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It’s Crazy How Easy It Is to Make People Falsely Remember Committing a Crime
New York Magazine: Memory’s a pretty fluid and complex thing. We don’t always remember specific details of an event well, and what details we do remember can be influenced by stuff that happened after the
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Framed by forensics
Aeon: In 1992, Juan Rivera was arrested for the rape and murder of an 11-year-old girl in Waukegan, Illinois. On the night of the murder, Rivera was wearing an electronic ankle bracelet in connection with
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Is the Justice System Overly Punitive?
Scientific American: Twenty years ago Rwanda was torn apart by violence. The Hutu majority slaughtered their Tutsi neighbors, killing approximately 70% of the Tutsi minority in the space of only four months. Once the killing
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Experts: Conflicting eyewitness accounts aren’t surprising
The Washington Post: National experts on eyewitness testimony said it’s not surprising that there would be so many conflicting accounts — particularly of a chaotic crime scene. Memory, they say, isn’t like a video recording. Our
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Cycles of Fear and Bias in the Criminal Justice System
Pacific Standard: Discussions about how to reform the criminal justice system—whether through sentence-reduction proposals for low-level crimes, or limiting the use of data analysis in making sentencing decisions, or fightingvoter disenfranchisement—all have one talking point in common. When an overzealous
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In Interrogations, Teenagers Are Too Young to Know Better
The New York Times: Even when police interrogators left the room, cameras kept recording the teenage suspects. Some paced. Several curled up and slept. One sobbed loudly, hitting his head against the wall, berating himself.