Perfect Evidence

The most surprising thing to me in this episode was in part one where Huy Dao was blamed for police for a crime that he did not do and had evidence to prove that he was innocent. I thought that was disturbing. It reminds me a little of what is happening in Ferguson, Missouri. Mr. Dao was still just a boy when he was convicted, and none of his family except his cousin came to show support at the hearings. What I am most disturbed about is that the police seemed to want to find someone who fit the stereotypes of who they thought would commit that type of crime. The media didn’t help, when they were selling an untrue story. It makes me wonder how many news stories are untrue. That is why this case reminds me of the Ferguson case in Missouri. I am sure everyone has heard what is going on down there. These cases are dealing with racial issues, and both cases are unique in many ways. I am not an expert to what is going on, but the media is definitely taking everything out of proportion, and should have stayed out of the communities business. More innocent people have been affected with the riots. Mr. Dao is the innocent one in his case, and has been affected by missing out on the younger years of his life and not learning many basic skills of living or getting a higher education and developing a career. I think that psychological science can help with improving with wrong convictions, because then people will be able to see how people react in a physical and mental way. If people react in a certain was that they either show that they are extremely distraught and have a body language showing that they are cooperating then they could be innocent. If the people is showing signs of not being cooperative and not caring about anything except themselves. I like to watch criminal mystery shows like Criminal minds and Lie to me. Both those shows look at body language and how they react and answer to their questions. Lie to Me is particularly fascinating because he watched facial expressions, body language and speaking tone to tell if a person is lying. Criminal Minds is not as advanced in that department, but they look at evidence to see if a person is guilty. I think if the police department was not corrupt and had used proper techniques to properly study evidence then I do not think that Mr. Dao would have gone through all this emotional and maybe physical trauma. I think that the judicial system today is not accurate, just, and makes it easy to gain power and become corrupt. I think that putting psychological science in the judicial system would help find people and properly convict the guilty ones and even save citizens taxes in the process. I think there should be a lot of changes and I hope there are not as many wrongfully convicted people that I think there is. The terms I used were: Psychological Science, Stereotypes, facial expressions, and body language.

For this post I listened to episode 210 of This American Life entitled Perfect Evidence. This episode focused on the use of DNA in the criminal justice system and how it has been used to convict people of crimes as well as prove innocence to others. DNA is a very important part of crime scenes because it is evidence that cannot be argued with. When someones DNA is found they cannot just come out and deny it is their DNA. This is because of how unique each individuals DNA actually is. Everyones DNA is different and I think that its cool they can use it in our justice system for good hard proof. I also think it is scary for the same reason because if they mess up at all when testing the DNA, there is no going back and whoever the test comes back to will be at fault.
The most surprising thing from this episode to me was the last story of the fourteen-year-old boy who admitted to killing his own sister after a police interrogation, even though later DNA showed it wasn't him. When they told the boy that his DNA was found at the scene of his sisters death he broke down and denied being there, however they began to convince him he did it, even through his innocence. Although this kind of interrogation is controversial, it is legal. Michael began denying he was there, and then began saying if he did it he didn't remember. Once he began to believe the police had DNA proof, he convinced himself he did it, and that he was in for a lot of trouble. I felt bad listening to him sob because that really is a harsh way to interrogate someone. It’s amazing how much our beliefs of given information can power our thoughts and overtake what we know to be true.
Psychological science can help overcome the problem of wrongful convictions. This is because when science is involved there are lots of facts presented. When facts are presented, there is no arguing. The mind is a powerhouse, and when it panics, guilty minds will give good information. Physical evidence can also help overcome wrongful convictions, like in the story of the four innocent teens that were convicted of murder. They spent 15 years behind bars before the DNA found the right wrongdoers. It would be very frustrating and depressing to live behind bars knowing you are innocent.
I hope the justice system can continue to improve and keep using DNA and psychological science in a positive way. As it is a big help, it could also be very bad if used in the wrong way. It makes me wonder how many innocent people died on death row or sitting in prison before these ways to view crime were discovered. I hope the numbers of innocent people convicted continues to slow, and justice is done correctly as it keeps improving.

Terms Used: DNA, Psychological Science, Physical, Frustration, Depression

Jacob Clark
Mcklain
Psych
12-6-14
Perfect evidence
I feel like the most surprising thing i learned after the show, was how unsurprised i was. Granted, there were a few things that peaked my interest. But, the point it was getting at i know fairly well. We live in a world where it is pretty common for innocent people to have major crimes pinned on them. All because everyone needed someone to blame. When the cops authorities couldnt find the real culprit, they improvised. But who’s fault is it? the people for pressuring the police? the police for accusing the wrong person? or the wrong person for signing something he shouldn't? I can only offer speculation.
Some anecdotal evidence i have is a petty crime my brother committed. He was 12 and very rowdy as a child. One night he got a little too rowdy when he and his friend went out vandalizing a few cars. So later that night the cops catch them and take em to the station. Later that week they are called in for negotiating because some people called in about having food stolen from their house. We know it wasn't josh or his friend. They just vandalized a few cars and were nowhere near the house that had food stolen. However, the police tried very hard to pin it on josh and his friend. Saying things like, “we know it was you, we have your fingerprints on the scene”. which is funny because first off, no they didn't have the fingerprints. Secondly their fingerprints weren't even in the system. They were trying to create a self fulfilling prophecy. Anyway, they were later dropped of those charges thankfully. But so many others in the world never were
New psychological science is helping end the era of wrongful convictions. Laying out all the evidence and taking a more complex approach they are able to extrapolate more truth. Just as well, DNA evidence has changed the circumstances for a lot of people. Some that have been locked up for 20 plus years are getting out because their cases are reopened and the DNA of the assailant isn't theirs. Its crazy to think about how often this happened.
Psychological terms: DNA, self fulfilling prophecy, innocent, psych science

This episode talks about DNA and how it reveals how police get innocent people to confess to crimes they didn't commit and also how they get witnesses to pin crimes on innocent people. DNA is a very powerful tool, but needs to be handled carefully. One example shared was how the slides of DNA got switched in the lab, which lead to telling the wrong person they had cancer and leaving the cancer victim untreated. In Illinois, there are more wrongful convictions than right ones from DNA convictions. DNA can help convict someone, but also set them free. One man was sentence to life for a wrongful DNA conviction. However, after spending 15 years in prison, DNA also proved him innocent and he was finally released.

The most surprising thing I learned about after listening to this show was how police got a 14 year old boy to confess to killing his sister, when he actually didn’t kill her. Police didn’t have much evidence, so they really needed a confession and did everything in their power to get one. They interrogated him by playing good cop, bad cop. Then they manipulated him, set him up and tricked him into believing he did it. I was shocked to believe police could lie and say they had evidence they do not actually have. They told him they were going to use science to prove him guilty with the Computer Voice Stress Analyzer. However, this lie detector doesn’t really work, the only thing it does is scare the accused. Eventually he started to doubt his own memory and actually believe he did kill his sister. He said. “If I did this, I don’t remember.” It was surprising to me the effect the officers had on the boy. I can’t imagine how he felt. This also scared me to think about all the innocent people locked up from wrongful convictions, while the real criminal is still out there.

Psychological science can help improve the real world problems of wrongful convictions. Memory plays a big factor in a testimony and understanding how memory work is important. Memory can play tricks on people and is not always accurate. Repressed memories are hypothesized memories having been unconsciously blocked, due to the memory being associated with a high level of stress or trauma. The theory postulates that even though the individual cannot recall the memory, it may still be affecting them consciously. When police were interrogating the 14 year old boy, they caused him to have high stress. This incorrectly made him believe that he possibly repressed the memory of killing his sister. One reason for this was because people have the tendency to obey authority figures. They tend to do things they normally wouldn’t do, or don’t believe just because an authority figure told them to. These wrongful convictions can be caused from authority figures forcing people to confess. Understanding that authorities easily trick people should be considered when deciding if someone is guilty or innocent. Also, people are easily influenced from stereotypes and bias. Detectives study the evidence and put together a profile of the characteristics the perpetrator most likely has. These are usually stereotypes and then when someone fits these characteristics, they are automatically accused.

Police officers should investigate more before they begin interrogation. They need to be carful how they interrogate; because once someone signs a confession sheet it is very hard to take it back. Then, when they are locked up for years before finally proven to be innocent, their lives are ruined and have to start all over again. People run the justice system and people makes errors. Understanding physiological science can help minimize errors and convict the correct people.

Terms: psychological science, computer voice stress analyzer, memory, repressed memory, obey, authority, stereotypes, bias

This show was very alarming. The part that alarmed me the most was the thought that the people who we rely on to be good honest people and to keep our world safe, the policemen and detectives devoted to justice, had used threats and lies to arrest young innocent kids for a murder they were not at all responsible for. The detectives used manipulation to trick or scare these teenage boys into a guilty verdict. I had a really hard time retaining this idea. How could anyone live with themselves after putting people, who they knew were innocent, into a jail cell for a huge part of their lives? The answer I came up with was pretty simple. They were protecting their own self-image. They knew they were in the losing end of finding a murderer of their victim, so they made their own suspects, and it was all because they had the power to do so. Omar talked about how the police tried to persuade him into becoming a witness for them. They tried to make him believe a story they had conjured on their own, and when he refused, they framed him in the case too. The same went for the young 14 year old boy in Act 2. They twisted the story within the interrogation so much that the poor boy became confused and didn’t know how to answer the questions. He became so confused that he started to believe he had actually killed is sister, they had altered his memory. Not only was the interrogation wrong, but it was worse that the boy did not have the maturity to handle the situation. He was terrified and emotionally stressed.
No one questions the credibility of cops like they should be questioned. We too often as a society remain ignorant to what is going on around us. That was a shocking realization I had learned after this episode. We, from our ignorance, place the power into these men and women’s hands and give them the ability to do what was done to these young people. Either murder case was a major-life stressor for the suspects involved
The media is another thing that we typically give the benefit of the doubt to. They want a story that sells, so they add their own flavoring to the story to make it interesting. In this case, the media played into ruining any sort of integrity these boys had left. The example that Omar used was the example he heard on the radio. The man on the radio accused Omar of liking it cold, meaning that Omar had sex with the young woman’s body after she had died. He was mortified after hearing this, and his integrity fell through. The case became huge, and people began making their own accusations about the suspects. There was also a lot of punctuation on the fact that it was four black men that had killed a young white lady. This kind of statement is an example of prejudice. The fact that these boys were black males suspected of killing a white woman added to the awful situation that was going on. It only fueled the fire. Even if we choose to believe it or not, the United States still struggles with prejudices against race. They were feeding the public with wrongful ideas.
I think that, from the radio episodes that we have heard from “This American Life” so far, psychology is dangerous to society. Playing with how people think should not be a science. It can cause a lot of harm. These two situations of interrogation are a great example. A previous episode also exposed the dangers of psychology through psychiatrists. These types of mind altering techniques scare me. If we continue to use them, they need to be monitored much better than what they have been.
Terms: race, prejudice, psychology, ignorant, integrity, persuade, framing, stress, maturity, major-life stressor

After listening to This American Life episode; Perfect Evidence, I learned that DNA is a huge factor when being involved with crimes. Little things such as hair particles, fingerprints, or even spit can help investigators in any case they are trying to solve. DNA was a factor in this episode because several inmates were wrongfully accused of doing violent things to a girl and eventually killing her. They were eventually released after several years of imprisonment and having a negative DNA test for the crime. Police officers have the power to interrogate and manipulate an individual until they confess even if they did not do the crime. Sadly, some police know that this individual did not do it, they just feel pressure from the community to convict someone in order to end the case. This is why I believe DNA is the number one factor when investigators are trying to solve a crime.

The most surprising thing while listening to this episode, was learning about police interrogations. They were trying to get a man to say he was an eyewitness of the murder case in order for people to believe the story was reliable. Another story I found most surprising was when the police officers were interrogating a fourteen year old boy until he believed that he actually killed his sister. Police told him his DNA was found during the investigation of the crime. But, the boy knew he did not do it. This story reminded me of how some psychiatrists make people believe things that are not true.

Psychological science can help improve the real world problems of wrongful convictions. Memory is a huge factor when the interrogations are occurring because people tend to believe things that they did not do just so the process would end. The accusers can sometimes stereotype people and/or be more biased towards others leading to an even worse interrogation. The worse the interrogation, the probability of the victim believing the crime was caused by them increase. The memories of these individuals can be inaccurate due to the manipulation of the investigator. The stress the police caused to this fourteen year old boy gave him the ability to repress a memory of killing his sister. His sobs and cry made me feel extremely bad for him because no one should ever have to be wrongfully convicted. While listening to this I thought, does the police have any feelings? How doesn’t the cop feel horrible for making the boy feel this way and knowing the boy wasn’t the killer?

