under duress was the major factor in the release > 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.

ergocoder 4y ago
The insulin inventor wasn't aware of millions of diabetic people either. MythBusters's episode was the starting point for him. The title is okay.
- boomboomsubban 4y ago
  >MythBusters's episode was the starting point for him. The title is okay. He already had an attorney helping appeal his case when he saw the episode. It's making a tiny part of his lengthy story the main theme, but that's not a huge issue.

woojoo666 4y ago

What kind of compensation do these people typically get? I can'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.

mlindner 4y ago
None by default AFAIK. They can sometimes start a civil lawsuit against the state.
caminante 4y ago
Here's info for wrongful incarceration compensation at the federal and state level [0]. [0] https://www.law.umich.edu/special/exoneration/Documents/Key-Provisions-in-Wrongful-Conviction-Compensation-Laws.pdf https://www.law.umich.edu/special/exoneration/Documents/Key-...
- lucb1e 4y ago
  Takeaway from that link: around 50k/year in the USA, more or less depending on the region, and you have to go to another court (or similar) to get it, depending on the region. Additionally, in some regions you might get "tuition assistance", "medical expenses" (national healthcare for the rest of your life I think this might mean?), "job search assistance", and other things that you expect to get in a prosperous country without having to have been wrongfully convicted, and these benefits aren't even universal across the USA after a wrongful conviction. But the 50k×35=1.75 million USD should make for a nice retirement fund regardless of anything else.
hammock 4y ago
Many municipalities have an online database of all the wrongful death settlements, etc that they (aka the taxpayer, split with e.g. the police pension fund) have paid or are current paying. Once out of curiosity I googled the name of the officer who simply “took” my online stolen property report, and found out both they and their partner had multimillion dollar judgments against them

hanniabu 4y ago

> 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. The great american justice system

pstuart 4y ago
The American Legal System. Justice is for sale.

louwrentius 4y ago

Maybe this has always been obvious to everybody but the American justice system is not about truth or fairness. The goal is to convict no matter what. That is how the incentives are lined up. 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. You are very unlikely to ever be judged by a jury of your peers. You are much more likely to not 'risk' that and take the plea deal. From the perspective of a European (and we have our issues) it sounds the system is fundamentally rotten. The mythbuster story only highlight how basic truth finding isn't really an issue.

twblalock 4y ago
> The goal is to convict no matter what. That is how the incentives are lined up. No, the goal of the prosecution is to convict no matter what. The goal of the defense is to prevent the prosecution from winning. In order to win, one side must convince a jury. This is an intentionally designed adversarial system. The European system, where a judge is essentially an inquisitor trying to discover the truth rather than a referee, is not better, it's just different. It is not more immune to abuse or bad results than the Anglo-American system.
- louwrentius 4y ago
  If that’s what you want to believe I can live with that.

dghughes 4y ago

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. YouTube video of 60 Minutes Australia: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3V5Cj8d43Yw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3V5Cj8d43Yw

JoshGG 4y ago
There's a short documentary "Long Shot" about this on Netflix that is pretty good: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_Shot_(2017_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_Shot_(2017_film)
mijoharas 4y ago
So, first off, given that they were trying to incarcerate an innocent person in the case I think that the detectives in this case were either incompetent, or immoral. It did somewhat throw me, in that documentary, to have the policeman that they used to say that be mark fuhrman[0] from the OJ simpson case. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Fuhrman https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Fuhrman
- mijoharas 4y ago
  unrelated, the audio in that clip keeps cutting out for me which is very distracting.
- addicted 4y ago
  > given that they were trying to incarcerate an innocent person in the case I think that the detectives in this case were either incompetent, or immoral. It really doesn’t need to be that exciting. For the most part, it’s much more mundane. A detective comes up with a theory (let’s not forget…American “detectives” are poorly trained in actual detection), and they need to close a case so they are highly primed to prioritize any evidence that supports their theory.

pkrotich 4y ago

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't have competent cousel. I'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. Yes - you should be scared of ordinary prosectutors in suits doing their "best" job more than a gang member for example! They want are motivated to win at all cost... short of obviously illegal ways.

