8 ms·

The Reykjavik Confessions

198 points by marcopolis 12y ago

stuart_v 12y ago
God, this makes me so sad. Being persuaded into admitting guilt to a crime that you have no idea about sounds bizaare but I am sure this case wasn't the last.
- Sharlin 12y ago
  Well, probably not all that rare in the US, for example, due to the abuse of the plea bargain system.
  - tripzilch 12y ago
    That's the weirdest thing about US police series. When I was younger, I never really believed that sort of thing actually happens for real, just thought it was an over-used fictional "cleverness" trope. I mean it's so obvious this is going to lead to abuse and false confessions if actually used for real-life confessions, I figured it had to, because in a TV-series you can assume that the police are the smart/good guys so they could safely use this clever (if somewhat unfair) trick to get the (obvious) bad guys. As I got older, and perhaps as the themes in TV series got a little more complex, I started wondering sometimes, how are these even the good guys? For all they know they are now convicting an innocent man or woman, by pressuring them into confessing to a crime with the only leverage being "an offer they can't refuse" (a much larger sentence).
- arethuza 12y ago
  At roughly the same time in the UK there were the Guildford Four and Maguire Seven cases: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guildford_Four_and_Maguire_Seven http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guildford_Four_and_Maguire_Seve...
chanks 12y ago
Frontline has an excellent episode on the Norfolk Four, a similar case that happened in Virginia: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/the-confessions/ http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/the-confessions/
sixQuarks 12y ago
I would love to have my favorite book, "Cosmos" by Carl Sagan recreated in this same web layout. In fact, why AREN'T online books like this?
- PetitPrince 12y ago
  There's "Snow Fall - The Avalanche at Tunnel Creek" by John Branch and published in the New York Times with a similar format: http://www.nytimes.com/projects/2012/snow-fall/ http://www.nytimes.com/projects/2012/snow-fall/
  - mercer 12y ago
    I've hard this style referred to as 'Snow Fall Journalism', actually!
- medell 12y ago
  The Guardian did a good piece "NSA Files Decoded": http://www.theguardian.com/world/interactive/2013/nov/01/snowden-nsa-files-surveillance-revelations-decoded http://www.theguardian.com/world/interactive/2013/nov/01/sno... For more stories in this format: http://multimedia.journalism.berkeley.edu/tutorials/taxonomy-digital-story-packages/embedded-multimedia/ http://multimedia.journalism.berkeley.edu/tutorials/taxonomy...
- sakri 12y ago
  While the story was interesting, I was also more interested in the layout. In the past there were a lot of "over the top" Flash "experience" sites, with the decline of Flash and skyrocket of "thumb up and down" mobile sites I feel there has also been a drop in experimental layouts and visuals. A lot of that stuff was crap, but it's great to be surprised every now and then. Thumbs up bbc!
  - mercer 12y ago
    I generally like the Snowfall-style articles, but for some reason this is the first time where I felt a (very vague) sense that the style was overshadowing the content a little. That said, I prefer a little more experimentation in this area over staying safe...
NKCSS 12y ago
Is this to showcase the article style? It reminds me of the snowy thing the New York Times did a few months ago, but with added parallax effects
- bgarbiak 12y ago
  This form of presentation (a specific layout for a single longform article) got really popular recently. That "snowy thing NYT did" happened a few years ago, if I recall correctly, and indeed, it might be considered the trend starter. Personally, I'm very often impressed by work of theverge.com/polygon.com in this regard. Here's just one example: http://www.polygon.com/a/xbox-one-review http://www.polygon.com/a/xbox-one-review They perfectly handle the toughest thing, which is the balance between flashiness and readability. As for the BBC article: I don't like the font choices they've made. A serif (Georgia or Cambria) for body content and sans-serif for distinctions would work better, IMHO.
  - NKCSS 12y ago
    Thank you, that Xbox One article is indeed very awesome.
  - mercer 12y ago
    Yeah, and aside from the font I also felt that the transitions were a bit too abrupt, like they just stitched together a bunch of (in themselves pretty) pages. The German newspaper 'Die Zeit' has been experimenting with this style as well, to the point of (as I understand it) starting Zeit Online as a completely separate department in Berlin. For example (in German): http://www.zeit.de/kultur/karl-marx-allee/index.html#prolog http://www.zeit.de/kultur/karl-marx-allee/index.html#prolog http://www.zeit.de/sport/tour-de-france.html http://www.zeit.de/sport/tour-de-france.html Generally they're a little more subdued and their work, so far, is not as technologically impressive. But I might actually prefer that.