I think that the judge and jury should always take into consideration that the individual on trial could possibly been wrongfully accused. It could happen to anyone. The DNA test should be done before a person is sent to prison because if the individual did nothing in the crime, they are wasting several years of their life locked up. When they are eventually released like the men in this episode, the world is totally different. Internet on phones, iPads, more buildings, different businesses, etc. They must adjust to these new things and freedoms in order to live a happy life out of prison. Most importantly spend quality time with their families that they unfortunately missed out on.

Terms: DNA, Psychiatrists, Stereotypes, Bias, Psychological Science, Memory, Repressed Memory, Stress

The most surprising thing to me after listening to this show was how in the Roscetti case four teenage boys were wrongfully accused of raping and killing Lori Roscetti. There were many shocking facts in this case but the one that stuck out to me the most was how the Chicago police set up and charged Omar, who was fifteen at the time and innocent with helping in the crime. The police needed a fourth criminal and while they were trying to find one came across Omar and wanted him to come out a say he was a witness to the crime and when he refused to tell the lie the police pinned him as the forth criminal. Fast forward fifteen years later not only were all teenagers, now men, found not guilty it also turned out that the story the police gave to the media was extremely false. There weren’t four men who raped and killed Lori, only two did. They weren’t teenagers, they were men. Also, the scene of the crime didn’t happen near her car but in an alley close to where she lived. It was so surprising how the police were able to make up their own story and pin the crime on whoever they wanted and get away with it. Another shocking part in this week’s show of This American Life was the one where the fourteen year old boy was manipulated into believing he was truly the one who stabbed and killed his own sister. It is sickening to think that these police officers actually think that they are doing the right thing and that these people they are accusing really did do the crime since they get them to “confess.”
With that being said, I believe that one way psychological science could be used to improve the real world of wrongfully accused convicts is to train all police enforcement on psychological science. Maybe after the police enforcement better understand how the brain works, how it can be tricked, they can better understand where certain suspects who are brought in are coming from. For example when the two police officers were interrogating that fourteen year old buy for killing his own sister with knowing it or not were tempering with his memory. From our textbook we learned about a phenomenon called change blindness. In this research, shown in the Scientific Thinking feature, participants were momentarily blocked from them and while they were blocked got switched out with a completely different person and the participant wouldn’t even notice. What this phenomenon illustrates is that we can attend to only a limited amount of information. As a result, our perceptions of the world are often inaccurate. When we don’t pay attention we most likely will not create a memory of the information. When you can’t create a memory you’re left with guessing. Having someone tell you something repeatedly over and over again that you did in fact do this action and you don’t have a memory created of that specific event, you start to believe what they are telling you. That is exactly what those two police officers were doing to that fourteen year old boy and they didn’t even realize it.
Terms: psychological science, change blindness, research, brain

This episode surprised me to say the least. First starting off with Act one called Hawks and Rabbits. When I first looked at the title of this particular Act, I was especially curious as to what it would be about. The explanation for why it was named that is actually pretty straightforward. The idea that going into a psychological situation you are not accustomed to is like being a rabbit whereas the others who know the drill are the hawks. Being a lone rabbit in a field where hawks fly isn’t exactly where I would like to be. Getting back to the story, this event took place in Chicago in the year of 1986 where a woman by the name of Lori Roscetti was raped and killed. The reason why this particular story made the headlines is because it was described, as a horrifying and senseless massacre done by a few people who had a specific attitude in mind and for me that was to kill. Since this was becoming so big in the news the police were in rush to find suspects who could have committed the crime. They basically brought in a few men and tried to persuade them that they killed this woman that they didn’t even know. I knew falsely accusing people happened back then, but I didn’t know the numbers. It’s amazing the amount of innocent people who were in jail back then based on many things, one in particular being discrimination. At the beginning they say that Roscetti was a white medical student murdered in a black neighborhood. I know this fact had a lot to do with why this became so big and also who they brought into to the station. The men in jail experienced things that I couldn’t even imagine. Their self-esteem and overall well-being changed them as they sat in jail for over fifteen years. If I were them I think I would have wanted to give up, but they persevered because they new they were innocent. They believed that somebody out there would find them and display an act of altruism towards them, which is exactly what their attorney Zellner did as she logged eight hundred unpaid hours and spent fifty thousand dollars of her own money to get the case back into court. Altogether this story blows my mind. The fact that we did, and have convicted many innocent human beings without any real proof or DNA evidence is above and beyond me. I’m glad that we can say we have furthered our knowledge in this subject. I think psychological science has and will continue to help the problem with wrongful convictions. Like I said, our knowledge is continuing to grow and as it does we are able to do all sorts of tests and studies to figure out what a persons mind is thinking. We are getting better at reading each other’s thoughts and what they are thinking based on the reaction one gives to a particular question or statement. Depending on the mental state of the individual we are able to get a more clear idea of what is occurring in their personal mind. For example, say one is schizophrenic. That said, we know that people with this diagnosis have altered thoughts and perceptions and are often not competent or able to stand trial and tell the truth because they aren’t exactly sure what the truth is. Well way back when we didn’t even know that this diagnosis existed therefore when standing in court being a witness or of any such the thoughts going on in this persons mind may have not been true. We are learning new things about our brain and its activity today, and with that psychological science continues to help in solving problems like wrongful convictions that have occurred in our nations past. The psychological terms I used were attitude, DNA, discrimination, persuade, altruism, self-esteem, well-being, psychological science, thinking, mental state, and perceptions.

The most surprising thing that I heard in this radio show was the part about the boy who hadn’t committed a crime, but confessed to it anyway. A fourteen-year old boy was interrogated regarding his sister’s murder, and even though there was no evidence that the boy was linked to the crime, he confessed to killing his own sister because the police officers manipulated him into believing that he was responsible. At one point, the officers even started to lie about evidence, stating that they found his sister’s blood in his bedroom. Even though this is not illegal, it is controversial both legally and morally. This poor boy was lead to believe that he killed his own sister. At one point the boy says through his tears, “If I did this, I don’t remember it.” The police respond by telling him that it is very possible for him to not remember. When I was listening to the interrogation I felt so horribly sorry for the boy. I can’t imagine the psychological stress that this kind of situation put on him, on top of the loss of a member of a family. It’s unbelievable to think that we rely so much on evidence and facts that people would confess to a crime that they didn’t commit just because they were told that there was evidence suggesting that they were responsible.
There was another case that was discussed in this radio show that involved four teenage boys who were arrested and convicted for raping and killing a young girl and spent fifteen years in prison, only to find out that they were innocent. One of the boys even made a deal with the system and agreed to provide the police with whatever information they needed in order to receive less time in prison. Even though the boy knew that he, as well as the other three boys was completely innocent, he admitted to a crime that he didn’t commit just so that he could get out sooner. These boys had fifteen years of their lives stolen from them due to the fact that they were wrongfully convicted. Not only was their freedom taken from them, but their reputations were as well. One of the boys, Omar, heard a radio announcer make a comment saying, “from what I’ve read, the Saundars kid likes it cold.” This implies that the boy had sex with the girl after she was dead. To make an accusation of that nature and not have any evidence to support it is absurd and completely outrageous.
When the cases were reevaluated, the four teenage boys as well as the young boy convicted for his sisters murder, were set free after being found innocent. This shows that psychological science can be a very helpful tool. If it weren’t for scientific evidence, these boys would be spending life in prison for crimes that they didn’t commit. An important factor with cases like these is memory. Sometimes our memory fails us, and we can’t seem to remember things that have happened, clouding our understanding of a certain event. We saw this with the fourteen year-old boy. He was told over and over again that he killed his sister, and even though he had no memory of it, he believed the police officers because they led him to believe that they had evidence. Most of the time, science is more dependable than memories are, making it important for evidence to be present when convicting someone of a crime.
Terms: DNA, evidence, memory, psychological science, stress

The most interesting this is how their biggest concern is dealing with wrongfully convicted criminals and unsolved homicide cases. I am glad that DNA is helping the police catch people but it sickens me how so many people have been put away in jail for something they did not do. Even after those who did commit the crime admitted to it justice still was not served properly. These people are being wrongly convicted and put into jail where they are forced to fight for their lives every single day. The worst part about it all is that when the truth comes out the only thing the court can do is apologize. These people will never get the time or sanity back; they will never get their lives back.
I cannot believe that the police made a child confess to killing his sister when he did not do it. The first way that psychological science could help teach officers how to treat people. They need to learn proper ways to interrogate. This brings me back to the last pod cast when the system wanted to test everyone in jail and brand their file with how psychopathic they are. Just because people are a person of interest does not mean they did the crime; one could have just been in the wrong place at the wrong time. To falsely accuse someone of a serious crime can ruin their reputation and life. I think that instead of having police officers interrogate suspects maybe they should have psychologist in the room to help assist.

I am glad that there are some good people in the world who are willing to go above and beyond to make sure justice is served. I do hope that the more DNA technology becomes better known, it helps more people get out of jail that they did not commit.

Terms: DNA, Psychological science

This episode really focuses in on DNA in the criminal system. The episode begins with talking about how much mail they have from prisoners hoping DNA testing will help show their innocence. They said the amount of mail they’ve received has grown exponentially over the past two year. A crazy fact was that Illinois has had more wrongful convictions that have been proven by DNA than any other state, 18.

The most surprising thing about this episode was the story on the four teenagers who were wrongly imprisoned for the death of Lori. They called it a horrific massacre, and it caught national news because she was a white nursing student. The police used very harsh tactics in questioning a 16 year old, teenager. 2 males turned themselves in, and told the real story that happened. The cops have tried to sell the public on the case. They even tried to get a man to say he was an eyewitness of a murder case so the story would be more believable. Calvin, Omar, and Larry were found guilty and sentenced to life in prison. They were very much innocent, but they couldn’t do anything about it. Calvin was only 15 and his life was essentially over. He discovered that none of their semen matched the semen found in Lori’s body.

This reminded me of the Ferguson case in Missouri. It was what some people called an innocent killing of a black male by a white cop. The whole town rioted, and there has been flags burnt, buildings have been ruined, and other violence.

Another surprising thing was in act 2 about the 14 year old boy, and how the police got him to confess to killing his sister when he really didn’t. They didn’t even have much evidence on him, so they really went after him to get him to confess. They used almost a therapy like interrogation process, and basically tricked him into believing that he killed his own sister. It was pretty awful to see what some police officers will do just to get rid of a case. I lost respect for the police, because they ruined this 14-year-old boys life. They were lying about the evidence to the boy, and really just forced him to confess of the killing.

Psychological science can help improve wrongful convictions very much. It already has set around 50 people free who have been sentenced in wrongful convictions. It’s awful that cops are still doing the wrong interrogation processes that were shown in this episode. They are wrongfully imprisoning a bunch of people, and really taking away their life.