caminante 4y ago
False positives are rare in the US [0]: estimated at only 1% of incarcerations according to the Innocence Project (mentioned in HN article) and go even lower depending on who does the analysis. Are you aware of legal systems in other countries with lower false positives? [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miscarriage_of_justice#United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miscarriage_of_justice#United_...
- tremon 4y ago
  Does that 1% include the number of people who accepted a plea deal, or only the number of wrongful convictions after a case has gone to trial?
- polygamous_bat 4y ago
  If every time you enter the legal system and you have a 1% chance of being falsely convicted, that is a broken and dangerous system regardless of how other countries fare at that metric. Especially if you consider that certain underprivileged demographics are already at a higher risk of having more run-ins with the police regardless of their criminal state.
  - caminante 4y ago
    > that is a broken and dangerous system regardless of how other countries fare at that metric. No. It's on topic because the parent singled out the US, and I'm curious if other countries are taking procedures that could be adopted in the US to reduce false positives and ALSO false negatives.

gnicholas 4y ago

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?

MichaelDickens 4y ago
I would think any fire on film is either CG or, if real, is lit by a hidden fuse being controlled by a pyrotechnician. It would probably be too dangerous to have an actor directly light a fire using a match.
suzzer99 4y ago
I've lit a pool of gasoline with a match before. Screwing around in junior high melting our plastic toys in the driveway - not something we should have been doing.
giantg2 4y ago
A lot of times it looks like they're burning alcohol to me. It's even more funny when they show them lighting jet fuel with a match or lighter.
anon_cow1111 4y ago
Cigarette, not a match, which is an important detail. Gasoline absolutely will ignite if you drop a burning match on it (assuming the match doesn't go out as it's falling). If a movie shows a close-up slow motion shot of a match hitting the ground+igniting gasoline, it's probably "real", but the larger shot of the building or whatever going up is filmed separately. They usually use propane/natural gas for large fires because it can be piped in and turned on/off easily.
- gnicholas 4y ago
  Ah yes, good point. So what is it different about a match and a cigarette? Is the latter always successful?
  - boomboomsubban 4y ago

giantg2 4y ago

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

lupire 4y ago
Why is deception right? Even the 10 commandments oppose it. Deception leads to false convictions.
- giantg2 4y ago
  "Deception leads to false convictions." How?
  - viiralvx 4y ago
    I can't tell if you're being willfully dense or serious. If you're deceiving people and pressuring them to lie in order to close a case, they will say anything to be released, potentially not knowing the implications.
    - giantg2 4y ago
      I'm only talking about deception. The other pressures I can understand. Why is deception without the other pressures bad?
      - Dove 4y ago
        People make plea deals and write confessions to reduce the punishment if they think they will be convicted. That motivation remains entirely the same even if they think they will be falsely convicted.
        giantg2 4y ago
        With access to a lawyer (one of the other issues) this shouldn't be a problem. And there are ways the police are supposed to verify the confession (changes to ensure that could be better).

lucb1e 4y ago

Even if the cigarette gasoline thing were possible, just, how the heck does this situation even happen? Doesn't this belong as an example in a war movie about nazi germany or north korea? > 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]. 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'd be curious how murder through arson in the USA and other countries turned out if anyone happens to know of any. 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 https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levenslange_gevangenisstraf https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levenslange_gevangenisstraf). 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't be, but quite a difference from "you will stay incarcerated and then you die". > The court concluded that without John’s false confession, which he did not give voluntarily, “the State’s case was nonexistent.” I listen to a podcast sometimes called Napleiten, which is quite interesting. It's not super legally technical, but it sounded like, in the Netherlands, it'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 https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valse_bekentenis https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valse_bekentenis and https://wetten.overheid.nl/BWBR0001903/2022-10-01/0/BoekTweede/TiteldeelVI/AfdelingDerde/Artikel341/informatie#tab-wijzigingenoverzicht https://wetten.overheid.nl/BWBR0001903/2022-10-01/0/BoekTwee...). Even without torture, false confessions are a thing, which I thought was well known. And then to top it all off, the thing described in the confession isn't even physically possible. But fair enough, that's not something one would necessarily think to question (in the lawyer's words: "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"). 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 https://nos.nl/artikel/2336792-zweedse-om-moordzaak-premier-palme-gesloten-hoofdverdachte-overleden https://nos.nl/artikel/2336792-zweedse-om-moordzaak-premier-...