anvandare 12y ago
An example, I'm afraid, of situations that happen all too often around the world. When we look at the justice system as any other abstract system (with positive/negative feedback loops) we find that the actors (the judges, prosecutors, investigators, etc.) are never rewarded for finding the truth. After all, how can you ever know that you found the truth? They are rewarded for finding a truth. For making the picture fit. And that is why you should never collaborate with (or trust) the system. They aren't interested in what's good for you, they are interested in what's good for themselves: finding someone to convict and thereby pushing their yearly evaluation into the positives. [ed.: typo]
- moconnor 12y ago
  This is an interesting insight into the dangers of ill-chosen metrics. It could only happen in a system in which the police were expected to produce (and were in various ways rewarded for) convictions instead of e.g. a maximally accurate presentation of events that can be used to decide how society should respond. Convictions are far easier to measure (and achieve, of course). How would you go about constructing an efficient, corruption-resistant system that is measured by its accuracy? It seems like a hard problem, but not necessarily an unsolvable one. Debugging support issues sometimes feels like this. If you go into a complex system looking for bugs then you'll find plenty - but not necessarily the one that's causing the current issue. What you're really looking for is to fully understand the reason the system does what it does. And then you can change it. Also: further evidence that information produced under torture cannot be relied upon, yet our states still do this. Perhaps sometimes it works? Or is it just very successful in producing "information" that the system wants and expects to receive, which is then interpreted as an objective success that validates the method? Kind of difficult to study that. Perhaps an "ends cannot be used to justify means" principle is simply a necessary precondition for benevolent civilization.
  - Centigonal 12y ago
    A nice formulation of the first part of yout post is Goodhart's Law: If you use a correlated metric to measure something qualitative, people will optimize toward the metric, and it'll stop correlating. Some reading: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart's_law http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart's_law http://lesswrong.com/lw/1ws/the_importance_of_goodharts_law/ http://lesswrong.com/lw/1ws/the_importance_of_goodharts_law/
klausjensen 12y ago
The woman involved, Erla Bolladottir, was my Icelandic language teacher when I moved to Iceland. She is an extraordinarily kind and helpful person, and it angers and saddens me that she has been put through this nightmare because of lousy police-work and ill will.
jacquesm 12y ago
What a story. So many lives wasted, torture and forced confessions. There are no reparations possible for cases like this, no amount of compensation will turn back the clock and no punishment sufficient to go after the guilty parties (in uniform, no less), assuming they are still alive. But when you read things like this you inevitably question if what we call 'civilization' really is all that civilized. Iceland is a small nation, relatively few people and tightly knit. It's one of the last places on earth where I would expect a thing like this to happen. If this could happen there it could happen just about anywhere. And they are still at it (from TFA): "For the past year, the 486-page report of the investigation into the original police inquiry has been sitting on a desk somewhere inside the state prosecutor’s office. She has to decide whether the case should be referred to Iceland’s supreme court so the convictions can be quashed."
- toyg 12y ago
  >If this could happen there it could happen just about anywhere. "Could"? This does happen everywhere, routinely, every day. Most of it happens to people nobody cares about (foreigners, displaced, lone wolfs, drug addicts, mentally ill, smalltime crooks etc etc). Some of it is corrected with time (which is why you have appeals and counter-appeals in most systems). There is just no incentive for a police force not to incriminate, and little for a judicial system not to convict. >For the past year, the 486-page report [...] has been sitting on a desk ... and it will likely sit there until all the implicated people have retired and/or they are 100% sure the Icelandic equivalent to the statute of limitations will cover all of them. Because people with related responsibilities know that, in a few years, the same could happen to them for whatever reason, and then who would look after them? At the time, "persuading" a little crook to confess a crime he didn't commit was a perfectly acceptable standard; who knows what standards will be in 20 years time? So invariably these institutions will "let bygones be bygones". The whole concept of institutional policing is extremely flawed.
