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A comment on The Reykjavik Confessions.

Re:The Reykjavik Confessions by stuart_v on Thursday May 15, 2014 @01:14AM (#7747955)
God, this makes me so sad. Being persuaded into admitting guilt to a crime that you have no idea about sounds bizaare but I am sure this case wasn't the last.
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Re:The Reykjavik Confessions by arethuza on Thursday May 15, 2014 @05:16AM (#7748478)
At roughly the same time in the UK there were the Guildford Four and Maguire Seven cases:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guildford_Four_and_Maguire_Seve...

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Re:The Reykjavik Confessions by Sharlin on Thursday May 15, 2014 @04:39AM (#7748394)
Well, probably not all that rare in the US, for example, due to the abuse of the plea bargain system.
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Re:The Reykjavik Confessions by tripzilch on Sunday May 18, 2014 @06:03AM (#7762635)
That's the weirdest thing about US police series.

When I was younger, I never really believed that sort of thing actually happens for real, just thought it was an over-used fictional "cleverness" trope. I mean it's so obvious this is going to lead to abuse and false confessions if actually used for real-life confessions, I figured it had to, because in a TV-series you can assume that the police are the smart/good guys so they could safely use this clever (if somewhat unfair) trick to get the (obvious) bad guys.

As I got older, and perhaps as the themes in TV series got a little more complex, I started wondering sometimes, how are these even the good guys? For all they know they are now convicting an innocent man or woman, by pressuring them into confessing to a crime with the only leverage being "an offer they can't refuse" (a much larger sentence).

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