Terms Used: DNA, Therapy, Psychological Science,

In this episode the most surprising thing to me was most of the episode. The thought that innocent people spend many years in prison for crimes they didn’t commit. Before DNA evidence was used there were many innocent people found guilty because they needed someone to take blame for these crimes. You have to wonder how many people were actually innocent and telling the truth before this. The story about the teenagers that served fifteen years for a crime they didn’t commit. That’s fifteen years of their lives, fifteen years of freedom they’ll never get back. It’s also crazy to think that police can make a fourteen year old boy into believing he killed his sister. You get this thought in your head that isn’t true and your memory starts to shift. You really do believe that its what happened, because why would they lie to you about this?
Psychological science can help improve the real world problem of wrongful convictions. It has already set so many people free who have been wrongfully convicted, because when you bring in DNA there are so many more facts that wouldn’t be there without it.
Terms: DNA, memory, psychological science

I think the most surprising thing I learned while listening to this show was how the police would seemingly rather blame an innocent person who fits the stereotype of the crime instead of actually doing their job and finding out the true culprit. It is staggering how many prisoners are confirmed to be wrongfully convicted after they have already been in jail. More than 2000 since 1989. What’s worse is that there have even been many executions that have taken place only for the individual executed to be exonerated posthumously. The problem is, is that people in power have the ability to break the will of those who don’t have as much power. The people who are being convicted, even if innocent, have a very hard time trying to get their voice heard against a group of powerful people who don’t want them to be found not-guilty. The struggle with power repression is strong in the US, as can be detailed by both Ferguson and the Eric Garner case. Racial stereotypes play an important role in these wrongful convictions. As privileged white men, we grow up naturally thinking that black people are criminals. Why? The media. The media puts an emphasis on criminals who are black. When you hear of a robbery or shooting as a child, more than likely the media that is reporting it automatically suspects a black person and whilst doing this they impose racial biases on everyone else. What is also scary is the proven commonality of the fact that police will encourage, if not force, an innocent suspect to plead guilty. Like I said before, they do this because of the breaking of their will by the people with power. This power struggle, the large amounts of privilege that people of power get over the people, is exactly why there are still cases like this in the court room. I think Psychological Science can help greatly. Do I think it will ever happen? Probably not. Powerful people are reluctant to change for fear that they will lose their power. It’s seen all throughout history. The only thing that can make this change would be a total reform, however that reform has to be brought upon by We the People. The powerful won’t do anything on their own.
Terms: Stereotype, Psychological Science

For the last episode of the American Life the most surprising thing I listened too was the murder of Stefanie Crowe. Stefanie crow was repetitively stabbed to death with no leads what so ever. There were no traces of entrance into the room the cops had no evidence all but one. The only major evidence there was is that of Stefanie’s 14-year-old brother who admitted in killing his own sister but for some reason that wasn’t even enough information to determine what happened the night of her murder. The boy was questioned countless times but was then let off due to the fact there was no evidence of his DNA anywhere on the crime scene. This made me sick it kind of made me question our own justice system and how many other violent killers are getting off from committing murders just as this one. The fact that he admitted to killing his own sister should be enough evidence to at least take into consideration. Yes maybe the boy was having an emotional disorder at the time of the lost of his sister but I find it hard to believe someone can be that emotionally stressed to even commit to a murder they did. In the court of law I think psychological science can help determine whether or not someone is guilty of committing based on how they act physical emotionally but also on there overall appearance in the court of law. This is why I think the boy got off so easy also from admitting he killed his sister because of his emotional distress. I still believe no matter what state of mind your in if you admit in a crime that has no evidence that you have done it you should be punished in some way. There are still hundreds of criminals out there that get off with a crime do to having an “physiological disorder.”

Terms: emotional disorder, physical, emotional distress, physiological disorder

What I thought was most interesting was that DNA could be evidence to convict people of crimes and prove innocence. When someone’s DNA is found, and they match it, than there is no way to get out of conviction. Everyone’s DNA is unequally different. It can be bad in some cases, because when testing the DNA they could mess it up by accidently switching who’s DNA belongs to who and the wrong person could then be convicted. That would be terrible for an innocent person to have to go to jail for a crime they didn’t commit.
The thing that surprised me the most was that the fourteen-year-old boy admitted to killing his own sister after a police interrogation. Even though the biy was innocent they told the boy that his DNA was found at the scene of death. They began convincing him he did it when he broke down and said it wasn’t him, even though they found later that the DNA wasn’t a match to the boy. Once the police began telling him it was him and it was his fault, he began believing that he really did do it. It was so sad to hear him that would be terrible.
I believe that with psychological science it helps end wrong convictions. The evidence they need is right there. Its better than questioning memory, because if that person is stressed enough, they can start thinking or believing things that aren’t true, and they cant help it because of their mind state.
TERMS: DNA, Memory, Stress

In This American Life episode 210: The Perfect Evidence, the most surprising thing that I learned after listening to this show was how police men can be deceiving. I also thought it was interesting how the police could make someone confess to a crime they didn’t do through interrogation and tactics. For example in Act 1: Hawks and Rabbits it is a story about four young kids being wrongfully convicted of a crime that they did not commit. In the beginning of this story they talk about how the police used their tactics in making two of the guys who “committed” the crime sign a confession. The other guys were just sentenced to jail convicted of murder because they would not lie for the police about being witnesses. I thought it was very surprising that the police men did this because police are supposed to be the good guys trying to find the killers, but instead they sent four young gentlemen to jail for fifteen years before DNA testing helped them get free. Also with the last act about a young man being interrogated until he confessed of killing his sister. The police’s job was wrongful, they broke down the little boy when he was in his most vulnerable state and began to make him think that maybe he did kill his sister. In these two situations and many more that are unheard of I think that the police are not doing their job right.
I think that psychological science can help improve the real world problem of wrongful convictions by being aware of the tactics that the police use and how it affects the convicts. For example with Michael Crowe he began to believe that he actually killed his sister. This happened because the police began to make him believe something he didn’t do and changed his memory and used his vulnerability to accomplish their task. Another way to improve wrongful convictions is through DNA testing and also making psychologists aware of different tests that are taken by convicts. The last thing for psychological science is to think about the stereotypes that people have of each other. Stereotypes are the cognitive schemas that allow for easy processing of information about people, events, or groups, based on a certain group. This affects people in the outside world because cops/ judges may have a stereotype of a group and then uses that against a person who may be convicted of a crime but really didn’t commit it.
Psychological Terms: Crime, DNA, Psychological Science, Memory, and Stereotypes

I was surprised that a person’s claims that their confession was false wouldn’t hold much weight in a trail. Especially considering the long history of falsely accused and punished individuals in our country, I would have thought that a jury would be swayed by such a claim.

Though DNA evidence is said by this episode to be the “perfect evidence,” psychological science is also something that could be properly integrated to lessen the number of wrongful convictions.

One example of possible implementation of psychological science for this would to remind officers to look for evidence, not create evidence. In the two cases mentioned in the radio episode, the officers created evidence – they came up with a story and found people who would match it, and they forged a suspect out of an innocent boy. Hindsight is twenty-twenty, so reminders would help. This would lessen the application of stereotypes and other prejudices, as well.

Another example: in trials a psychologist could testify that the method by which a confession was received could compromise the validity of the confession. When Michael, a minor, was being interrogated without his parents, the police lied to him, saying that they had evidence against him that they didn’t. One example of this is the voice stress analyzer, which can trick naïve people into thinking that irrefutable science has proved that they did it, so there is no point in trying to deny it. Even without the device, lying to the suspect can be seen as a poor tactic, as the episode stated that when the police say that they have the evidence, you come to doubt your own memory. This statement instantly reminded me of recovered memory: the police are telling you things that aren’t true that you did to coax a confession out of you, just like a psychologist tells you things that aren’t true that happened to you to coax a repressed memory out of you.

A psychological perspective on the case and the officers’ methods of solving the case could help to prevent these injustices from occurring. In addition to taking time out of an innocent person's life, false convictions and the methods by which they are received put stress on the suspect that may cause problems for the individual later on (such as a psychological disorder). Also, if/when the conviction is corrected, it costs the United States government a lot of money.

DNA, psychological science, memory, recovered memory, repressed memory, stress, psychological disorder

Episode 210 of This American Life was entitled Perfect Evidence and was about the wrongful convictions of many innocent people before DNA was used. Since the development of DNA, crimes such as robberies, assaults, criminal paternity suits, private eye work, insurance fraud, medical malpractice and so on, have been able to use DNA testing evidence to relinquish hundreds of innocent men and women in the United States jail system. Investigators are able to use DNA in everyday cases so that wrongfully convicting innocent people becomes more infrequent. One other problem that DNA testing helps eliminate is the overuse of police authority to convict suspects of crimes they did not commit. Police brutality has become a major debate recently with all the riots in Ferguson and the claims of policemen and women wrongfully overusing their authority. DNA evidence will definitely aid in these recent cases.
Psychological science can help improve the problem with wrongful convictions because it will enable us to assess situations. One example of this is when psychologists use microexpressions to detect lies. Microexpressions are short. involuntary facial expressions that last only as long as one fifth of a second. These expressions currently allow police and secret service agents to detect truthfulness and lying. Even without formal training of these microexpressions, some people are able to detect these involuntary faces. Microexpressions are just ONE way that psychological science can help improve wrongful convictions; paired with the recent technology of DNA testing, our justice system should now be more accurate than ever.

Mircoexpressions, psychological science

The most surprising thing that I leaned was, how much can be done in the legal standpoint with very little evidence. We saw four young boys get locked up, when there was no real evidence against them. All they had were the confessions they signed and later took back. The boys got a conviction of life in prison at the ages of fifteen, seventeen and eighteen. I could not believe this. I was shocked when I realized that all of this could happen without any real evidence.
Psychological science can improve the problem of wrongful convictions in many ways. During the radio show we heard stories of those who had been wrongfully convicted. The police usually bullied those who were wrongfully convicted until the police got out of them what they wanted. The police often told them that if they just signed a confession that they would be let go and able to return home. We heard to the story of Larry and his friends. They were just young teenage boys who were linked to the crime for no real reason. When brought to the police station the boys to me seemed to be terrified and just wanted to go home. The police continued to be persistent and would not let the kids off the hook. When the boys heard that they could go home to their parents if they just signed the confession, they fell for it, and ended up in jail. The boys were angry and had a right to be. Larry shared that he started stereotyping white people. He started to think all white people were bad, because they were the ones who did this to him. All of the police were white and all of the jury members were white, that’s what gave him that stereotype. The news stories were so in depth and believable, it is scary. The news stories were completely made up and proven all to be false. This scares me, how so much of what we could be hearing could be made up. Years later when the young boys were finally cleared and the real killers were locked up and convicted. The real killers were actually linked to the crime by DNA. The DNA was key to the conviction, even though it didn’t seem to matter in the first case. The DNA evidence was very important for these boy’s lives. They finally got out of jail and got their lives back. Even though they will never get those years of their lives back, they can at least walk free.
Terms: DNA, stereotypes,

After listening to this episode of This American Life titled Perfect Evidence, I was shocked. Honestly, I was really unsure of how I quite felt. This episode made me feel really sad and totally disturbed by how these people got charged and put in prison for crimes they didn’t commit. This episode really bothered me because I do not understand how in the first act of the episode, how the police who were interrogating and ended up charging the three guys have a conscience. They have to feel horrible. They had a guy say he was a witness to get out of the crime even though he didn't witness anything at all. These young guys who were being charged with a crime and being put in prison didn’t do anything to be put there.

After these young men had served several years in prison they were release based of off the fact that their DNA didn’t match the DNA of the killer. This is mind boggling to me, why were they even charged with the crime if the evidence didn’t match in the first place? Isn’t that usually one of the first things you are supposed to see before you charge someone with the crime? Isn’t the evidence supposed to be fully processed and the crime is supposed to be completely understood before you put someone in prison and practically ruin their lives? The men who were convicted for murdering the young woman spent fifteen years in prison before they were released due to DNA. I just continue to think about how if they wouldn’t have looked more into the DNA that these innocent men would’ve spent more of their lives in prison while the real criminals were out on the streets running free. DNA is the only reason that these men got set free. It is sad to think about the fact that the boys would’ve continued to live in prison if the DNA wouldn’t have been looked into more.

The second act of this episode of This American Life discussed how a fourteen year old boy was considered the murderer of his own sister. After this young man’s sister was murdered they told his parents that he was going to be helped for the traumatic problems he was probably experience due to the recent death of his sister. Although, they said this to his parent the police really to him in to interrogate him. The police hooked him up a machine that they told him would basically register if he was telling the truth or not, but the machine really wasn’t meant to do that all all. The machine was only meant to register voices. They had the young man come up with questions to ask while he was unaware that these questions were going to be asked to himself. After he helped them come up with questions, they proceeded to ask him the questions about his sister’s murder. After they asked him the questions they looked at the record of the machine they were using and used the information received from a false machine to convince the young boy that he had murdered his very own sister. The police made him think that he just didn’t remember killing his sister, like some type of failure to remember something. Although there are ways to forget memories such as: interference, absentmindedness, and blocking it would be very uncommon for such a big event like murder to just be forgotten. The interrogation tactics that the police officers used were very effective because they convinced the young boy to believe that he had killed his sister even though he didn’t. Dissociative amnesia is a mental disorder that involves disruptions of memory for personal facts or loss of conscious awareness for a period of time. Dissociative amnesia could possibly be another reason that the young boy could’ve forgot such actions. Even though, the boy didn’t kill his sister, the young man admitted to murdering his sister. The tactics that the police used had lead the brother to question that he did kill his sister and he just didn’t know it.
Psychological terms used: dissociative amnesia, interference, blocking, absentmindedness

This podcast was very powerful. Getting convicted as an innocent is devastating. I have see a few shows and documentaries about prison. It is something I find very interesting. One thing I have learned from watching these is that prison is not fun. It’s a scary place full of violence, rape, and intimidation. It is a place full of the predators in our society just look for a weakness. This place was terrible as Omar from the podcast described. It is especially scary for rapists as they are targeted in prison. Omar was one of four young men convicted of the brutal rape and murder of woman. It was years before he was released when DNA evidence proved them innocent. It angers me how government officials such as investigators are taking advantage of people and deceiving the law. They are talking innocent people into confessing to crimes which get them put into prison for life. This was shown in the case where an innocent fourteen year old boy was manipulated so far to the point where he didnt even know what to believe so he started to believe the story the investigators were telling him. The investigators were telling him lies and taking advantage of his vulnerable and emotional state just to get the answer they want. This is not what we as The People have put them in power to do. Their job is to find the truth, not to make convictions. Psychological science is opening up a new more complex way to find the truth. This will help the rate of wrongly accused people go down and help convict more of the people who really do need to be put in jail.