  - throwaway7767 12y ago
    > and it will likely sit there until all the implicated people have retired and/or they are 100% sure the Icelandic equivalent to the statute of limitations will cover all of them. This is not an issue. The statute of limitations in Iceland depends on the possible length of the prison sentence for the crime. The maximum is 15 years, so that's long since passed in all cases.
LaSombra 12y ago
It seems that's the tool used by BBC. http://shorthand.com/ http://shorthand.com/
- sesqu 12y ago
  I don't know how much of it comes out of the box, but the article was impressive in in more than just its writing. The only slight annoyances I encountered were the way some pictures appeared too late and the videos lacked length and subject information. Everything else was well paced, relevant and unintrusive. I hope Shorthand gets picked by more long-form producers.
heidar 12y ago
I heard of this case growing up and it has always been considered a mystery in Iceland. I haven't followed it closely but this is the best write up of the case I've seen; impressive work by BBC. While I'm not defending the investigators, a lot has changed in 40 years and even though this might be unacceptable today it was probably different then (as stated in the article). It's very sad to listen to these people talk about how they were treated though.
- rwmj 12y ago
  There doesn't seem much mystery about the first death. A drunk man walks 10 km through freezing cold and snow late at night in winter. Didn't anyone think he had just fallen and died of exposure, and his body was lost in a snowdrift?
  - deong 12y ago
    Had he just succumbed to exposure next to a road, they should have found the body quite quickly.
    - Nanzikambe 12y ago
      With a metre or more of snow falling, assuming he'd be right next to the road isn't logical, he could be any distance from it. When I was in Iceland I was told that tarred/paved roads are a relatively recent thing, given the volcanic landscape and the large number of fissures and caves, it's easy to see how you could wonder away from the "road", stumble, fall or just try to find shelter somewhere and succumb to the cold.
      - deong 12y ago
        I live in Iceland now, and while paved roads were not all that common at the time, it's not like they were barely-visible paths through the lava fields either. But yes, in the area the article is talking about, the ground is a patchwork of these fissures, which could easily conceal a body. On the other hand, there would be almost no way to wander all that far from the road without knowing it. It's not impossible that he would have died of exposure and never been found, but I don't think it's all that likely.
andyjohnson0 12y ago
"Geirfinnur Einarsson may have shared the same surname as Gudmundur but the two were not related." Very minor nitpick. "Einarsson" is a patronymic derived from a parent's given name, not a surname or family name as is common in many western cultures. In the case of the article, Einar is a common Icelandic given name [1] that both victims fathers shared. The Icelandic naming system [2] is interesting. Basically, children get a given name plus a patronymic (father's give name with son or dóttir suffix) or matronymic (mother's given name with son or dóttir suffix). So people two generations apart in the same family have completely different names, and non-siblings having the same patronymic isn't an indicator of kinship. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einar http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einar [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Icelandic_name http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Icelandic_name
- willvarfar 12y ago
  Historically it was much the same across Scandinavia. Most surnames end in son (sen in Denmark) or dotter (daughter), although people started using their parent's surname some time last century. Its fun to see the tradition survives in Iceland. In Sweden its becoming slightly trendy to give your children surnames ending in YOUR-FIRST-NAME+possessive+son/dotter again.
  - Dewie 12y ago
    That tradition, or the remnants of it (as in retaining -sen as a family name rather than as a patronymic) seem to have almost disappeared in my part of Norway.
- Hansi 12y ago
  Yeah this alway made for fun holidays when I was a kid; my dad last name is Ólafsson, my mom's Magnusdóttir, my sister's Hlynsdóttir and mine Hlynsson. Hotel staff often could not get that at all.
  - gislifb 12y ago
