help needed - compiling a list of documentaries and tv series on police frames and wrongful convictions

https://www.insidejustice.co.uk/cases/tv-library.php?page=2

Inside Justice : Birmingham 6.

https://www.bustle.com/p/the-15-best-unsolved-true-crime-documentaries-you-can-stream-right-now-9535566

Brothers Keeper

One you provided a link to Greg......Murder on a Sunday. Classic Reid Technique used on a 15y/o in Florida including belting him and writing his statement for him. The defence council shredded the DA's case who had claimed it would require a "Oliver Stone type conspiracy" to find against the police.

Another from Netflix is The Perfect Shot. In that one the suspects alibi was that he was at a baseball game with his young daughter rather than outside committing murder. Luckily for him a TV show was filming crowd scenes and he was found on an outtake reel.

There was a headline story in the 80's about a polish guy called Stefan.....can't remember his surname but it began with a K. He was jailed for life for a string of rapes but was eventually released when it was discovered that as well as being slow witted he was also impotent., something the prosecution had hid from the defence. If I can remember his surname there should be something on YouTube about his case.

Should be one made about Tommy Lee walker. Bastards

Mick Purdy wrote:https://www.bustle.com/p/the-15-best-unsolved-true-crime-documentaries-you-can-stream-right-now-9535566

Brothers Keeper

https://www.deseretnews.com/article/350910/PBS-AIRING-CREEPY-DOCUMENTARY-OF-TRIAL.html

When they see us.

https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2019/may/30/when-they-see-us-netflix-central-park-five

How a Corrupt Chicago Cop Framed Dozens of People.

Thanks all. Unless anyone can think of a 20th, that should do it.

steely dan wrote:There was a headline story in the 80's about a polish guy called Stefan.....can't remember his surname but it began with a K. He was jailed for life for a string of rapes but was eventually released when it was discovered that as well as being slow witted he was also impotent., something the prosecution had hid from the defence. If I can remember his surname there should be something on YouTube about his case.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Lesley_Molseed

steely dan wrote:

steely dan wrote:There was a headline story in the 80's about a polish guy called Stefan.....can't remember his surname but it began with a K. He was jailed for life for a string of rapes but was eventually released when it was discovered that as well as being slow witted he was also impotent., something the prosecution had hid from the defence. If I can remember his surname there should be something on YouTube about his case.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Lesley_Molseed

Thanks Steely, there was indeed a documentary on this case - now number 20 on the list.

There was an STV documentary made about the Guildford 4.
A film too..In the Name of the Father with Daniel Day Lewis and Emma Thompson( her first role after her appearance in the obscure CIA training flick "How we made the Roundabout magic")
I'm certain one of the Guildford 4 ended up marrying one of Bobby Kennedy's daughters.
Gerry Conlon was just a daft kid staying at his aunts in London. He slept rough after a night's boozing the night a pub was blown up. A pub frequented by British Army personnel..and back in the day it was enough that he was Irish and in the vicinity.
With the links between Glasgow/West of Scotland and The Troubles these cases got maximum publicity up here. I'm sure there must have been other documentaries made.
Having a Catholic father and a Protestant mother growing up amidst all that gave you a brutal insight from a young age just how rotten and compromised religious structures really are.

alex wilson wrote:There was an STV documentary made about the Guildford 4.
A film too..In the Name of the Father with Daniel Day Lewis and Emma Thompson( her first role after her appearance in the obscure CIA training flick "How we made the Roundabout magic")
I'm certain one of the Guildford 4 ended up marrying one of Bobby Kennedy's daughters.
Gerry Conlon was just a daft kid staying at his aunts in London. He slept rough after a night's boozing the night a pub was blown up. A pub frequented by British Army personnel..and back in the day it was enough that he was Irish and in the vicinity.
With the links between Glasgow/West of Scotland and The Troubles these cases got maximum publicity up here. I'm sure there must have been other documentaries made.
Having a Catholic father and a Protestant mother growing up amidst all that gave you a brutal insight from a young age just how rotten and compromised religious structures really are.