Psychological Terms; innocent, violence, DNA, manipulate, psychological science

From the beginning of the show there were very shocking and surprising information said. For example, the office of the Innocence Project began with two months worth of mail then got to the point that they had eleven months worth of mail is such a short amount of time. Another surprising thing that I learned from the show is how many letters they get from inmates wanting to get their DNA tested to help prove their innocence, but in most cases it proves that the prisoner was guilty to begin with, just wasting the time which could have been spent on other cases. However, the most surprising thing from the story was in Act one, on the murder of Lori Rosetti that ended up wrongfully convicting Shane DuBow and his friends on a false confession. The kids were told if they signed the confession they would be able to go home and see their family, however this was not the case and they actually locked them up. To make matters worse, there was no DNA evidence and the police even tried going out to manipulate individuals into giving false witnesses, and when two individuals did not cooperate, they were charged with the murder too. Although the actual offenders eventually confessed after years, the fact that those kids and other people were wrongfully convicted due to the pressure that the police did not have a single lead and that caused great pressure on them.

The only psychological way, that comes to mind, that could help wrongfully convicting an individual is having a professional there to study the person’s reactions, thoughts, behavior, etc. Since professionals are more skilled than police officers at identifying when a person could be lying, ill, or just scared. From watching Law and Order: SVU, which had a psych professional come in and watch the person’s facial expressions, body language, or the way they spoke in order to catch the true answer regardless of their plea. With the help of professionals, it could help eliminate wrongfully convicting someone based on stereotypes, race, look, or disability. It would also save a lot of money from the taxpayers along the way.

Terms: Psychological, thoughts, behavior, ill, facial expression, body language, stereotypes, disability, DNA, manipulate.

I thought the entirety of this show was disturbing. I think it is harsh and unethical how SOME law enforcement and government officials handle and gather cases. The fact that the first three falsely accused individuals wasted fifteen years of their life in prison for something they didn’t do bothers me. I can’t imagine being put in that environment for that amount of time for nothing. I feel that it should be illegal to interrogate a minor without them having the option to have their parents/guardians for moral assistance. The law enforcers involved bullied and lied in order to have these kids wrongly convicted. The law can work in terrible ways, so I think it is important to know your rights and know yourself. When I was a minor a cop interrogated me, and got me to confess to something by presenting false witnesses and making it seem as though I was already in trouble. My parents were outraged at the situation, and the fact that they weren’t informed of the situation. I learned a lot about how our law enforcement operates from that situation, and luckily I was able to take the matter to court. After my experience, I totally understand what the “suspects” went through. It is taught that the law is always correct, but I found that you should stand up for yourself no matter the situation, and to do it before repercussions may ensue.

I also learned how great of a thing DNA evidence is. If you know you are wrongly convicted, it is quite reassuring knowing that you have science backing you up. I feel sorry for those not presented with that option. These people lost the best time period of their life because the mentality of the jurors, police force, and supporters. I think Psychology can help in the conviction process as “suspects” are put under large amounts of stress, which could affect their mental state after hours of questioning. New laws should go into effect that protect the defendants more, and make unnecessary bullying and lying a thing of the past in the interrogation room. People can only take so much psychological trauma until they cave in to the requests of their interrogators. I feel being an educated person is the only defense against the government in today’s world.

Psychological Terms: DNA, Science, Psychology, trauma

After listening to this episode, Perfect Evidence, I learned that DNA is a major factor when it comes to someone being involved in crimes. Hair particles, fingerprints, and other little things can help investigators in a case that they are trying to solve. When it comes to this episode, DNA, or lack there of, was a factor because several inmates were accused of doing violent things to a girl, and eventually killing her, despite the fact that they were wrongfully accused. There was almost no evidence these young men had committed the crime, but they were forced into signing a confession, and then were found guilty. This made me angry. These men were tricked and beat into signing a confession, when they didn’t know was at stake. One of the boys was told by the police that he would be able to go home if he just signed the paper. He did, and they put him in prison immediately after. After years in prison and having a negative DNA test, they were finally released. This is why DNA is one of the top factors, if not the top factor, when it comes to investigators trying to solve a crime. It’s a shame because some police knew that these people didn’t do anything, but they knew they had to convict someone in order to end the case.
Although DNA evidence is said by this episode to be the perfect evidence, psychological science is also something that could be used to lessen the number of wrongly convicted people. An example of a possible implementation of psychological science for this could be to remind officers to look for the evidence, not make up or create evidence. In the story above, the officers created evidence. They found people who would match the story, and they forged the suspects. If officers used psychological science, then this would lessen the usage of stereotypes and prejudices. Overall, psychological science can basically help improve the real world problems of wrongful convictions. Memory is a big factor when it comes to the interrogations occurring because people tend to believe things that they didn’t do in the first place, just so they can get the long process over with. When it comes to stereotypes, accusers use this tactic to be more biased towards certain people, leading to an even worse interrogation. The worse and lengthy the interrogation, the more the victim will probably believe the crime was caused by them, whether they did it or not, which is crazy to think about but it’s true. They can truly play with your mind.
Another interesting thing to me that was mentioned in this episode was the story at the end where reporters asked if they ever lost hope. All I know is if I was locked up for 15 years, I would have probably lost hope. It would have been hell to stay in prison that long, with other prison mates, (who actually committed crimes) who beat me up. I can only imagine the psychological disorders these guys went through. It must have been miserable. I bet they needed therapy pretty badly after having a part of their lives ruined by a stupid case in which they were wrongfully accused.
Terms Used: DNA, interrogation, psychological science, memory, stereotypes, biased, therapy

To be honest, this whole segment was surprising to me. In Act I, the story of four innocent teens was told. These teens were accused of murdering a woman back in the 80’s. I could not believe what I was hearing. The fact that the police wrongfully accused this innocent man, named Omar, was terrible. It rotted my stomach listening to Omar describe how the police manipulated him. They wanted him to say he was a witness to a completely made up story based on an actual crime and when he refused, they arrested him. And they even had the audacity to find one of his friends and bribe him into testifying against his friend. How could they think this was alright? This man was innocent, he was a teenager! I can not imagine how that man felt as he sat and watched his so called “friend” lie about him in front of so many. I really found it to be interesting later when he said that he felt at first that everyone evil was white. All of the people who did this to him, the judge, jury, police… they were all white. I can totally understand where he’s coming from. This poor, poor man went through so much at the hands of the police, and since DNA evidence wasn’t around yet, he was easily placed in jail based off the police’s “evidence”. It wasn’t until the 90’s when DNA began freeing innocent people. Omar and his friend Larry, but mainly Larry, was hopeful that the new DNA technology would help set them free. When Omar said that his eyes began watering when he realized he may be possibly free, that made me feel so bad. I cannot stress this enough about how upset this episode makes me.
After listening to this episode, I couldn’t help but think of the Ferguson case. I know that there isn’t much issues with DNA evidence per say, but there is an issue with the whole “he said, she said” evidence. Mike Brown, who was unarmed, was shot and killed by a police officer. Since then, this story has been all over the news and has caused many riots, protests, and tears. I personally believe that the police are making some parts of the story up just to make themselves look better which is what happened in Omar’s case. The Ferguson police know that an officer killed an innocent man, and they don’t want the punishments for that. Mike Brown was unarmed, he did not deserve to die. Even if he did rob a convenience store beforehand like some stories say, the officer didn’t need to shoot him and kill him. If he believed people were in danger, he should have shot Brown in the foot or leg, somewhere where he’ll only be injured and not killed. People have become emotionally upset with this case, which I understand. Since then, tons and tons of stories have come out about police abusing their power and accusing people of false crimes or beating them, and also the black stereotype has come into play because many police assume that African-Americans are always up to no good. I think that with DNA evidence this type of police abuse can be controlled. I know that we will always be faced with this issue, but if we have DNA evidence, the police can’t lie their way around that.

Terms: DNA, emotions, stereotypes, thinking, and memory.

This episode is very intriguing. It discusses the issues that deal with wrongfully-accused criminals and unsolved cases. The Innocence Project is obviously a very important tool used in today’s society. It is used to help solve these cases in which something went wrong. I think the most surprising thing I learned from this episode is how many people are wrongfully accused of crimes. I could not imagine what it would be like to have to spend the rest of my days in prison for doing absolutely no crime. This is a pretty important fact that comes up in the debate of the death penalty. Because of the psychological science done, many “criminals” are actually found to be innocent, but it is too late for their justice, because they have been murdered through the death penalty. Instances like these show the need for programs like the Innocence project. Innocent people should not have to suffer through years of prison because of a mistake in the justice system. As told in Act I, teenagers spent over a decade in prison because they were convicted of murder. Due to DNA evidence shown years later, it was proven that these teenagers were not guilty of the crime. A man talks about how life was awful in prison, especially when he did nothing wrong. This shows me that trials and juries must really take the time to analyze the crimes. Although programs like the Innocence project are beneficial, it almost seems ridiculous that people are wrongfully accused in the first place. Psychological science improves the problem of wrongful convictions in many ways. One example of how it could help is by using some psychotherapeutic techniques. As discussed in the textbook, there is a way in which psychologists can “go inside” the mind of an individual who has repressed a particular memory, for example. If psychologists can use techniques to find the truth about what happened in a particular case, this could be beneficial to the justice system. This is just one example of how psychological science could improve this issue. Although I’m sure much of this is being done, I feel that more of this should happen during trials so as not to accuse the wrong person. No one should have to go to prison if they are innocent.
Terms: psychotherapy, memory repression, thinking.

This video addressed the issue of evidence never being found or being mixed up that causes people to be wrongly convicted of a crime and usually punished by death. This video did not really surprise me since I have heard about such crimes before, such as in the case of the Memphis three, but it did really anger me. Wrongful conviction has always been a fear in the justice system, so we rely on courts and police to help solve the truth. Sadly, as shown in this video, this does not always happen. Cases that were closed decades ago have been reopened due to DNA testing advancements, proving that many of them were innocent. In fact, DNA has shed so much doubt on the criminal justice system that prosecutors and judges are reopening questionable cases that don't even have DNA evidence. The first story in the video was about a man named Larry who along with his friends was taken by the police and accused of rape and murder. The police tried to bully confessions from them battery, trickery, and false evidence. The boys ended up being convicted of the crime even though they were completely innocent. These false details that convicted them were simply hypothesizes and guesswork by a profile analysis, false testimonies from coerced witnesses, and the police forcing the confession of the two boys. The boys ended up serving fifteen years in prison. Larry said he knew the police believed he was innocent, but they wanted to pin the murder on someone. He said it was a very troubling experience and he could not understand how or why these people were doing this to him. While in jail, the friends realized that the seaman evidence used in the separate trials were different, for one claimed that they seamen matched the boys’ while another one admitted it was not a match. With this self-discovered DNA screw up, the men signed papers declaring that the DNA was wrong and requested a judge look at this new evidence. They hired a lawyer who specialized in wrongful convictions and DNA cases, so she helped them get out of jail. When the real killers were finally caught and matched the DNA, they confessed and told their story. All their reasoning and memories they revealed of their crime did not match up with what the profiler thought, the police said, and the witnesses claimed. When the innocent men were finally released they revealed that the police tried to force them believe they were the criminals, but they resisted and refused to admit to it. They were still, however, tricked into signing a confession paper. This act of trying to get the boys to believe they were guilty is like the therapists use of repressed memory. The police psychologically messed with the men, telling them they had proof they were the murders and trying to convince them they did the crime. Though it did not work in this case, it has in others like in the case of the fourteen year old Crow. In this case the police convinced the boy that the lie detector proved he killed his sister and told him they found evidence in his room. The boy swore he did not do it, but after hours of being interrogated he began to doubt himself, breaking down and saying that if he did do it he could not remember it. The police told him that doubting memory and repressing memories of bad events was normal in such situations, further leading the boy to believe he had killed his sister. He became so convinced he did the crime that even after DNA evidence proved he was innocent he was still unsure. Such actions by the police and courts are disturbing and need to be stopped. Psychology can stop this by stepping in to explain how the brain’s mentality is easily swayed by confinement, long hours of conditioning, lies, and the perverted use of memory therapy. With the psychological science of memory, courts and juries can take into question whether the defendants were coerced into confessing or led to believe they did it. They can question if the witnesses are no longer able of fully remembering their testimonies and if there was ulterior motive behind the conviction of the criminal. These stories really upset me, especially when the innocent person is led to believe they are guilty, and it needs to be put to a stop. Hopefully psychology can help end wrongful conviction and establish laws against police brutality and interrogational bullying.