    Hah, add to that the confusion that me and my sister have the patronymic from our father's second name.
nichochar 12y ago
Hacker News is really being taken over by non hacker stuff. Interesting article, nice design, but don't really expect things like this here
- duncanawoods 12y ago
  I thought it was posted for its design which is a bit OTT for me. I'm pleasantly surprised to find people talking about the content - IMHO thats quite healthy :)
  - grahamel 12y ago
    I thought so as well(on the design) as the zooming and image changes are too distracting when reading the content
- vacri 12y ago
  There's still a similar amount of hacker stuff in the listings, but the 'interesting tidbits' seem to have pushed out the business half of HN's mission. There's barely an article these days about capturing an clientelle or hiring practices or similar.
- Dewie 12y ago
  If you don't like it (I'm unsure from your wording), are you doing your part by going on new and upvoting the submissions that you do like?
- espadrine 12y ago
  I don't mind reading outstanding non-tech work on a news rating website for hackers once in a while. If it disturbs you, think of it this way: it's a successfully executed exercise in data mining minds.
carlob 12y ago
In good HN spirit, instead of praising the great quality of the article, I'll point out a minor nitpick: > Geirfinnur Einarsson may have shared the same surname as Gudmundur but the two were not related. Einarsson is not a surname, but a patronymic. It's weird that later in the article it reads: > Erla is longing for peace, so that future generations, the sons and dottirs of her grandchildren will know she was innocent and didn’t take part in a murder. Here the author seems to grasp and even make a clever pun on Icelandic patronymics. Weird.
- vacri 12y ago
  A patronymic is functionally a surname. 'sur' means over- or on-; it's an additional part of a personal name. Wikipedia puts it well: "A surname is a name added to a given name and is part of a personal name". Surnames a generally a function of who you were born to, rather than a choice, just like a patronymic.
  - Sharlin 12y ago
    But patronymics are not used in Iceland the way surnames are used in the Anglosphere. For instance, even in a formal context, Geirfinnur Einarsson would not be referred to as "Einarsson" or "Mr. Einarsson". Also, Icelandic phonebooks are ordered primarily by given name.
  - carlob 12y ago
    Well the comment was about people with the same surname being likely relatives. Knowing how patronymics work you would not assume that two persons that share the patronymic are related, just that their fathers have the same name. You are right in that they are actually a surname, and that they are also a function of who you were born to, but the propagation rule means that they are a much poorer metric for blood relations.
- mercer 12y ago
  I read it as the author raising a question that the reader might have, or sharing their process in understanding this fact.
brohee 12y ago
People confess to crimes they didn't commit all the time, yet confessions are the end game in most judicial systems, way over hard proofs... A very sad state of affairs... http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/26/opinion/sunday/why-do-innocent-people-confess.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0 http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/26/opinion/sunday/why-do-inno... And obligatory, Jame's Duane's "Don't talk to the cops" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CkZf6_jK3Zs http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CkZf6_jK3Zs
- andreasvc 12y ago
  Not talking to the police wouldn't have helped the 5 people from the article (although having a lawyer would have helped). They would play a prisoner's dilemma against you, or tell you "your 4 buddies confessed and implicated you, just confess and get a lighter sentence".
Zigurd 12y ago
This is one more reason why police and prosecutors should be individually bonded. This would pay, up front, for liability, and it would wash out the careless and incompetent. Without institutional incentives to produce good results, the incentives to produce more results, faster results, and more lurid results will continue to produce bad results.
warrenmiller 12y ago
also on BBC radio 4 http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0435jz1 http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0435jz1
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
nkoren 12y ago
For a truly amazing look into how false confessions occur -- told from the point of view of an officer who inadvertently extracted one, and took over a decade to recognise his error -- act one of this This American Life episode is a must-listen: http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/507/confessions http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/507/c...

