This fellow was recently sentenced to life without parole in Salt Lake City.
Some clips from his confession http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=285_1418952250
The whole confession is there too.
This is in reference to this story of a murdered 7 year old child.
I don’t know what actually happened or who did it but the links above do strongly suggest that the person that was sentenced for the murder had at least reasonable doubt on his side and may really be completely innocent. The claim that he confessed out of fear and cultural confusion is not far-fetched at all. It is very easy to get many people to confess to just about anything through extended interrogation tactics that often include some elements of torture.
There are foundations and projects whose goal is to find cases like this and get them overturned on appeal or at least sent back for a retrial. Unfortunately, they are usually grossly underfunded and can only take a fraction of the cases but this one sounds clear-cut enough to me that it may attract some attention from someone willing to fight for him.
Objection! Calls for a conclusion from the [del]witness[/del] posters. Moved to IMHO from General Questions.
samclem, moderator
Here is where it is now. There is more material besides what has been uploaded. None of it points to the guy who got convicted. Some of it does point to others.
I have sent emails to various organizations and made lots of posts but I have been roundly ignored, probably because I tend to be perceived as rude.
What do you suggest now?
Here is where you contact the Innocence Project, I think.
ETA: Or other such organization.
Forgive me for being naive , but what in incentive does anybody have in giving a confession, guilty or innocent? There’s certainly no guarantee of leniency. And short of a plea bargain it just seems to make things worse.
I feel like whether I did or didn’t commit the crime in question I would never sign a confession without any legally binding guarantee. Let the jury decide the evidence, not manipulative detectives prone to tunnel vision.
The Force can have a strong influence on the weak-minded.
Not everyone is a legal beagle like on this board. Some people believe “things will go easier on you if you confess” or “let’s settle this so we can all go home”, especially after 12 or 18 hours no sleep. (I don’t understand why anyone does not say “I want my lawyer before I say a word.” Then shut up.) A lot of weak-minded and confused people will try to please authority figures, and the interrogation is often structured to exploit this.
As for convictions, absent a serious defence, most court cases are railroad jobs. Public defenders barely get time to talk to a client, let alone investigate the case or read deeper into the details. The PD shows up, the DA says “we have a signed confession”, the PD simply tells his client “you aren’t going to beat your own confession, better to try for a deal”. The cops don’t care. Get a confession, close the case. the DA doesn’t care about details, “got a confession, easy win”.
There was a recent case of a 15-year-old locked up in Rikers Island for 3 years because on principle he refused to accept a deal for something he didn’t do. After 3 years of trial postponements they finally realized the only witness, who had changed his story several times, was no longer available.
Most of the inmates there thought he was crazy not to plead guilty for a crime he didn’t commit. They were right, he would have been out a lot sooner if he had. The American “Justice” system is totally screwed up.
Oh yes you would although you may not believe that now. I can break you just like most integration experts can given enough time. It is just basic psychology and torture tactics. You can get anyone to confess to anything even if you have no knowledge of it. The thing that is telling about those videos is that he doesn’t have a consistent story and is looking for his interrogators to tell him what to say so that he can get out of it. Even then, he doesn’t tell a consistent story and is looking for guidance because he doesn’t understand what is going on.
I am a fairly strong law and order type of guy who isn’t opposed to the death penalty but those accounts and videos just flat out piss me off. I think there is an extremely good chance that he is completely innocent.
I do have some experience with this type of thing. I have written about it before but a very good guy that I grew up with took his kids to school one morning and came back home to find his wife dead in bed and his stepson also dead with a gunshot wound to his head in the garage from his own rifle. The wife and son had been fighting over a cell phone when my friend took the smaller kids to school and it apparently escalated to a murder-suicide.
The police on the scene ruled it as such and it was obviously tragic but became even more tragic when a now proven corrupt prosecutor decided he didn’t like to have any murder victims in his district with no one to prosecute. He invented this weird theory that would leave JFK assassination buffs shaking their head that my friend did it himself. They scored an arrest out of the blue months later but it didn’t stop there. Most people thought the charges were laughable but they somehow got the dumbest jury in Texas history to make a conviction of life for double murder and he was supposed to be thankful that he didn’t get the death penalty for it.