DNA, memory, profiling, repressed memory, mentality, conditioning

To begin, I really could not believe that there were 167 people on death row that were wrongly convicted. This could have been 167 innocent lives gone. This is an amazing number. I don’t believe in the death sentence at all. Lori Roscetti was a woman who was raped and killed. There were four teenagers who were falsely convicted of her murder. These men had been sentenced to prison and finally, after 15 years, the real murderers came forward. From the podcast, it sounded like the police made this story up and just made the men sign it. The original story was completely false compared to the story that the real murderers had finally come out with. What was most interesting to me was hearing from Larry Ollins. I liked hearing his side of the story and hearing about the other side of police officers and other authority figures. The majority of the time, I just hear about how they do such amazing things to keep everyone safe. I have heard multiple times that the government would rather have a guilty man on the streets than an innocent man behind bars. This might just be a saying to keep their noses clean. I feel like this happens a lot, especially because of the numbers that were explained earlier on in the podcast. I couldn’t believe that they police officers could make up such a gruesome story and stick to it. This is so unbelievably inhumane to do to these innocent men. They didn’t do anything to deserve it and for the police to come up with a story so far fetched and so false makes me feel somewhat unsafe. I kept trying to put myself in the innocent men’s shoes; like the brother who admitted to murdering his sister. I can’t even imagine the pain he went through. If something like this were to happen to my sister and I was accused of the crime, it would be like the two most horrific things that could ever happen. First of all, I can’t imagine losing my sister, and secondly, I can’t imagine being wrongfully blamed for her death. I just think putting someone through something like this is ridiculous. To a point, I can understand why the police officers would suspect a family member, but I mean, I don’t think there were any signs of them not getting along or signs of him being a violent person in the past. I do believe that there is a way that psychological science can help improve this issue. I think there should be a way to convict someone correctly and not have any question about it. I think there needs to be a lot more scientific studies to go into it. I don’t believe these lie detectors can be right all the time just because some questions can strike emotion and make one seem as if they're lying. I think there should be something done to improve the DNA testing. I do think it is very effective so far, but I think more can be done.
Psychological Terms: lie detectors, DNA

The most surprising thing I heard while listening to this episode was how the police and authorities can just so nonchalantly press someone and force them to admit to committing a crime, or force them to sign a confession, which would ultimately have the person convicted. It was hard to hear how these people we trust with our lives could just force someone into a crime, which could even lead to their death if he or she was old enough to achieve the death penalty. The police officers just so heartlessly manipulated the boys in the first story as well as the fourteen year old boy. What is even sadder is that the poor fourteen year old boy actually began to believe the officers that he murdered his own sister. Listening to that portion of this episode nearly made me sick. How someone could do this to an innocent fourteen year old is frustrating and disappointing to say the least. I was very disappointed in our legal system when it came to the boys involved with the Stephanie Crowe case. There was no evidence to link these boys to the case, yet they were still locked away for fifteen years before being released. There were many quirks the legal system played in this case. First, the authorities brought in these boys without any evidence, with intentions of convicting them for a crime they did not commit. Additionally, one of the boys was conned into making a deal with one of the authorities. The deal required him to testify against his friends, saying that they did indeed commit this crime; in return, he would receive a lesser punishment. Listening to such a story made me almost lose some respect for our legal system in a way. No one should have to go through with this, and thankfully, DNA testing is working to make this issue subside. Psychological science can definitely help improve the real world problem of wrongful convictions, starting with DNA testing. DNA testing gives the authorities a one hundred percent, without a doubt idea of who exactly committed these crimes. If certain crimes are bad enough, wrongful convictions can very well lead to the death penalty. Whether or not you agree with the idea of the death penalty, I think we can all agree that we should have the right person convicted before we take that issue into consideration. Overall, this episode made me realize that the police can definitely be corrupt, and DNA testing can put a stop to it. Terms: DNA testing,

This Perfect Evidence episode of This American Life is very relevent with the things that are going on in today’s society. We hear about Police brutality all the time in the news, and how there are corrupt police everywhere in today’s world so on and so forth. What is interesting about this is that this episode talks about those that were pressured into signing confessions of something that they know they didn’t do and the police know that they didn’t do. I think the problem with this is that people hear these stories and they want to make sure that someone is getting locked up right away and they are pressuring the police to find the people that committed the crime as soon as possible and that leads to the police basically arresting someone as a scapegoat. In the case of the murder within Act one the police didn’t have much to go by besides how the murder had happened and what part of the town that it was in. The problem was that the media had taken this story up and blown it into huge proportion so there was so much pressure on the police to try and find who it was that had killed this woman. When put under this much pressure I think that the police felt like they just needed to put somebody behind bars, and because they had these four teenagers as long as they were able to get one of them to sign a confession by whatever means possible they would be good. I think the most surprising part of this was that one of the people that they had falsely accused said that they actually had a greater appreciation of the law system. Contrary to what you might believe because of what had happened in his case he also said that he thinks that the police themselves are not the corrupt ones rather it is just a small few within the police force that are corrupt. I think that statements like this would really be powerful in today’s world, if someone who was wronged by the police in some way would come out and say that they did not think that the police as a whole are corrupt rather there are just individuals within the police force that have become corrupt. I think that the best way to use psychological science within the police investigations is to have a therapist with the interrogators or at least watching through the one way glass so that they can see the defendant and see how much stress it is that they are going through. We have learned that people are only able to deal with so much stress for a small amount of time before it starts to wear on them. When this stress starts to wear on them they may have a lack of good judgement and decide to do something just because it is the quickest way out of the situation. The therapist could be there and just see over things and make sure that the investigators aren’t putting too much stress on the victim. Obviously you would still want the interrogators to be able to press on the people to get confessions out of the people that are actually guilty but there has to be a limit before people will do whatever they can to get out of a situation, even if that means confessing to a crime that they didn’t commit.

Terms: Psychological Science, stress

Right off the bat I was surprised to hear that 13,000 cases are solved due to DNA. While listening the interviews talked about when the spoke to a police captain that is was interesting how people get witnesses to lie and how many people confess even though they are not quietly. It scares the captain on some of the police procedures. In prologue 1 it starts off talking about a group of teenagers that were convicted even though they were innocent. 15 years later a couple of guys confessed and their DNA was a perfect match, and proved that they didn’t do it. A woman named Lori was murdered. She was found by railroad tracks with her head bashed in. The police had no suspect until 3 months later and when the police drug Larry in. He was low build and squinted which made him seem moody even when he wasn’t. He had already been arrested several times for burglary. The police strapped him down to a wall and smacked him around a little bit. They asked him leading questions about a vague brutal crime. He denied it every bit of it. They couldn’t get him to confess so they turned to his friend, Marcellus, and cousin, Calvin. They got both boys to admit, Marcellus and Calvin, by telling them they would go home if they admitted it. Both confessions named Larry so they locked him up too. 15 years later the real people who committed the murder came forward and the others were exonerated. The DNA from the crime scene backed it up. The boys’ lawyer realized the confession was taken from a book and the police had put it on paper and got Calvin and Marcellus to sign it saying they did just what, when they did not.
What really hit me in the heart was how police officers convinced a 14 year old boy and made him believe that he killed in sister. He was told by the police that his DNA was found during the investigation of the murder. The 14 year old boy knew that he did not do it but they convinced him that he did. It shows how people can convince others that they did something when they really did not do it.
I think that people should be trained better and only certain people should be allowed to interview people. Police should be monitored by a trust worthy person that will not persuade someone. When it comes to trials everyone involved in the trail should understand what memory is and how it can be changed so easily. Our mind and memory trick us all of the time. We can forget things and not remember something that happens how it happens. My main this in that the jury, judge, defenders (defense), and the prosecutors should be educated on the topic and what goes on in a human being.
TERMS: DNA, memory, procedures, prosecutors, human being, defense, jury, judge, investigation, murder

As I was listening to the audio recording, I was thinking about how authorities can accuse someone of something that they didn’t do. DNA and fingerprinting have been around for a while now and I can’t believe that they wouldn’t do DNA testing to see if the people that are accused of doing a crime are the ones that really did it. One thing that I learned from listening to this show that I found surprising was the fact that authorities will just accuse anyone by people just saying that some person did it instead of doing testing. This was a problem in society back in the 1900s. If a person of a different race was seen to be around the scene of the crime, authorities could possibly just charge the person of the different race with the crime if they had no leads in the case except for the one person that was there. This would be known as discrimination back then before there was equality among all races. Psychological science could help prevent wrongful convictions in the way that some people may feel like they actually did it because of what other people said when in realty they didn’t do a crime. This is where fingerprint testing would come in handy so that they wouldn’t get the conviction of people wrong anymore. Authorities sometimes just take the word of other people and accuse innocent people of a crime that they witnessed. In the audio recording, it talked about a crime that happened where a woman got raped and then she was killed. There were two boys that were accused of doing the crime and they were sentenced to life in prison. Life 15 years later, they did DNA testing in the evidence and found out that the two boys had not done it. It ended up being four guys that I think were waiting to rob her. This just shows the importance of having DNA testing. If it had been done right the first time, these two boys would not have had to spend time in prison. These boys were ages 15 and 19 when they were convicted so to go to prison at this age, it made their life a lot harder than it had to be.

Terms: DNA testing, psychological science, race, discrimination

After listening to the online article about the people who have been falsely been found guilty for a murder I found it extremely disgusting that the police were just looking for a confession. I also think that it was completely unprofessional of them to bribe a person to be a witness to a crime that didn’t happen. And then turn around and charge him with the murder when he was obviously not a part of it. I also think it is just plain out right immoral to be a professional and take the stand and lie about what you had found for evidence to just get a conviction of innocent men. Another surprising thing to me was that police can lie about evidence. I am going to be a criminology major and I actually did not know about this. I think that psychological science can help improve wrongful convictions of this world because instead of just being cold hearted and persuading someone into a confession; then can see that the person they are interviewing is going through a lot of stress and is going to likely have differences in voice. If the cops have all taken a psychology course at the precinct they are in; this can remove the loss of stereotypes and other such things which will cause harsh treatment of a person of interest. Courses in psychology can also help a cop see cues in their actions that will most likely show if a person is guilty or not (although this would not be enough to go off of for a conviction; more of a gut feeling). Even with cops having backgrounds in psychology; I don’t think that wrongful convictions will come to a screeching halt. I say this because there are a lot of stressors that lead cops to have to convict someone; especially media pressure. And when there is always an outside pressure to get something done and no trail to lead you to a perpetrator; people will be wrongfully convicted.
The psychological terms I used were; persuade, stress, stressors, stereotypes.

This was very interesting and easy for me to listen to because in my Biology Lab class we have been talking about the innocence project and how it saved people who had been wrongfully convicted of crimes. It was very surprising to me that this went on for so long and so many people were convicted of crimes they did not do. I would literally go insane if I knew I did not do something, but no one would believe me or help me. This made me feel happy, lucky, but also angry. I was happy that I did not grow up when this was going on so that I never had to be a part of something so tragic, but the fact that our legal system was once like that makes me question it somewhat. I know it has changed, but I’m sure it still has flaws in it today. I recently learned about PCR which is taking a small piece of DNA, say a tiny bit of hair was found at a crime scene, the PCR makes millions and millions of copies of the DNA. Then the DNA can be matched to someone. Although I had a little bit of a back ground with this topic, I was very surprised that so many people were wrongfully convicted, but then when they were able to test the DNA they were let out. I feel like the law should have felt very bad about themselves. They ruined so many people’s lives. Times that they missed with their loved ones, their children, they missed out on everything, and some of their lives were even ended. In my opinion since this was such a shaky system before I do not think the death penalty should have been an option, for this reason exactly. Innocent people were killed for things they didn’t even do. I think the DNA finger printing break threw was a huge step forward in many aspects, but especially in the criminal justice field. Everyone’s DNA is different, and it was non-arguable information.

