"just tell us what really happened" and other junk science that can land you in jail, or worse

Unfortunately, despite what you're told in most movies and TV shows, the cops are not your friends, and they may not be there to help you.

From 1983 to 1895, Henry Lee Lucas confessed to one, no, two, no, ten, no, 100, no, 210, no, 360 murders across much of America, estimating his tally of victims at over 600 by the time he recanted his confessions. Just like a famous bit from Eddy Izzard brought to life, Lucas was supposedly responsible for pretty much every murder that needed to be solved but the trail had either gone cold or was never hot. He’d be given a case file, told to think about it for an hour or two, then come up with a tale of how he murdered the victim in the exact way the case file seemed to imply. Often, he’d travel to a murder site and detail where he did his dark deeds.

Now, of course, serial killers do have a very well-known tendency to confess to more murders than they really committed, perhaps viewing it as having fun with the police or just harmless embellishment on their resumes. After all, what are the prosecutors going to do? One murder is bad enough so what’s going to happen if you confessed to ten? Or fifty? What were they going to do? Triple kill you on death row? Give you a hundred life sentences? You aren’t getting out anyway, may as well spin some yarns to get shocking media coverage and some extra fan mail to help pass the time. And Lucas and his confession roadshow appeared to have done exactly that.

When journalists and skeptical detectives started doing the math on all the timelines and distances involved, the data said that Lucas would do nothing but eat, drive, and murder. How would he get the money to put fuel in a heavy car that burned gasoline by the barrel by today’s standards, to complete all of his 900-plus-mile trips between killings? How did he find a victim and the perfect place to commit the crime within just minutes of arriving in a new city on a whim so he could make it just in time for his next spontaneous murder? Over a decade, a victim a week sounds plausible until you start looking at the logistics of doing all that across the entire American West.

However, as detailed in the Netflix series about Lucas, The Confession Killer, he was still paraded across the nation, admitting to basically every crime put in front of him, while authorities in Texas went to appalling lengths to intimidate and silence skeptics who pointed out that while Lucas certainly killed one person and very likely murdered two more, there was zero evidence tying him to any other murders, and in fact, there was ample evidence that he couldn’t have committed most of them. Even families of victims with burning questions were dismissed for tainting the tale of the super-killer who killed all the people ever.

Diving into the story of why he confessed to murders he never committed exposed that Lucas was being bribed and manipulated by the sheriff who arrested him to first own up to a few murders that could’ve hurt the sheriff’s reelection campaign if they remained unsolved, then expanded to nearby jurisdictions with the same problems, then to similar departments near those, and so on and so forth, rapidly snowballing into a tsunami or lies and false confessions. Hundreds of killers were allowed to get away with their crimes as cases were falsely closed and never reopened, even when convictions for far better suspects were already secured.

Family after family is trying to restart investigations into the deaths of their friends or loved ones to this day, citing the fact that they were closed on a lie from Lucas, whose death came in 2001 after congestive heart failure in a Texas jail where he was serving a life sentence. They face an uphill climb because many of the cases have gone so cold and have so little preserved or pristine evidence, and so few surviving eyewitnesses, solving them now would require something that could be classified as a miracle. Few police departments want take on these hopeless projects from both a public relations and logistical standpoint, especially when they have current cases to close.

And therein lies the problem. The emphasis here is on closing cases with an arrest to clear the queue. Ideally, you get to the truth and find the perpetrator. Unlike you see in most TV shows and detective films, the vast majority of criminals aren’t geniuses with overarching plans that lead dogged investigators on chases that last for years. A more or less typical perpetrator has problems with impulse control and alibis that fall apart if they even bother to have any, gets caught red-handed, or will admit to the crime on a recorded line from jail when talking to friends and family. But what happens when a suspect doesn’t pretty much land in your lap? It can get rather grim quite quickly.

Most of us were taught that police investigators are our friends. From children’s books to hagiographic cop and detective shows like Law And Order, we’re told that the cops are heroes, that they care about fairness, that they won’t stop until they find the truth, that the system is fair, and any injustice or error would be swiftly found and corrected immediately after it’s been uncovered. It worked because we all really want to believe that a team of real life superheroes has our back around the clock, and that we will be treated fairly by passionate defenders of truth and justice when we run into trouble, or need their help after something terrible happens to us.

