by musashi » Sat Jun 11, 2016 4:23 pm
Just to add my little bit here i can tell you that it has long been accepted by 'The Authorities' that a man who maintains his innocence after five years in prison is almost guaranteed to be innocent. Experience, and meticulous record keeping and studying by criminologists shows that those who falsely claim to be innocent stop doing so after about five years in jail and start to acknowledge their guilt.
There are a number of innocent men in jail doing life sentences who steadfastly refuse to confess to a crime they maintain they did not commit. As a lifer they cannot and will not be released until they acknowledge their crime and come to terms with it. They are considered to be still a danger to the public if they do not. The case of Keith and Tony Egeler is a classic of the type where a guilty brother is released after 12 years of a life sentence when he accepts he did the crime, and the innocent brother is held in for more than 20 years because he refuses to take responsibility for something he did not do.
I can tell you this because criminology was part of the psychology degree I abandoned many years ago. Additionally, I have counted among my friends over the years several prison-based psychologists as well as other, non prison-based psychologists and despite abandoning the course I maintain a steady interest in psychology.
As far as I am concerned if a man maintains his innocence all that time then he is almost certainly an innocent man.
As far as I am concerned the police involved should receive the exact same sentence as the man they tried to stitch up would receive if convicted, or who they actually managed to stitch up. In this case the police involved should be lifed off and given a minimum tariff of 18 years to serve in exactly the same prisons and conditions in which their victim suffered.
But then, I am a bit of a dirty rotten bastard because I actually believe in fair play, decency, honesty and truth.
Lance.
It's still fucked, isn't it?