File this under completely F’d up!!!! Excuse my french, my friends know I only use it when I am truly passionate about something – hope I don’t let it slip in court one day. So I have to admit I read the dailymail as my gossip, shut my brain off, candy but the article I found on it tonight was anything but light and airy. Another huge issue in wrongful convictions is false confessions dragged out by cops who should be fired and then in my humble opinion prosecuted. The case of Thomas Cogdell as reported by the dailymail would seem too fantastical to be true if I didn’t already know a few things about wrongful conviction and false confessions. Basically this 12 year boy has spent the last two years in prison for the murder of his sister who was suffocated. Police interrogated him ,likely alone, for many hours, without food, and lied to him to coerce a confession. Part of his interrogation is on tape but its often telling what the police leave out and when they feel the need to turn the tape recorder off and how the course of things seem to change once they turn it back on again. In this case though if the reporting is true it sounds like the police left just enough on the tape to prove their tactics were unsavory. I don’t even understand how this could happen – why there is not a social worker or someone there looking out for this child while this is going on. The mother is apparently bi-polar and sometimes doesn’t feel like taking her meds- no idea about the father- no child should be forced to make decisions about Miranda rights and waiving them on their own which is apparently one of the points of error being addressed. This case highlights further the need for full video tapes of police interrogation- no turning it off while police operate in the shadow of truth. It’s crazy but I have to tell my kids that not all people are good and that included law enforcement – its hard to know who to trust. Check out the full article here at the dailymail. Here is another article on the same case.
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