Now, we know that for many, this is simply not true, and grave injustices went, and still go undetected or are maliciously ignored, that if you fit a certain profile, you might be accused of faking the crime, then publicly humiliated and punished to stop others like you from reporting similar incidents. If the detectives are convinced you’re guilty, they will interrogate you for days on end if they have to, using threats, lies, cajoling, or just twist your testimony to say what you never said or implied. (Which is why all lawyers advise you to keep your mouth shut as much as humanly possible in such interviews.) As far as they’re concerned, you did something, and it’s their job to prove it.

Over the past decade, countless true crime documentaries have shown that the logic used by a lot of prosecutors could almost be satirized as “well, the defendant took a nap after being up all night, they cried for a whole 30 seconds less than they should have, and innocent people just don’t do that, so obviously they’re lying, and need to be in jail for all the murders ever.” But sadly, it’s not satire at all. Police investigation manuals are often just a field guide to confirmation bias where suspects are damned if they do and damned if they don’t, and everything they say can be used to support telling the courts whatever it is the detective already decided.

For example, the critical steps of the Reid Technique used by just about every police investigator focus on assuming that the suspect is guilty, telling them that you don’t believe them, giving them two versions of what you think really happened, and then tell them that if they agree with the less heinous version and take a plea deal if they are offered one, then maybe, possibly, the judge will go easy on them. This is pretty much the exact opposite of “innocent until proven guilty” implied by the legal system and functions as nothing more than a manual for browbeating often scared and tired people taught that the police are their friends to shut down and comply.

How can this possibly be justified? With a patina of pseudoscience, of course. Those teaching the Reid Technique argue that it’s based on various lie detection techniques which focus on not just the subject’s words but their posture, tone, and eye contact. That may sound evidence-based, but the devil is in the details. Did you lean away as you were asked a certain question? You may be lying. Cross your arms or legs? Lying. Looked away? Lying. Maintained unflinching eye contact? Also lying. Angry at being accused of a crime? Guess what? Yup, that’s right. You’re lying. There’s no objective measure of anything is used in the handbook. Whatever a detective decides, goes.

If you ask the company behind the technique, they will tell you that it’s effective and very scientific. Yet the rising rates of exonerations, with many of them featuring false confessions, and countless videos showing just how coercive and manipulative these interviews are, say differently. Research into lie detection techniques shows that they are all absolute bunk and there’s no such thing as a reliable marker of a lie. But that’s not what’s important in the system. Closing the case is, and getting a confession is a great way to close a case and convince juries who’ve been told by every crime show that innocent people just don’t confess no matter what happens.

But suppose you’re wise to these techniques. You listened to your lawyer’s very sage advice and despite TV telling you that only scumbag criminals need an attorney, you kept your mouth shut and refused to give them anything to work with as soon as you realized this was an interview and you’re now a suspect. Well, thanks to a swarm of cranks who think they found cheat codes to the human mind, chemistry, and physics, and founded companies to teach these cheat codes to cops, there are more ways of making the evidence, no matter how meager, tell the story the investigators want it to tell by straight up ignoring the basic laws of reality.

Once again, TV and the movies have done us dirty. Juries now expect forensics in just about every case they hear, mostly because entertainment land sees science as little more than a distraction when it stands between the writers and their plot twists, and is free to invent whatever investigative technique it needs. Here in the real world, with real people, who may be paying for others’ misdeeds with their lives, plenty of cases don’t need forensic evidence or come with horribly inconclusive forensics which can’t tell a good story in court. But unfortunately, borrowing a page from TV and movies, an entire industry turned many of these made-for-TV techniques into real cases.

Bite mark analysis. Blood spatter analysis. Fire and arson analysis. Image analysis. An unbelievable, literally, improvement of ballistic analysis. All of them are bunk, generally based on a complete disregard for material science, chemistry, and physics. Matching deformations in flesh to teeth, or comparing the splatter of blood to a crime scene, or burning down test rooms all rely on very subjective evaluations of whether the results match the evidence, and ignore that those matches can be made in multiple ways, or are easily affected by changes in altitude, humidity, wind, and age of the materials. As shocking as it may sound, even DNA and fingerprints have their problems.