198 points by marcopolis 12y ago

God, this makes me so sad. Being persuaded into admitting guilt to a crime that you have no idea about sounds bizaare but I am sure this case wasn't the last.

Sharlin 12y ago
Well, probably not all that rare in the US, for example, due to the abuse of the plea bargain system.
- tripzilch 12y ago
  That's the weirdest thing about US police series. When I was younger, I never really believed that sort of thing actually happens for real, just thought it was an over-used fictional "cleverness" trope. I mean it's so obvious this is going to lead to abuse and false confessions if actually used for real-life confessions, I figured it had to, because in a TV-series you can assume that the police are the smart/good guys so they could safely use this clever (if somewhat unfair) trick to get the (obvious) bad guys. As I got older, and perhaps as the themes in TV series got a little more complex, I started wondering sometimes, how are these even the good guys? For all they know they are now convicting an innocent man or woman, by pressuring them into confessing to a crime with the only leverage being "an offer they can't refuse" (a much larger sentence).
arethuza 12y ago
At roughly the same time in the UK there were the Guildford Four and Maguire Seven cases: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guildford_Four_and_Maguire_Seven http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guildford_Four_and_Maguire_Seve...

chanks 12y ago

Frontline has an excellent episode on the Norfolk Four, a similar case that happened in Virginia: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/the-confessions/ http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/the-confessions/

sixQuarks 12y ago

I would love to have my favorite book, "Cosmos" by Carl Sagan recreated in this same web layout. In fact, why AREN'T online books like this?

PetitPrince 12y ago
There's "Snow Fall - The Avalanche at Tunnel Creek" by John Branch and published in the New York Times with a similar format: http://www.nytimes.com/projects/2012/snow-fall/ http://www.nytimes.com/projects/2012/snow-fall/
- mercer 12y ago
  I've hard this style referred to as 'Snow Fall Journalism', actually!
medell 12y ago
The Guardian did a good piece "NSA Files Decoded": http://www.theguardian.com/world/interactive/2013/nov/01/snowden-nsa-files-surveillance-revelations-decoded http://www.theguardian.com/world/interactive/2013/nov/01/sno... For more stories in this format: http://multimedia.journalism.berkeley.edu/tutorials/taxonomy-digital-story-packages/embedded-multimedia/ http://multimedia.journalism.berkeley.edu/tutorials/taxonomy...
sakri 12y ago
While the story was interesting, I was also more interested in the layout. In the past there were a lot of "over the top" Flash "experience" sites, with the decline of Flash and skyrocket of "thumb up and down" mobile sites I feel there has also been a drop in experimental layouts and visuals. A lot of that stuff was crap, but it's great to be surprised every now and then. Thumbs up bbc!
- mercer 12y ago
  I generally like the Snowfall-style articles, but for some reason this is the first time where I felt a (very vague) sense that the style was overshadowing the content a little. That said, I prefer a little more experimentation in this area over staying safe...

NKCSS 12y ago

Is this to showcase the article style? It reminds me of the snowy thing the New York Times did a few months ago, but with added parallax effects

bgarbiak 12y ago
This form of presentation (a specific layout for a single longform article) got really popular recently. That "snowy thing NYT did" happened a few years ago, if I recall correctly, and indeed, it might be considered the trend starter. Personally, I'm very often impressed by work of theverge.com/polygon.com in this regard. Here's just one example: http://www.polygon.com/a/xbox-one-review http://www.polygon.com/a/xbox-one-review They perfectly handle the toughest thing, which is the balance between flashiness and readability. As for the BBC article: I don't like the font choices they've made. A serif (Georgia or Cambria) for body content and sans-serif for distinctions would work better, IMHO.
- NKCSS 12y ago
  Thank you, that Xbox One article is indeed very awesome.
- mercer 12y ago
  Yeah, and aside from the font I also felt that the transitions were a bit too abrupt, like they just stitched together a bunch of (in themselves pretty) pages. The German newspaper 'Die Zeit' has been experimenting with this style as well, to the point of (as I understand it) starting Zeit Online as a completely separate department in Berlin. For example (in German): http://www.zeit.de/kultur/karl-marx-allee/index.html#prolog http://www.zeit.de/kultur/karl-marx-allee/index.html#prolog http://www.zeit.de/sport/tour-de-france.html http://www.zeit.de/sport/tour-de-france.html Generally they're a little more subdued and their work, so far, is not as technologically impressive. But I might actually prefer that.