Thank you, Alexei. The doco was called Small Lives and Great Reputations and is added to the list.

greg parker wrote:

steely dan wrote:

steely dan wrote:There was a headline story in the 80's about a polish guy called Stefan.....can't remember his surname but it began with a K. He was jailed for life for a string of rapes but was eventually released when it was discovered that as well as being slow witted he was also impotent., something the prosecution had hid from the defence. If I can remember his surname there should be something on YouTube about his case.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Lesley_Molseed

Thanks Steely, there was indeed a documentary on this case - now number 20 on the list.

Well I hope the doc is a little more accurate than my memory of the case.

True Conviction Documentary

https://www.texasmonthly.com/the-culture/the-exonerated-true-conviction/

Latest blog post
https://www.thenewdisease.space/post/when-justice-denied-becomes-the-excuse-to-continue-denying-it

greg parker wrote:Latest blog post
https://www.thenewdisease.space/post/when-justice-denied-becomes-the-excuse-to-continue-denying-it

Outstanding.

It's an age old Human trait. I think one calls it CYA - and in some cases for eternity.

Stan Dane wrote:

greg parker wrote:Latest blog post
https://www.thenewdisease.space/post/when-justice-denied-becomes-the-excuse-to-continue-denying-it

Outstanding.

Thanks Stan -- and thanks also for the head's up on the typos. Gave me the excuse to go through it all again and add a few bits and pieces, including this:

Meanwhile, CAPA heads the cry for all of the remaining files to be opened - as they should be. But not, as currently is the situation, at the expense of recognizing that what we already have would be more than sufficient to get any prisoner exonerated and released from Death Row. 

And just added this as well,

As a side-bar, Let me add here that even Ruby's alleged reason for shooting Oswald is straight out of the Reid Technique manual... which is to offer suspects an excuse for the crime that puts it in the best possible light. For example, police might offer to a burglar the excuse that he did not steal the drugs for his own gain, but because his sick mother needed them and could not afford them. This is meant to gain the co-operation of the suspect, who now (wrongly) believes that they will be treated more leniently by the prosecutors and courts. The Reid company now in fact publishes a whole book of excuses for police to use with suspects. 

On December 14, 1955, Darrel Parker came home for lunch from his job as a forester in Lincoln, Nebraska. A recent graduate of Iowa State, he had moved to Lincoln with his wife, Nancy, who worked as a dietician for a flour-and-noodle company and had a cooking show on the local television station. He found her dead in their bedroom. Her face was battered, her hands and feet were bound, and a cord had been knotted around her neck. The medical examiner later determined that she had been raped before the murder.

Parker called the police and spent the next several days in a fog of grief and sedation. After the officers questioned him, he took his wife’s body home to Iowa for burial. Several days later, while mourning with her family, he got a call from the attorney for Lancaster County, Nebraska. There was some new information, the attorney said, and he asked if Parker could come in and help with the investigation. When Parker arrived, he was led into a windowless room and introduced to a large, well-dressed man named John Reid.

Reid was a former Chicago street cop who had become a consultant and polygraph expert. He had developed a reputation as someone who could get criminals to confess. Rather than brutalize suspects, as police often did in those days, he used modern science, combining his polygraphic skills with an understanding of human psychology.

Reid hooked Parker up to the polygraph and started asking questions. Parker couldn’t see the movement of the needles, but each time he answered a question about the murder Reid told him that he was lying. As the hours wore on, Reid began to introduce a story. Contrary to appearances, he said, the Parkers’ marriage was not a happy one. Nancy refused to give Parker the sex that he required, and she flirted with other men. One day, in a rage, Parker took what was rightfully his. After nine hours of interrogation, Parker broke down and confessed. He recanted the next day, but a jury found him guilty of murder and sentenced him to life in prison.

The case helped burnish Reid’s reputation. He hired new employees, took on more clients, and developed more sophisticated methods of questioning. Today, John E. Reid & Associates, Inc., trains more interrogators than any other company in the world. Reid’s clients include police forces, private security companies, the military, the F.B.I., the C.I.A., and the Secret Service—almost anyone whose job involves extracting the truth from those who are often unwilling to provide it. The company’s interview method, called the Reid Technique, has influenced nearly every aspect of modern police interrogations, from the setup of the interview room to the behavior of detectives. The company says that the people it trains get suspects to confess eighty per cent of the time.