That case was picked up quickly by a very generous Innocence Project thanks to the insistence of his sister (also my friend) but it has been an extremely slow process. The first step was to go through a series of appeals to get him out of maximum security prison. That went to the Texas Supreme Court and eventually worked. They overturned his original conviction but even that wasn’t enough. He was sent back for retrial but the bail was set at $500,000 with no way to get it. It gets worse than that. Forget the right to speedy trial. That is complete bullshit in cases like that. He was supposed to have one in July of this year but it was an election year so they postponed it indefinitely so he is still sitting in jail tonight because his stepson killed his wife 7 years ago.
He will got out eventually because he is completely innocent but the system does not make it easy to correct judicial mistakes. The various Innocence projects do good work but they only take the most blatant examples of injustice (this one might qualify) and they are vastly underfunded.
A story like this must have a link, no?
One (female) poster here whose hubby is a police officer has basically said that even an honest person can be made to question themselves under his interrogation - and that the technique is to keep going over small details again and again until the accused gets confused.
Apparently he uses the technique to get guilty people to confess - but it’s very easy to imagine how the innocent can be caught by it as well.
In a famous French case, the defense argued exactly that about the motives the alleged culprit had for admiting to the crime : he had a compliant personnality and was very eager to please. No hint of the confession being beaten out of it, or of harsh, long or exhausting interrogation, just that : his tendancy was to please people. He was found guilty and exonerated many years later when it was half-randomly discovered that a famous serial killer had been present at the crime scene.
It doesn’t seem to make sense that someone would admit to have killed quite horribly two kids (as in this case) just to please a police officer, and it seems hardly credible on the face of it. But fact is, people admit to crimes they didn’t commit all the time. It’s weird, but very real.
And as someone already pointed out, logically, even people who did commit the crime shouldn’t admit to it, except under harshness or something.
It does not appear to have been a false confession. And I don’t think the Innocence Project is going to have a lot of interest in the case.
Regards,
Shodan
Something a bit different after reading the linked article: how comes the family of the victims always seems to back the accusation? Even in cases with serious holes, I can’t remember a single instance of a family expressing any kind of doubt about the guilt of the accused. Logically they should sometimes wonder : “what if the real murderer of my 7 yo is still at large?”.
What psychological process is at work here?
Maybe it has to do with the fact that the state just got done proving he was guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.
Regards,
Shodan
Not referring specifically to this case, but after a horrific experience it is natural to want to find a target to focus their anger. Once that target has been identified he becomes evil in the eyes of the victims and confirmation bias takes over. Everything is in favor of the guilt of the target is believed, and anything against his guilt is discarded as evil manipulation. After all, who except someone who is evil would defend the person who killed their daughter.
Skin under fingernails.
The victim had microscopic skin cell DNA under her fingernails from numerous people she had contact with before death. The accused gave piggyback rides and bicycle rides to the victim, this was established. In other words the victim almost certainly had microscopic skin cell DNA from Met under her nails before the crime. So it is meaningless that she also had it afterwards.
Four small drops of blood on the back of Met’s jacket from Hser Ner Moo.
The crime was extremely bloody. Please note the questions the FBI agent asks Met about the blood and how he answers. It seems obvious he has no clue what kind of crime was committed nor what kind of blood evidence needs to be worked into the confession. Note too that despite the vast amount of blood in the crime, the blood on Met’s jacket is consisyent with gravity, the four small drops were in a straight line. At the trial the family said she had a cut on her finger before she died.
[QUOTE=Shagnasty]
The police on the scene ruled it as such and it was obviously tragic but became even more tragic when a now proven corrupt prosecutor decided he didn’t like to have any murder victims in his district with no one to prosecute.
[/QUOTE]
How was it proven that the prosecutor was corrupt? Was this because he charged your friend, or was there other malfeasance shown?
Regards,
Shodan
There are indications that up until the time of conviction the family may have suspected an uncle was involved.
After the conviction the people who speak the language of that community and know all of the characters involved cast their verdict for who the culprit was. The Salt Lake Tribune
In this case all of the people on both sides of the case are from refugee camps. Many of them have seen friends and relatives killed by police and soldiers, all of them have heard stories about it.
Note in the confession Met asks if he will be able to say goodby to his mother before they kill him, if that is his fate. ItemFix - Social Video Factory