An innocent person on the other hand, knowing they are innocent, will just talk. They will speak only looking at what they say in the best light. They will not realize that everything they say is going to be construed by the police to fit their theory of the crime. This is why it is important for an innocent person to think like a guilty person during their interactions with the police.

Imagine you are innocent and you naively believe they can't convict you because you know you are innocent. There is no device to test for innocence so in the end it is not that hard or impossible to end up in jail even when you are innocent.

The second part is to ensure that he doesn't waste his time on people that are really guilty because in the end that will go nowhere. Just like the innocence project has pre-screening to ensure they are not wasting their time.

Again, I think this is inconsistent. The original comment author is bound to be one of those third parties where objective innocence does not matter.

But if it "will go nowhere" as soon as objective innocence isn't a given, it does apparently matter.

Now does it, or doesn't it matter?

Nothing can have both an effect and not an effect at the same time. It's a logical error and reformulating this same error is not a fix.

Edit: especially in a jury-based system it seems like it doesn't matter whether you're guilty or not, but whether the jury believes your story. In addition, many (most?) people who commit crimes do not necessarily think of themselves as criminals, though admittedly I got forgot from which source I got this.

Edit2: bottom line: why would influencing a jury suddenly stop working when you're guilty.

The US is not a jury-based system, but a plea-bargain-based system. Over over 94% of cases never go in front of a jury. [1] And while theoretically you can insist on your case going to trial, a few things will happen to you:

1. Your public defender will do everything possible to discourage you, because they don't have the resources to take you to trial.

2. As a consequence of not having resources, they will in fact be correct in discouraging you.

3. The prosecutor will charge you with far more counts, and a potential sentence that is much higher than what you'll get in a plea deal.

Note that the extra counts don't need to be provable. What they do is two things:

1. Add to your defense burden.

2. Put intense psychological pressure ("If I take this felony deal I get five years, but I might get TWENTY FIVE if I take this to trial and lose.")

If you can afford a good lawyer, the plea deal calculus works better, of course, since you now have a credible threat of taking a bad case to court and demolishing the prosecutor.

[1]: https://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/23/us/stronger-hand-for-judg...

You know, they’re doing you a ‘favour’ by avoiding the trial so long as you accept guilt.

laughs hysterically

In the real world, of course, they are used to throw the book at people with no ability to defend themselves.

The only circumstance that holds true is if you get a legit confession. But that confession still has to be fact-checked.

As for the rest, you cannot in any circumstance be obviously guilty unless you were an accomplice to that fact or you were captured after the fact. You would have to read minds to throw away the presumption of innocence, and even in those seemingly obvious circumstances there may be something else going on. So we have the trials.

Plea deals are exactly that - deals between you and the state to go to jail so you might not go to jail longer. They're not doing you a favour, because they have all the authority.

One would hope it would be easier to be found innocent when you are innocent - easier to produce evidence and proof of things that are true, and to produce convincingly honest testimony when you were being honest.