anvandare 12y ago

An example, I'm afraid, of situations that happen all too often around the world. When we look at the justice system as any other abstract system (with positive/negative feedback loops) we find that the actors (the judges, prosecutors, investigators, etc.) are never rewarded for finding the truth. After all, how can you ever know that you found the truth? They are rewarded for finding a truth. For making the picture fit. And that is why you should never collaborate with (or trust) the system. They aren't interested in what's good for you, they are interested in what's good for themselves: finding someone to convict and thereby pushing their yearly evaluation into the positives. [ed.: typo]

moconnor 12y ago
This is an interesting insight into the dangers of ill-chosen metrics. It could only happen in a system in which the police were expected to produce (and were in various ways rewarded for) convictions instead of e.g. a maximally accurate presentation of events that can be used to decide how society should respond. Convictions are far easier to measure (and achieve, of course). How would you go about constructing an efficient, corruption-resistant system that is measured by its accuracy? It seems like a hard problem, but not necessarily an unsolvable one. Debugging support issues sometimes feels like this. If you go into a complex system looking for bugs then you'll find plenty - but not necessarily the one that's causing the current issue. What you're really looking for is to fully understand the reason the system does what it does. And then you can change it. Also: further evidence that information produced under torture cannot be relied upon, yet our states still do this. Perhaps sometimes it works? Or is it just very successful in producing "information" that the system wants and expects to receive, which is then interpreted as an objective success that validates the method? Kind of difficult to study that. Perhaps an "ends cannot be used to justify means" principle is simply a necessary precondition for benevolent civilization.
- Centigonal 12y ago
  A nice formulation of the first part of yout post is Goodhart's Law: If you use a correlated metric to measure something qualitative, people will optimize toward the metric, and it'll stop correlating. Some reading: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart's_law http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart's_law http://lesswrong.com/lw/1ws/the_importance_of_goodharts_law/ http://lesswrong.com/lw/1ws/the_importance_of_goodharts_law/

klausjensen 12y ago

The woman involved, Erla Bolladottir, was my Icelandic language teacher when I moved to Iceland. She is an extraordinarily kind and helpful person, and it angers and saddens me that she has been put through this nightmare because of lousy police-work and ill will.

jacquesm 12y ago

What a story. So many lives wasted, torture and forced confessions. There are no reparations possible for cases like this, no amount of compensation will turn back the clock and no punishment sufficient to go after the guilty parties (in uniform, no less), assuming they are still alive. But when you read things like this you inevitably question if what we call 'civilization' really is all that civilized. Iceland is a small nation, relatively few people and tightly knit. It's one of the last places on earth where I would expect a thing like this to happen. If this could happen there it could happen just about anywhere. And they are still at it (from TFA): "For the past year, the 486-page report of the investigation into the original police inquiry has been sitting on a desk somewhere inside the state prosecutor’s office. She has to decide whether the case should be referred to Iceland’s supreme court so the convictions can be quashed."

