Oh bloody hell, not another one.
I hope this isn't too far off topic, but this takes me back to the time this sub-forum was established. We were in the position where pretty much any attempt to discuss a suspected miscarriage of justice on the basis of the evidence was met by a barrage of members insisting that this was woo-woo and belonged in the conspiracy theories section. The reason given was that the evidence had been tested by a court and a guilty verdict handed down, and this was definitive. They heard all the evidence, you didn't. Away to the CT forum with the thread!
We got it when trying to discuss Amanda Knox, Lockerbie, Luke Mitchell, pretty much any of them. I remember once asking one of the "you're a woo-woo" crowd how they would have reacted to a thread discussing the possiblilty of Stefan Kiszko's innocence while he was still in jail, having lost all his appeals. We knew from subsequent events that he was innocent, and indeed that the evidence of his innocence was available at the time of the trial, but was misinterpreted. Would any attempt to discuss how the forensic evidence should have been interpreted and the apparent conclusion that he couldn't have been the murderer have been shouted down on the same terms?
And now we have another one. Another false confession, indeed, just like Amanda Knox and Stefan Kiszko. Has the forum finally got past the prejudice that juries always get it right? That nobody would ever confess to a crime they hadn't committed? Or indeed the logic that was handed to me once, that miscarriages of justice are so rare that it's a reasonable assumption to regard every claim of such an occurrence as woo-woo and shout it down without bothering to consider the actual arguments put forward?
www.bbc.com