Archelaos 4y ago

> In 2021, Illinois and Oregon became the first states to ban the use of deception during interrogations of minors ... Is there any other modern democracy that allows deception as a method of interrogation to the same extent as the US? 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. The central paragraph of the law is as follows: (1) The accused'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. (2) Measures that impair the accused's capacity to remember or to reason shall not be permitted. (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. § 136a StPO -- German text at https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/stpo/__136a.html https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/stpo/__136a.html

aikinai 4y ago
Not that it makes it okay, but Japan also extensively uses deception in interrogations. Japan and America seem to be similar as highly-advanced, rule-of-law democracies with abhorrent criminal justice culture.
- david38 4y ago
  If you anything about Japan you wouldn’t say this. Japan’s criminal justice system is so bad as to rival Central America, not the US.
  - Retric 4y ago
    I think you misunderstood, abhorrent means disgusting, loathsome, terrible etc. So he’s saying Japan’s criminal justice system is unconscionable just like the US, not that they are equally bad.

hedora 4y ago

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

saithier 4y ago
Full pension, and a gold watch I'm sure. What else?

twawaaay 4y ago

Except, a lit cigarette can 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. 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. Here is a handy table listing necessary concentrations: https://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/explosive-concentration-limits-d_423.html https://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/explosive-concentration-l... Now, if you just drop the cigarette into a bucket of gasoline it will not ignite. This is because on a typical small pool/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. 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. 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.

lamontcg 4y ago
> 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. The ones I've seen are all consistent with static electricity sparks being the source of ignition, or else someone is screwing around with a cigarette lighter.
mytwocentsworth 4y ago
>Here is a handy table listing necessary concentrations The table lists concentrations but not ignition temperature. And temperature is a key factor mentioned in the article: "Based on the ignition temperature of gasoline and the temperature range of a lit cigarette [...] the team determined it was highly unlikely that dropping a cigarette into gasoline could cause a fire."

boomboomsubban 4y ago

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. 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's innocence.

ummonk 4y ago

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.

mijoharas 4y ago

> 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. One thing I'd like to know is what exactly happened here. Obviously there were multiple miscarriages of justice, but this seems like a pertinent one. EDIT: (obviously not _the most_ pertinent one, but still one I'd like details/reasoning on. Why would the judge do that, once they had the evidence in front of them).

pas 4y ago
judges in many places are elected, but even if not, they still simply reflect the biases of the electorate. and of course this leads to an ugly feedback loop.

TedDoesntTalk 4y ago

I wanted to donate to his GoFundMe, but the link says the campaign has been taken down?? https://www.gofundme.com/f/us2zh-free-after-35-years-in-prison-innocent%5D https://www.gofundme.com/f/us2zh-free-after-35-years-in-pris... (Click “donate now” button to see what I mean)

franga2000 4y ago

This is even more fucked up than the title suggests. It's not that a Mythbusters episode helped a man prove his innocence, it helped him overthrow a false confession he gave under coercion! 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 fabricated and coerced confession. Like yeah, "yay science!" and it's a great thing he finally got out, but how is the real story here not that once you sign a confession, you'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's scary to me as an outsider from a (yes, I'll say it) actually developed county!

silexia 4y ago

I see lots of these "wrongful conviction" 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.

JoeAltmaier 4y ago
Yet this case had zero evidence other than a coerced confession. There was 100% (of zero) evidence available. The original judge and jury had nothing to go on but the confession.
- silexia 4y ago
  Are you sure? You sat there in that courtroom decades ago and heard all the testimony and viewed all the evidence? Or are you going off of a blog post written decades later?
  - JoeAltmaier 4y ago
    Read the article again.