A growing number of scientists and legal scholars, though, have raised concerns about Reid-style interrogation. Of the three hundred and eleven people exonerated through post-conviction DNA testing, more than a quarter had given false confessions—including those convicted in such notorious cases as the Central Park Five. The extent of the problem is unknowable, because there’s no national database on wrongful convictions. But false confessions, which often lead to these convictions, are not rare, and experts say that Reid-style interrogations can produce them.

Last winter, I signed up for a basic Reid & Associates training course, in Boston. It lasted three days and cost five hundred and eighty dollars. There were about forty people in the class—mostly police officers, federal agents, and private security workers. The instructor, Lou Senese, joined the firm in 1972, shortly after he graduated from college, and is now a vice-president. A middle-aged Chicagoan who resembles a less edgy Dan Ackroyd with glasses, he has the manner of an affable salesman. He mixed lessons in interrogation with homespun stories about how he used his training to outwit a car dealer, and how his daughters used it to manipulate him. The hallmark of lying is anxiety, he said, and interviewing therefore involves watching for signs of anxiety and occasionally causing it.

The Reid Technique begins with the Behavior Analysis Interview, in which you determine whether the suspect is lying. The interview has its roots in polygraph testing, and involves asking a series of nonthreatening questions to get a sense of the suspect’s baseline behavior, and then following up with more loaded questions. Such “behavior-provoking questions” might include “What kind of punishment should they give to the person who committed this crime?” You can also imply that you have evidence, a technique called “baiting.” You might say, “We’re in the process of analyzing evidence from the crime scene. Is there any reason that your DNA would turn up there?”

Senese asked the class, “What do you think is more important, verbal or nonverbal behavior?” Intuitively, we responded, “Nonverbal.” “Yeah,” he said. “That’s the whole ballgame right there.” He told us that a video of an interview without sound would be more likely to reveal lying than one that included the audio. He showed us footage of a dark-haired woman being questioned about having changed her prescription for oxycodone from ten pills to forty. She gave equivocal answers, touched her face, and cast her eyes down and to the left. “I say that’s deceptive,” Senese pronounced. In another video, a bearded bank-robbery suspect sighed and shrugged while giving meandering answers. A teen-ager accused of setting fire to his family’s house responded with details that were oddly specific—such as arriving at school at 7:49 a.m.—while picking at his sock, jiggling his foot, and touching his cheek. When the kid paused to rub his eye, Senese turned and shot us a look.

If you decide that the suspect is lying, you leave the room and wait for five minutes. Then you return with an official-looking folder. “I have in this folder the results of our investigation,” you say. You remain standing to establish your dominance. “After reviewing our results, we have no doubt that you committed the crime. Now, let’s sit down and see what we can do to work this out.”

The next phase—Interrogation—involves prodding the suspect toward confession. Whereas before you listened, now you do all the talking. If the suspect denies the accusation, you bat it away. “There’s absolutely no doubt that this happened,” you say. “Now let’s move forward and see what we can do.” If he asks to see the folder, you say no. “There’ll be time for that later. Now let’s focus on clearing this whole thing up.”

“Never allow them to give you denials,” Senese told us. “The key is to shut them up.”

Having headed off denials, you steer the subject toward a confession by offering a face-saving alternative. The process is called “minimization”—downplaying the moral consequences of the crime without mentioning the legal ones. In the case of the woman who tampered with her oxycodone prescription, you can suggest that the dentist did not give her enough pain pills and that she only wanted to save a trip to the pharmacy. “If you were a drug addict, you wouldn’t have changed the prescription to forty—you would have changed it to a hundred!” Senese’s 2005 book “Anatomy of Interrogation Themes” lists more than two thousand such excuses, in cases ranging from identity theft to murder. No matter how repugnant the crime, he told us, you can come up with a rationalization that makes it easier for the suspect to admit it

When the suspect finally admits to the crime, you praise him for owning up and press for corroborating details. Then you work together to convert the admission into a full, written confession. If he seems to have trouble remembering the details, you can present multiple-choice questions. Where did you enter the house: the front, the back, through a window? As a finishing touch, you introduce some trivial mistakes into the document, which the suspect will correct and initial. That will show the court that the suspect understood what he was signing.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/12/09/the-interview-7