The part of this episode that bothered me the most was about the boy, Michael, who admitted he killed his sister, even though he really did not. The police interrogated him so much that he ended up convincing himself he did kill his sister. These tactics are often used to make a person crack, and I do not consider this right at all. He was convicted and then later DNA showed it was not Michael who killed his sister. How could they do that? How could they make the girls own brother think he killed her?? This was very disturbing to me, listening to him sob throughout the episode made me so sad.

Psychological science can help prevent wrongful convictions because when science is involved like fingerprints or DNA these are facts. No one can argue with them, they can’t just deny that it is their fingerprints at the crime scene. It is their fingerprints, no question about it. Science provides cold, hard facts that help the conviction process, and make sure the wrong person is not convicted.

I’m glad our criminal justice system has improved so greatly, and that we have such smart people in our world to figure a situation out like this, even if it did take awhile. I hope it continues to improve and new things are invented to better the system. Along with our jury and judges… the ones convicting our criminals. Listening to this episode made me feel like previously there was a lot of stereotyping and prejudice situations going on. I hope our jury and judges keep improving as well so that one day we will have a flawless law system!

Terms I used: stress, prejudice, stereotype, DNA, psychological science, insane

The thing that surprised me was that the police can tell you they found something that they did not find. That does not seem right. They are trying to get people to tell them that they did it. It is not right when they get someone who did not do it to say that they did do it. The police are kind of influencing the person. This influence works. It is not a good influence. They are getting the person to conform to what they want. This is not good because it could be someone who did not do it. They get them to conform. The person is trying to follow a social norm by saying that they did not do it. The police are trying to get them to conform. The person complies and conforms to the police. The person conforms to the police because they think that the police have something that they said they have. The person is also obeying the police. The police are using informational influence. They tell someone that they got something. The person thinks that they are supposed to tell them that they did it. Then the person tells them that they did it.

The police should not influence the person and tell them that they got something and they do not have it. This would help. Then people would not conform to them and they would think that they did not do it. They would not tell them they did it. The police would get it right because that person said that they did not do it. This is probably something that will help a lot. It is probably the only thing that needs to be changed so that they can get it right. The other things that they do are good. This is probably something that needs to change. It is not doing what it is suppose to do. It is suppose to help them get it right. It is not doing that. They are getting it wrong and it needs to change so they cannot get it wrong. They need to find something that will help them get it right and not get it wrong.

Conform, informational influence, social norms, comply, obey

Our justice system has a real problem with convicting innocent people and letting killers and convicts get away scotch free. The murder about the young medical student female was a dark and eerie story. The way they set up the story it felt like a bad situation all together. There so many things that need to be done in order to fix this system of justice, but honestly no matter how hard we try, I feel there will be people behind the scene always stopping the progression of police brutality and lack of conviction because lack of evidence. Police corruption is absolutely horrible at this point and time and has been going on for a very long time, so many things wiped under the rug. There are so many things hidden from the public because they want to make it seem as though they have everything under control. It is a hard thing to swallow knowing that people judge your truth harshly on the color of your skin. These teenagers were innocent, but they knew nobody would believe them over “good” police officers. Police officers are suppose to serve and protect and catch the criminals. But as time has progressed it feels more like they have become the very thing bringing us down as a country. They keep bringing in the wrong people and letting the malicious ones run away. How are we suppose to progress when they keep holding us down and abusing their power? Obviously there are good cops out their, but that should be the only kind of people serving and protecting us. Not people who have anger issues and were picked on when they were children. The people who get the most trouble in during the cop incidents looks like they have been taking steroids and they looked pissed off at the world all the time. They never look happy, they walk with a sense of supremacy. This podcast didn't surprise me which is a sad thing, because there is so much negative crap in this world, it disgusts me. It is so hard to go out everyday and deal with life, not because of my life, but because of the people around me. I am happy with myself and love myself, but if I can't get people to do the same it doesn't matter how I feel. I could do absolutely nothing wrong and still end up dead. When I hear stories of murder it always seems like the people who are taken from this world are the ones striving and achieving success. The others who ruined their own lives end up imploding in on themselves and sometimes sadly end up taking people with them. The recent story of Eric Garner has caused an uproar around the country and people are finally starting to take a stand against police brutality. People always say not to do illegal things and obey the law, but those are the people who have never had a run in with the law or have only gotten multiple warnings. You can still be a perfectly good and just person, but STILL end up going to prison. That is what this whole podcast is about! These innocent, good people went to prison for no reason for 15 years. They lost those years and will never get them back. So many things can happen in 15 years, and it saddens and hurts me to know that there are people in prison who are innocent. Psychological science could greatly help identify the criminal by examining all witnesses, and exam every single piece of evidence. I have played games where they set up scenarios where criminals commit a crime and you have to collect evidence to try and figure out who they were. If they were to examine the evidence and the people suspected to in the crime thoroughly. Although the people working behind the system may be malevolent, the speaker in this podcast spoke a very good point I haven't thought about yet. Instead of arresting us and sending us to prison, they could instantly end up executing us. Although I don't know when this podcast happened, it feels like that is becoming the norm of America, public execution and no conviction for the law enforcement. Maybe the system is changing? Perhaps we are slowly becoming the third-world countries who end up executing their criminals on the spot. That is an eerie thought, and hope that does not come to fruition. I sadly think that this is starting to happen, but the people of America are starting to take a stand and I hope we will be able to do enough in order to prevent this dark future from happening. If psychological science would be able to help identify the true criminals then I am all for it, but there are so many complications that I feel it still would not be enough to help identify the correct person/s. There are a lot of things that need to be done in order to fix the system, and the number one problem we need to deal with first is us. We will never be able to make things right until we start fixing ourselves. The man in the podcast was absolutely right, the system is working, but the people working the system are twisting and bending things to make it work for their liking. I know that there are shady people out there that have enough money to bend and manipulate the system to work in their favor, and I don't know when that will, if it ever will, come to an end.

Terms: norms, psychological science, injustice, DNA

The most surprising thing that I have learned after listening to the Perfect Evidence radio blog is the court have to power to make an innocent person to confess for something they did not do. Many people sent to prison for something they did not do because of some mistakes were made during the DNA test. My faith in law enforcement is completely gone after listening to this episode of radio blog. In the book psychology in your life, from chapter 8 on page 302, the content on that page was about stereotype threat. Stereotype threat is apprehension about confirming negative stereotypes related to a person’s own group. The police arrest a guys from a black neighborhood where the crime took place, a white woman was murder by the psychopath rapist. The reason why the innocent guy got arrested because he was black and the way he quint his eyes made he appear to be a mean person even though it was just a natural thing that he always does with no harsh meaning behind. Be got beat up and force to sign the confession form. In the episode of radio blog tied to the content in chapter 11 found in our textbook. Stereotype may be positive, negative, or neutral. But when they are negative, stereotype can lead to prejudice and discrimination. Stereotype can influence our belief and behavior. Because people are often not conscious of their stereotype, they are also unware of the influence of stereotypes on their perception. The wrongful conviction were based on how people look like what color of their skin where they live, and what environment did they growing up with. A lot of people now a day are having a wrong view on people with dark skin color. Whenever it come investigating crime, people with dark skin always get the highest percentage of being frame for the crime. A lot of people will think the one that rape and murder other are black people, but that is not always the truth. Not all Asian are smart, not all blonde are dumb, and not all black are criminal. Psychological science help improve the real world to improve the wrongful conviction by educate people about the problem of stereotype. Science is irritable. The police should let the psychologist be involve in their investigation, so the psychologist can talk to the suspect because the psychologist how to hypnotize it is another way to know if the suspect showing any remorse. Or they could improve on the way they do DNA- test make sure there is no mistake make during the process. The most surprising thing in this radio blog is how the police framing innocent people.
Terms: DNA test, Stereotype threat, Stereotype, psychopath, conscious, Prejudice, discrimination, hypnotize

When I was in high school we watched a short film that showed how skewed a witnesses testimony in a case could be, and how they can form opinions on, “what they thought they saw.” But this episode was extremely shocking to me when I heard that a young boy was actually convinced and manipulated into giving a confession on killing a family member, which he did not even do. The manipulation of the police force just to get a conviction is disgusting to me. The police have a lot of power on vulnerable kids, or anyone for that matter, especially when they’re in an extremely stressful time. It’s very gratifying to know that DNA evidence is becoming such a big factor in cases and that there are people that are being caught with actual facts proving they were there, and that there are people becoming exonerated that have been charged with crimes they did not commit and DNA evidence is proving they haven’t. I couldn’t imagine what it would be like to be locked in a jail for a crime I didn’t have anything to do with, and no way out of it. It would be extremely depressing and hard to cope with.

Psychological Terms: DNA, depression, cope, stress

The most surprising thing I learned about during this podcast was about how two police officers got a little 14 year old boy to confess to murdering his sister, when, in fact, he didn’t. The police officers didn’t have enough evidence to convict him, so they needed to get him to confess. They interrogated this poor little so rigorously, playing good cop, bad cop. They told him they were going to use science to prove him guilty with the Computer Voice Stress Analyzer. This lie detector didn’t really work, the only thing it did was scare the accused suspect. They manipulated him, toy with his mind where he actually started to believe that had, in fact, murdered his sister. He started to doubt his own memory, he said. “If I did do this, I don’t remember.” It was surprising to see the effect these officers had on this little boy. You could only imagine how terrified he was. This makes you think about all the innocent people, who have been sent to jail for wrongful convictions, while the real criminals roam the streets. I never thought that the people that we depend on to protect would exactly be the reason of these falsely convicted cases.
Another surprising thing about this episode was the story of four teenagers who were wrongfully convicted for the rape and murder of a young woman named Lori Roscetti. The papers said, "It wasn't just a murder. It was a bestial, barbaric, horrifying, senseless massacre." She was a medical student and the fact that she was also white medical student murdered in a black neighborhood did not go unnoticed. Sixteen year old, Larry Ollins was taking into custody. He says police officers strapped him to a wall, slapped him around, and started asking him leading questions about a vague but brutal crime. They wanted him to confess to doing it. They couldn’t bully a confession out of him, but their tactics worked better on Ollin’s friend, Marcellius Bradford and his 14-year-old cousin, Calvin, . Marcellius says the police beat him up until he gave in and Calvin says they tricked him by telling him that if he'd just sign a confession, he could go home and see his mom. When he signed, they locked him up instead. Both confessions also named Larry too, so the officers locked him up too, in solitary confinement, without even fully explaining his charges. The last guy convicted for this case was Omar Saunders. He was brought to the Area 4 headquarters on February 11 by detectives James Mercurio and Thomas Lamb. They told him that they wanted him to say he witnessed the rape and murder of Lori. He refused and the convicted him with the charges as the other three guys. On December 5 of 2001, Omar, Larry, and Calvin were finally released. 15 years after their original arrests. 18 months after Kathleen Zellner received Omar's letter. She'd logged 800 unpaid hours and spent $50,000 of her own money to get the case back in court. Along the way, she'd had an independent lab test her clients' DNA and none of it matched the DNA from the crime scene. Faced with this new evidence, the state's attorney let them out. The footage that you're hearing is from the press conference outside the prison.
Psychological science can help improve the real world problem of wrongful convictions by letting the victim actually confess if they did the crime, and if they did not do the crimes, then by not bribing them or making them think that they actually are guilty. Memory is a huge factor when the interrogations are occurring because people tend to believe things that they did not do just so the process would end. The accusers can sometimes stereotype people and/or be more biased towards others leading to an even worse interrogation. The worse the interrogation, the probability of the victim believing the crime was caused by them increases. The memories of these individuals can be inaccurate due to the manipulation of the investigator. The stress the police caused to this fourteen year old boy gave him the ability to repress a memory of killing his sister. The boy was forgetting that this was not actually a memory, it was just a manipulation. His sobs and cry made me feel extremely bad for him because no one should ever have to be wrongfully convicted.

Key Terms: DNA, stereotypes, psychological science, memory

Oh, goody goody. Another reason for the world to depict law enforcement as the devil. I also have to say that it's quite a coincidence that this little blog post just happened to pop up while the hot mess in Ferguson is still a gaping infected wound in the public consciousness. But is anything about this surprising? No. No, I should say not. This episode came out in 2002 (according to the web page) and twelve years have passed with still more cases of wrongful convictions turning up left and right. Still just as common are incidences of dishonest tactics, and lazy or poor investigative work on the part of law enforcement. In 2014, incompetent police are still just as much of an issue, although as of recent, less attention is being called to their tendency to wrongfully convict and more focus is directed toward their utter lack of discipline, especially when it comes to unarmed people of color. All passive-aggressive jabs aside though, this is sadly business as usual.