toyg 12y ago
>If this could happen there it could happen just about anywhere. "Could"? This does happen everywhere, routinely, every day. Most of it happens to people nobody cares about (foreigners, displaced, lone wolfs, drug addicts, mentally ill, smalltime crooks etc etc). Some of it is corrected with time (which is why you have appeals and counter-appeals in most systems). There is just no incentive for a police force not to incriminate, and little for a judicial system not to convict. >For the past year, the 486-page report [...] has been sitting on a desk ... and it will likely sit there until all the implicated people have retired and/or they are 100% sure the Icelandic equivalent to the statute of limitations will cover all of them. Because people with related responsibilities know that, in a few years, the same could happen to them for whatever reason, and then who would look after them? At the time, "persuading" a little crook to confess a crime he didn't commit was a perfectly acceptable standard; who knows what standards will be in 20 years time? So invariably these institutions will "let bygones be bygones". The whole concept of institutional policing is extremely flawed.
- throwaway7767 12y ago
  > and it will likely sit there until all the implicated people have retired and/or they are 100% sure the Icelandic equivalent to the statute of limitations will cover all of them. This is not an issue. The statute of limitations in Iceland depends on the possible length of the prison sentence for the crime. The maximum is 15 years, so that's long since passed in all cases.

LaSombra 12y ago

It seems that's the tool used by BBC. http://shorthand.com/ http://shorthand.com/

sesqu 12y ago
I don't know how much of it comes out of the box, but the article was impressive in in more than just its writing. The only slight annoyances I encountered were the way some pictures appeared too late and the videos lacked length and subject information. Everything else was well paced, relevant and unintrusive. I hope Shorthand gets picked by more long-form producers.

heidar 12y ago

I heard of this case growing up and it has always been considered a mystery in Iceland. I haven't followed it closely but this is the best write up of the case I've seen; impressive work by BBC. While I'm not defending the investigators, a lot has changed in 40 years and even though this might be unacceptable today it was probably different then (as stated in the article). It's very sad to listen to these people talk about how they were treated though.

rwmj 12y ago
There doesn't seem much mystery about the first death. A drunk man walks 10 km through freezing cold and snow late at night in winter. Didn't anyone think he had just fallen and died of exposure, and his body was lost in a snowdrift?
- deong 12y ago
  Had he just succumbed to exposure next to a road, they should have found the body quite quickly.
  - Nanzikambe 12y ago
    With a metre or more of snow falling, assuming he'd be right next to the road isn't logical, he could be any distance from it. When I was in Iceland I was told that tarred/paved roads are a relatively recent thing, given the volcanic landscape and the large number of fissures and caves, it's easy to see how you could wonder away from the "road", stumble, fall or just try to find shelter somewhere and succumb to the cold.
    - deong 12y ago
      I live in Iceland now, and while paved roads were not all that common at the time, it's not like they were barely-visible paths through the lava fields either. But yes, in the area the article is talking about, the ground is a patchwork of these fissures, which could easily conceal a body. On the other hand, there would be almost no way to wander all that far from the road without knowing it. It's not impossible that he would have died of exposure and never been found, but I don't think it's all that likely.

andyjohnson0 12y ago

"Geirfinnur Einarsson may have shared the same surname as Gudmundur but the two were not related." Very minor nitpick. "Einarsson" is a patronymic derived from a parent's given name, not a surname or family name as is common in many western cultures. In the case of the article, Einar is a common Icelandic given name [1] that both victims fathers shared. The Icelandic naming system [2] is interesting. Basically, children get a given name plus a patronymic (father's give name with son or dóttir suffix) or matronymic (mother's given name with son or dóttir suffix). So people two generations apart in the same family have completely different names, and non-siblings having the same patronymic isn't an indicator of kinship. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einar http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einar [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Icelandic_name http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Icelandic_name

willvarfar 12y ago
Historically it was much the same across Scandinavia. Most surnames end in son (sen in Denmark) or dotter (daughter), although people started using their parent's surname some time last century. Its fun to see the tradition survives in Iceland. In Sweden its becoming slightly trendy to give your children surnames ending in YOUR-FIRST-NAME+possessive+son/dotter again.
- Dewie 12y ago
  That tradition, or the remnants of it (as in retaining -sen as a family name rather than as a patronymic) seem to have almost disappeared in my part of Norway.
Hansi 12y ago
Yeah this alway made for fun holidays when I was a kid; my dad last name is Ólafsson, my mom's Magnusdóttir, my sister's Hlynsdóttir and mine Hlynsson. Hotel staff often could not get that at all.
- gislifb 12y ago
  Hah, add to that the confusion that me and my sister have the patronymic from our father's second name.