While, I tend to see this as more of a legal issue and less of a psychological one, I do find myself drawing parallels between the situation with the boy being pinned with his sister's murder and the woman who's memory was being inadvertently rewritten by her therapist. Eerily similar, indeed. It wouldn't be far-fetched to think that the officers involved had used similar misguided tactics of goading the suspect into recosolidating non-existent information in order to create false memories, like say, murdering your own sister. However, once again I must say that to me this largely a subject of legality. I firmly believe that the rampant cases of false convictions are ultimately the result of faulty police work, and an undue presence of laziness. Cops in general seem to be far more inclined to seek a swift and decisive end to a given case, rather than see the evidence to it's conclusion. Far easier to coerce your most promising suspects into confessing the crime than to keep digging when you're relatively sure that your current suspects are guilty. Any reform that is to resolve this won't come from any therapeutic technique, or conditioning (of the sanctioned sort, anyway) but from drastic changes in policy.

The keywords are: consciousness, psychological, memory, reconsolidation, therapeutic, and conditioning.

The most interesting/surprising thing for me was how many people are actually wrongful convicted. If eleven months of mail from imamates piled up then I have to believe that majority of them are innocent. I bet someone people are stupid enough to try it to see if they will be free but still, 2, 00 letters. I also didn’t even know there was an organization that only dealt with these kinds of cases, only dealing with wrongly convicted cases to be proven innocent by a DNA test. I will see articles on facebook that say,” Man has been in jail for 40years and now is just being free because he has been innocent this whole time.” That is 40 years of this mans life that he will never get back. It makes me sick that this can just happen to any and for such a long period of time.
I think the psychological science can help improve what’s happening because its fact and you can’t argue with facts. In my eye that’s what a part of the law are knowing and havoing true hardcore facts.

I am shocked to find out how many people are convicted of crimes that they did not commit just based on a little bit of DNA. It sickens me how the police arrest people just because they need suspects. The public gets angry when they don’t see anything happening after a crime and no one getting arrested, so the police start to wrongly convict innocent people. I cannot believe that it is okay for the police to interrogate suspects this much. I believe a lot of stereotyping is involved here. They came to the point of making the suspects believe that they committed the crime even though they are innocent. They made a poor little boy believe that he had killed his sister by telling him his DNA was there even though it wasn’t. It sickens me how they can use this much interrogation to psychologically mess up people in the head. I believe that the thought of being guilty just builds up in these people and they eventually confess to something they didn’t even do because they think that they will be better off that way. I don’t think it is right for the police to force people or trick them into saying they are guilty. The police just want to feed the media. I don’t think that DNA is enough evidence to prove someone is guilty. You need a lot more evidence. I don’t understand how the police can lie about things that aren’t even true. I think psychological science can help improve the real world problem of wrongful convictions by actually looking at psychological perspectives to encode what the suspects are really saying. They should be able to actually listen to what they have to say and look at body language and really figure out what is going on.

Psychological terms: DNA, innocent, psychological science, stereotypes, body language

The most surprising thing that I heard in this episode was the story about the fourteen year old boy got convinced by the police that he killed his sister. Although he didn’t do it. The police aimed to get a confession from him because they didn’t really have a lead. So that was the goal throughout the whole interrogation. I was shocked that it is legal to lie about evidence to scare the boy. For example, they told him they found her blood in his room, just to scare him. He then began to question himself, unsure if he did or didn’t do it. They also used a computer voice stress analyzer in an attempt to scare him. They said that this machine could detect things in his voice that determined whether he was lying or not, but really there was no actual evidence that this worked. They use it just to scare the person they’re interrogating. They did a very good job scaring this boy too. Eventually, they convinced him enough he admitted to killing his sister, but later was found to be guilty. This brings about the concerns of how many people they could have convinced into confession falsely, that may be doing the time for a crime they really didn’t do.
Psychological science could be very beneficial for our legal system. If the legal system were more educated about this, they would know there are many factors that contribute to a confession and often times they can’t accept it to be true, considering the psychological state and amount of emotional distress that the presumed offender is in. If they learned more about this, they could use their interrogation skills in a more beneficial way and learn how to get more accurate confessions from these people.
Terms: psychological science, emotional distress,

Listening to my last episode was different and a little short for the story I was given. It talked about people being convicted of being guilty in the crime they did not commit. Evidence is a big part of the trial that goes on and also tells if the person is guilty or not. I thought overall that being falsely accused is a terrible thing to live with. Always never knowing why it was you that was sentenced when you didn’t even do it. DNA is a hard evidence to not believe because everyone has different blood that is hard to match. The most surprising thing that I heard was when I little bot was wrong accused of killing her sister because they found his DNA at the crime scene. Later on, it was learned that the boy broke down because of the police convincing him of doing to, when he did not do it at all. The mind is a powerful thing that can convince you of doing something or believing things that are not real. I feel that we need to get better detective to solve the cases better so people will not go to prison if they did not do the crime.
I hope that the justice system can improve with having the right evidence and skills to prove what it true. I learned a lot over the months in the class of what is real in life and the knowing the mind can play games. This episode was talking about a lot of things that are going wrong and not enough things that are happening to make it right.

Terms: psychology and DNA

I think that the most surprising thing from this episode was just that people can get convicted of crimes and can be put into jail without even enough DNA evidence to prove that they did something. Like in the story about the fourteen year old boy who was convicted of the crime of killing his sister. Everyone wanted him to just say that he did it, but it turns out that he didn’t do it. Because DNA actually proved later on that he didn’t do it. I just thought that it was crazy how people can just jump to assumptions about things like that, without even having actual evidence of the crime that happened. In my biology class, we are actually learning about situations like this right now. We learned that people can trace other people’s DNA, and some people can have the same exact DNA banding, but if their DNA is looked more into depth, then they can tell that people have different genetic sequences. So it has to take more researching and more evidence than just one step as to convicting someone of a crime. Psychological science does help improve the real world problem of wrongful convictions. Because when science comes into play, it also comes with a lot of data and facts. When there are actual scientific facts, then it is hard to make wrongful convictions. I think that the law enforcement should be more careful when they make accusations and when they interrogate people. I think that instead of just locking people up when they think people are guilty, they need to have more proof and they need to do more research on the people. I think that they need to have actual DNA evidence, or personal evidence before they make an arrest and an accusation
Psychological terms: DNA, DNA banding, genetic sequences

It is surprising to me that so many people have lost a big part of their lives. These people are in jail because they have been wrongly convicted. The police procedures from years ago are very different because of the lack of technology. People are now using DNA to see how many mistakes have been made and how many people have been wrongly prosecuted. The first example in the show is of some kids who were convicted of killing a young girl. She was a medical student and had been found by a railroad with her head bashed in by a rock. The murderers were accused of being vicious and massacred her. A reward was put out to find the killers because the police could not find a suspect right away. Three months after the murder a sixteen year old kid was brought into jail because they assumed he did the murder. He has been in the police station before because he has stolen from stores. The police said that if he signed a paper he could go home but instead they tricked him and threw him into jail. The paper also had a few other names on it that said they were involved so they were also brought in and imprisoned because of the signed paper. Police let out a statement that says she was carjacked and then was raped. A famous FBI agent was involved in the investigation and was the one that made the details about the murder. The scenario that the media let out on the news was part of a book that had been written by this famous FBI agent. The police put in local names and then the story made perfect sense. The evidence that was stored away was tested for DNA which found out that the teens that were put in jail were actually innocent. The DNA showed that two grown-ups had done the murder, and the story didn’t match up at all. Psychological science can be used because they use lie detector tests and other means to match up the felon with the crime. These tests are more accurate and more reliable and can help put the right people in jail and leave the innocent out to live their lives.

This episode of American Life was very sad to listen especially the part about when a young teen was convince by the police that he had committed a crime when really he didn’t even do anything. I thought this was real unfair, since they were convincing the teen he had done something when he didn’t. Police officers shouldn’t be allowed to do something like that unless they really do have facts and information that he did something. In another episode they convinced another teen to think he had killed his own sister, that part kind of upset me because you could tell he had done nothing. He was literally telling the truth with tears and a cracking voice. I don’t think it was fair that the police suspected him when he was innocent and not even suspected to be the killer of his own sister. There was also a part where they talked to four different guys that were black, these four were accused of killing a girl. They only accused and suspected it was those four guys because they were black and the girl they “killed” was white, the police officers were stereotyping the four. This isn’t something fair, because you aren’t just supposed to accuse someone because of their color of skin. This was being very unfair because they were sentenced for life, meaning they believed the four had done this tragic thing. The police officers must have felt horrible though when they finally got justice and were not accused of doing this killing. What helped them find the truth was DNA. DNA stands for deoxyribonucleic acid, and means that it’s the carrier of genetic information. With DNA you can tell and solve a lot of things and information with just a drop of blood, or a piece of a hair, etc. All of this, listening to the episodes were really interesting and also surprising to hear. This was something I didn’t know really happened out in the real world. I thought all this happened in just TV shows and movies. Listening to this episode did remind me of a show I am currently watching called “Dexter” and many of the things mentioned in the episodes happen in this TV show making me think it wouldn’t had been so realistic, but it really does happen which is crazy and unfair. I think police officers should be more careful and double check themselves because they could ruin someone’s life for nothing. Now psychological science in my opinion is something very important because it helps a lot, and it especially helps with memory. This results to when for example someone tells you something negative about yourself several times, like many times. After a while you start believing I and thinking it’s true. This is just like the part in the episode when they made the teen think he killed his own sister, when he didn’t. They really messed with the teen so much he believed it because he was being bothered and stressed out by it all. Everyone should understand this, and not use it against someone for being innocent because it isn’t fair.
Terms: DNA, psychological science, stressed.

Alberto Sveum
Well, I was most surprised about these two cases of wrongful conviction. I have heard of this before, I recall one of the most iconic cases, the one involving the Central Park five who all lied and confessed to the beating and brutal rape of a women because they were manipulated by the police. I think this is really disgusting when this sort of thing happens. I think lots of times, the media picks these cases up, people want them solved and officers will do anything to do just that.

Forensics can without a doubt clear people entirely. This is so important when cases have very little to rely upon or when there is a lack of evidence to convict, but a confession is coerced. Obviously, if one were to look at the fact that being interrogated for a crime you didn't commit and being lied to is a major life stressor, it is understandable why people lie and say they committed the crime. I recall the famous Prison Experiment as well as the Milgrim obedience experiment because these both dealt with the body's tendency to make things, even if they are completely false, seem real. The detectives condition the suspect's responses until the suspect actually believes they committed a crime. This problem ultimately throws a wrench in the prosecution system. Given the susceptibility of the human brain, the development of psychological science is paramount to discovering the truth in tons of cases.
Psychological terms: Milgrim experiment, Stanford Prison Experiment, conditioned response and major life stressor.

I think the most surprising thing is that how often it happens and how it is just treated as “oh well, my bad”. It can forever change someone’s life in a negative way. People are getting accused of stuff they claim they did not do which leads to punishment that you do not deserve. Along with having to be convinced you did it because we do all have our own unique DNA which better way to prove a crime I guess. They stated how they even mix up people’s test results when it comes to very important things, a patient was told they were diagnosed with cancer when in reality, they were fine but someone else is still living with the cancer and have no clue, which is crazy how it happens, it is a serious manner and it could damage two families since it is such a serious thing to mix up. It really makes you concerned about the health and government which can cause a lot of worry and paranoid people which isn’t good. I think it is interesting how the media does not make a big deal of these things when they happen just kind of leave it off to the side and let the people recover from it on their own. I think listening to this makes you think more about things. It is almost lazy to punish people who did not do it because they found a person, move on, case closed. “Don’t want to hear about it ever again. Not my problem.” Instead of hearing out the people and seeing there is just not a way they did it and looking for the real person guilty of the crime.
I think psychological science can help the situation by just looking at it more instead of just completely going off of things like DNA. Sometimes the mental health of a person can have an effect on how they behave, not always but sometimes depending on the situation. If someone isn’t in the right mind they can be persuaded to fess up to something easier over something they did not do, especially if they get those intrusive thoughts and feel guilty about it so they take the blame to take away the guilt of thinking about acting in similar ways. Memory can also play roles, if you are told something happened with detail, you can start thinking about it then realize it could have happened just because your mind has been messed with slightly. I think if they stopped being so convinced the person they did it, looked more into it without having to pressure a suspect they aren’t even 100% is the right one then they would have better luck and innocent people would not have to go through this process. I think it could help if they looked at it in more ways and made a process of it versus just relying so much on DNA. I am sure in most cases it is a pretty reliable source but there are still flaws no matter how great the technology is.
Terms used- intrusive thoughts, mental health, memory

Wow. I didn’t realize how many wrong convictions there really where. The most surprising thing is that police and detectives are getting confessions out of people that aren’t real, and they believe they are doing good. The little boy really thinks he killed his sister because the police lie to him. And with the three men that where in prison for many years all because the police pretty much forced them to sign confessions. Its really good that in the 90s they started to use more DNA testing which helped a lot of innocent people get out of jail. I really wonder how many people are still in prison or even got the death penalty because of these wrong convictions. The police and prosecutors I think need to have a little more responsibility for what has happened to these people in prison for no reason.
With psychological science people can understand that witnesses can believe they saw something or the accused can start to believe they did something wrong when they may not have. Understanding that you can falsify memories can put a hold on some cases and I think the courts and even some detectives just want to be done with the case as fast as possible, and that could really mess up someone’s life. Not even the fact that someone is wrongly convicted but also the actual perp can still be at large and that is pretty scary too. It is hard though because what if the person who actually did the crime repressed the memory? I don’t know how people work in that field and I give them props for that but I wish everything was black and white, but with our brain it isn’t always that way. In all reality the cold hard facts such as DNA is the only thing you can really count on all the time.

This episode of This American Life was particularly interesting to me because it was very similar to the subject of the book report that I wrote for this class. The part that most surprised me was the when the fourteen year old boy was persuaded to think that he might have actually killed his sister. Cases like this are pretty well discussed in the book I did my report on, but it still shocks me every time I hear it. A confession, if obtained correctly, should be the most definitive piece of evidence in any courtroom, but if proper, good techniques for interrogating aren't followed a confession is useless. In the case where the young boy admitted to killing his 12 year old sister it was very closely related to a case in my book where a young teenage boy signed a confession, admitting to killing his neighbor, even though he maintains that he didn't. Both of these cases show how people, especially kids, are conditioned to accept whatever the police say as the truth. In the story in my book the kid admits to it because the cops tell him he had to do it, and in the case with the fourteen year old boy who killed his sister he admitted to doing it because the cops told him his blood was at the scene, even though it wasn't. The boy clearly doesn't believe it, initially, but he eventually accepts it as the truth because the cops said it was true, and children are all conditioned, from a young age, to believe whatever a police officer says. With all this unconditional trust that the public puts on it's police officers it shocks me that it is legal to tell deliberate lies during an interrogation.
We can use the power of psychological science to lower the number of wrong convictions. For example, we put so much stock in a written confession, so every suspect interrogation should be videotaped. If we videotape interrogations it would be able to show the court if a person was pressured into admitting something wrong by an officer. A camera would also be able to show the suspect's condition leading up to and during his confession. Finally, an officer would be much less willing to use shady interrogation techniques if they were under surveillance. Another way that psychological science should be instituted into the officers process is that they shouldn't make their own determination if someone is guilty or not. The purpose of a police interrogation should be to find facts to present to the court, not to elicit a confession. If an officer comes to an interrogation with the intent on drawing out a confession stereotypes and biases could cause them to hear only what they want to hear. On the other hand, if an officer interrogates without an ulterior motive to fact finding they will be able to gather good information to present to the jury, it is then the jury's job to decide if the suspect is guilty or innocent. Psychological science could be helpful if it were more incorporated into the justice system.
Psychological terms: Conditioned, bias, stereotypes, psychological science.

This radio episode was eye opening to me. It is scary to think about crimes being solved before DNA. I good family friend of mine is the head of the homicide unit in Minnesota. I asked him about his opinion on DNA and he said, “DNA has been a crucial tool to solving many violent crimes such as homicide and sexual assaults, it is basically necessary to get a conviction now” Crime is a interest of mine so I found this episode intriguing.

Before DNA testing, solving a crime was basically all based on psychology. Integrating people into confessions was the strongest evidence that a prosecutor had. The problem with this is that the police were known to bully people into confessions. The first act talked was a great example of stereotypes and self fulling prophecy. One of the men in this section talked about his time in prison when he started to believe that white people are naturally evil. Everyone who did this to him was white and they were stereotyping him as a violent black man although that wasn’t true. What is ironic about this is that he was stereotyping white people, they are not all evil. The confessions were an example of a self fulling prophecy. This is people’s tendency to behave in ways that confirm their own expectations or other people’s expectations. The police kept pushing and pushing to break down these men mentally and trying to convince them they did this until they finally confessed. I don’t think the police would have stopped until they got this confession. They wouldn’t have given these men the death penalty without hard evidence!

The second act is so sad. These cops are straight up lying to the poor kid about his sister's death. This poor boy just lost his sister and these cops are trying to make him say that he did it. These cops give false information which turns his perspective upside down. It alters his memory. Michael Crow believes that he forgot about doing this awful thing to his sister but we talked about in class that a traumatic incident is easier to remember thanks to adrenaline. But this is just his memory being distorted.

I think a way to use psychological science to help improve the real world problems of wrongful convictions is by educating the people involved. The juries, lawyers, and judges should be educated on the topic of memory and how it can be distorted. I didn’t have any idea about distortion before taking this class and if I was sitting on a jury I would be believe a confession without a doubt. Another way to help improve this problem would be to work with the cops and make laws about what is okay to do in the interrogation rooms. I don’t believe lying should be legal and I don’t believe the cops should put the person under so much pressure to confess. Psychologically proven methods of getting a false confession should be outlawed.

This is scary! I could see myself getting really freaked out with the cops pressuring me to confess I would do anything to get out of that awful room. I can’t image this practice by the cosp is legal. If anything this episode makes me very thankful for DNA testing. This episode also makes me change my perspective on confessions. They are not the end all be all of a case.

Terms: perspective, DNA, distortion, memory, stereotypes, self fulling prophecy, traumatic incident, adrenaline, psychology,

I could not believe this episode. I could not understand why people would commit these awful crimes or why anyone would admit that they committed a crime that they did not commit. I cannot imagine what that would be like. I was really surprised that they tried to tell the boys exactly what to say and that when they would not, they just blamed them. It is really scary to think about how people that are innocent are convicted of crimes like this. I cannot imagine what it would be like to just give in and comply with the authority, but it would be really hard to stand up against the crime when everyone already thought you were guilty. At this point you would just want to get into as little as possible, which explains friends standing up and lying about the crime itself. I just could not believe the whole thing. It was insane. I just have no idea what I would do in this case. The boys went to prison when they were fifteen. This led me to imagine myself in prison at age fifteen, or even at age eighteen. I would not have survived. It is reassuring that now we have DNA testing to help convict the criminals today. I think that psychological science is really important because it is really important that no one gets wrongfully convicted of crimes. I think that it is so important that authority does absolutely everything possible to make sure mistakes like these never happen again. I think it is interesting to look at prejudice in this case and to see if it made a difference. He mentioned that everyone that convicted him was white. This makes me wonder if any racial discrimination came into play. Overall, this episode was really surprising and appalling. The whole thing just continued to surprise and upset me. I really hope that a huge lesson has been learned from this mishap.

Terms: DNA, comply, psychological science, prejudice, discrimination

After listening to This American Life episode 210 I was very shocked. I had no idea that there were so many cases where innocent people were going to prison for crimes they didn’t commit. It eventually describes how DNA testing was able to help people. Unfortunately, not all people benefit from it. The first case describes the murder and beating of a woman. When cops arrived at the scene, they weren’t able to find any suspect and the evidence was very minimal. They eventually forced three boys to take the blame for something they didn’t do at all. This made me mad because it shows how wrong our criminal justice system is. One of the boys that was interrogated was asked to sign something. They said if he signed something, he would be to go home. It turned out that when he signed the paper, he was committing to doing the crime and would get put on trial for it. In the trial the three boys had to lie and give false information. I think this is very wrong and someone should be punished for it. In court, you swear to tell the truth on the bible and I think lying after doing that is an absolutely terrible thing. Because all the boys were young, they were not sentenced to death row, but life in prison. The three boys were “responsible” for the savage rape and murder of an innocent girl. Some other ways that we can tell the case is very faulty is that one of the reports of the police officers claimed that the murderers needed money to get back to their home, so they waited for the first person to walk by to attack. Eventually when the actual convicts confessed to the crime, they claimed that this was not true at all. I believe it is very important that crimes like this be analyzed extremely carefully. I think psychological science can help the justice system because when people lie, there should be some testing behind it. If we understand what is going on through police officers when they are looking for suspects and interrogating people it could help us very much. It is definitely impactful psychologically when a young teenager is interrogated for a crime. It has to be a very scary thing, especially if you are innocent like the boys in the story. I can’t imagine the way I would feel if I was condemned to prison for something I never did. I remember one of the boys describing how he was locked into solitary confinement and he discussed the psychological trauma it caused him. They talked about how people on the news were speculating and talking about how one of the men enjoyed raping dead corpses. The boy accused of this felt destroyed and I can imagine how terrible that would be. Eventually, the DNA evidence showed that they weren’t guilty and all they had to do was sign a sheet confirming the blood type on the body was not theirs. One of the men wouldn’t do it, he said that the last time he signed something he got put into prison for a crime he didn’t do. He lost trust, which is a component of psychology. He eventually signed though and they were let out of prison. This episode made me realize the flaws in our justice system very much. Although DNA evidence is helping very much, the forensic specialist are often not able to keep up because so many cases are being sent in every day. I believe we need to find a system that suits up the best way possible.
Terms: psychological science

Listening to thing like this really gets under my skin. I believe there are a lot of people that are in prison for crimes that they have not committed. A prison letting one person go because evidence finally proved that they were innocent isn’t not enough. The time that these people lose do to being in jail is heart breaking to me. There is nothing that the state or the prisons can give to these people to compensate them for the time they have lost with loved ones and friends. Psychological science can help to prove evidence in a number of ways that physical evidence cannot prove. This will enable us to be able to tell if a person is lying and how they react to questions and things mentally as well. This is a great idea because obviously relying on evidence that we rely on now just isn’t enough because people continue to be put in prison for crimes they have not committed. This kind of reminds me of people that are trained in telling if someone is lying or not. I think a person has to be really trained in order to use that as evidence though. I am aware that facial expressions, body movements that move in a certain way, and if a person is jumpy or how they answer questions are all psychological ways that could be put down as evidence that could help. This would also tell if someone is telling the truth as well so I think it’s a good thing.

I think the most surprising thing to me after listening to the episode was where the man (Huy Dao).
was charged as guilty. The fact that you can be charged with a crime with no physical evidence to prove that you do it or any DNA evidence is absurd. Our court system is in place so that you are innocent until proven guilty. It is the prosecutors job to prove that a person is guilty not having a suspect having to prove that he is innocent. DNA tests are not just used to convict someone of committing a crime. DNA tests are often used to prove the innocence of a person. It was said that half of all prisoners who take a DNA test come back as them being guilty. While this is great for the Prisoner and for the system of DNA testing this brings into question the competence of the Court system and who they charge.

Psychological science helps the world by focusing the problem of wrongful conviction. Often when a interrogation is happening the person being questioned even if they are completely innocent will break down and change there story sometimes going
as far to have their story agree with the prosecutors. Psychologists can prove that the person is breaking down due to stress thus he is more easily manipulated into believing in something that he didn't do. They do so by having the person speak into a computer that analyzes their voice for stress.

Terms: DNA, Psychological Science, Stress, psychologists, Computer voice-stress analyzer.

From listening to this episode, I was surprised at just how many wrongful convictions there were, and especially the part about the interrogators pushing people to confess to things that they simply never did. This issue is most definitely one of the reasons why the police department has a bad rep around the world. I feel that to a point, the ways these officers were using to get information out of people should be illegal. Obviously intimidation is one way to get information from someone who has committed a crime. But, for the people that were innocent, this tactic proves that the amount of stress incorporated can make people either believe that they did something they didn’t, or will cause people to accept responsibility for something they had nothing to do with. This should not be the way that we go about locking people up. People who for sure committed the crime are the only ones who should be locked up, not the ones that we want to lock up, just because we so badly want to incarcerate someone for a crime. I feel psychological science can be used to improve the quality and legitimacy of interrogations by providing an expert in this field. By doing so, it would provide those who are interrogating the subject valuable and useful information, as to where to take the questioning, or when to stop it. This is a very useful tool. But, I also believe that the field of psychological science could help tremendously in helping out people who are in prison, that are serving sentences for a crime they didn’t commit. This would also save money, because the prisons wouldn’t be overpopulated as often, if wrongly accused people were taken out of the system.
Terms: Stress, Psychological Science