nichochar 12y ago

Hacker News is really being taken over by non hacker stuff. Interesting article, nice design, but don't really expect things like this here

duncanawoods 12y ago
I thought it was posted for its design which is a bit OTT for me. I'm pleasantly surprised to find people talking about the content - IMHO thats quite healthy :)
- grahamel 12y ago
  I thought so as well(on the design) as the zooming and image changes are too distracting when reading the content
vacri 12y ago
There's still a similar amount of hacker stuff in the listings, but the 'interesting tidbits' seem to have pushed out the business half of HN's mission. There's barely an article these days about capturing an clientelle or hiring practices or similar.
Dewie 12y ago
If you don't like it (I'm unsure from your wording), are you doing your part by going on new and upvoting the submissions that you do like?
espadrine 12y ago
I don't mind reading outstanding non-tech work on a news rating website for hackers once in a while. If it disturbs you, think of it this way: it's a successfully executed exercise in data mining minds.

carlob 12y ago

In good HN spirit, instead of praising the great quality of the article, I'll point out a minor nitpick: > Geirfinnur Einarsson may have shared the same surname as Gudmundur but the two were not related. Einarsson is not a surname, but a patronymic. It's weird that later in the article it reads: > Erla is longing for peace, so that future generations, the sons and dottirs of her grandchildren will know she was innocent and didn’t take part in a murder. Here the author seems to grasp and even make a clever pun on Icelandic patronymics. Weird.

vacri 12y ago
A patronymic is functionally a surname. 'sur' means over- or on-; it's an additional part of a personal name. Wikipedia puts it well: "A surname is a name added to a given name and is part of a personal name". Surnames a generally a function of who you were born to, rather than a choice, just like a patronymic.
- Sharlin 12y ago
  But patronymics are not used in Iceland the way surnames are used in the Anglosphere. For instance, even in a formal context, Geirfinnur Einarsson would not be referred to as "Einarsson" or "Mr. Einarsson". Also, Icelandic phonebooks are ordered primarily by given name.
- carlob 12y ago
  Well the comment was about people with the same surname being likely relatives. Knowing how patronymics work you would not assume that two persons that share the patronymic are related, just that their fathers have the same name. You are right in that they are actually a surname, and that they are also a function of who you were born to, but the propagation rule means that they are a much poorer metric for blood relations.
mercer 12y ago
I read it as the author raising a question that the reader might have, or sharing their process in understanding this fact.

brohee 12y ago

People confess to crimes they didn't commit all the time, yet confessions are the end game in most judicial systems, way over hard proofs... A very sad state of affairs... http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/26/opinion/sunday/why-do-innocent-people-confess.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0 http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/26/opinion/sunday/why-do-inno... And obligatory, Jame's Duane's "Don't talk to the cops" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CkZf6_jK3Zs http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CkZf6_jK3Zs

andreasvc 12y ago
Not talking to the police wouldn't have helped the 5 people from the article (although having a lawyer would have helped). They would play a prisoner's dilemma against you, or tell you "your 4 buddies confessed and implicated you, just confess and get a lighter sentence".

Zigurd 12y ago

This is one more reason why police and prosecutors should be individually bonded. This would pay, up front, for liability, and it would wash out the careless and incompetent. Without institutional incentives to produce good results, the incentives to produce more results, faster results, and more lurid results will continue to produce bad results.

warrenmiller 12y ago

also on BBC radio 4 http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0435jz1 http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0435jz1

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

nkoren 12y ago

For a truly amazing look into how false confessions occur -- told from the point of view of an officer who inadvertently extracted one, and took over a decade to recognise his error -- act one of this This American Life episode is a must-listen: http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/507/confessions http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/507/c...