While the various “analyses” outlined above are based on slapping some numbers on a random person who completed a workshop saying “yup, looks the same to me” and pretending this is science, it may seem odd to place DNA and fingerprints in the same pile. After all, those are objective, right? Your DNA is there or is not. Your fingerprints are there and match or they don’t. Both are unique to you. What’s the confusion? The problem with fingerprints is that two people can have similar enough prints for false matches, especially when their quality is poor. And with DNA? You leave it all over the place as you shed hair and skin flakes, both of which can easily travel.

Oregon lawyer Brandon Mayfield experienced this firsthand after a fingerprint match by the FBI linked him to bombings in Madrid. He ended up being paid over $2 million in restitution as the Spanish police rejected the low quality analysis and investigated further. As for DNA, it’s been a double edged sword. While it exonerated dozens of falsely imprisoned convicts from death row, pointing to other culprits, there are also edge cases in which poor quality and partial matches were used to sentence people for crimes they didn’t, or even physically couldn’t, commit. Basically, anything other than heavily scrutinized full matches should be strenuously questioned in courts.

Sadly, the courts don’t seem to care very much, handing out thousands of sentences based on junk science and pop psychology presented by pretend experts who often deploy weasel phrases devoid of meaning while insisting that they’re explaining real science or high quality evidence. In the stands, they’ve argued that knives at 21 feet could be deadlier than guns to justify disproportionate lethal force, that matching a tire mark or shoe print could reliably identify the perpetrator, and that calling 911 and talking too little or too much means the defendants tried to cover up their crime. And the judges overseeing the proceedings seem happy to let them keep doing it.

Even if those convicted are exonerated in the end, there are no consequences for the cops, prosecutors, or judges who put them in jail, or even on death row. They can’t be sued or have some sort of black mark on their records. If anything, they get pensions and promotions. With there being no risk for badgering people into false confessions, or sending innocent people to jail or death row based on bunk, it’s not how you close the case but how many cases you close that counts. So what if the science says what you’re doing is dangerous bullshit? You’re getting criminals off the streets and if this is how you have to keep the public safe, that’s how you do it.

Except the problem is that you’re not keeping the public safe with these techniques. You’re letting actual murderers, thieves, and rapists off the hook. How many innocent people are rotting in jails today? How many criminals roam free because investigators hounded their first suspects into false confessions, pushing them to recount their first hunch by telling them they “know that’s not the truth,” that they “need to tell us what really happened” for hours and hours and hours on end, and when that failed, turned to the forensic version of snake oil, reading tea leaves, and Rorschach tests? Because given what we know today, these numbers are likely in the thousands.

Now, all of this prompts the question of what’s next. If the system is so badly broken, how do we fix it? Luckily for us, there are some rumblings of change as a new PEACE technique for suspect interviews is trying to replace the problematic Reid. Instead of belligerently browbeating people into confessions, PEACE borrows from journalists, instructing investigators to ask a lot of detailed but open-ended questions, look for inconsistencies, and back them up with evidence. It’s not perfect, but at least it’s not a manual for psychological torture. True crime shows and documentaries diving into false confessions and convictions are also helping drive adoption of new methods.

Likewise, scientists have been quite vocal about the prevalence of junk science in far too many criminal courts and are happy to out fake experts whenever possible. There was even a working group to issue detailed guidance on what should count as proper, court-acceptable forensic science, but the Trump administration trashed all its work in its commitment to always make the worst possible choice in any situation. If there was even the slightest bit of time and money for the group to reconvene, they could not only redo their work based on existing notes and archives, but offer even better, newer approaches based on even more cases and data.

But while all of this is nice and needs to be encouraged and done, the question is how to hold the legal system accountable for making these changes instead of reverting to their old ways. The obvious, and politically suicidal, answer is to allow exonerated and wrongfully accused people to sue investigators for badgering them into making false confessions, prosecutors for using junk science to get a convictions, and judges who refused to allow defendants to recant or accepted widely discredited junk science in their courtrooms, as well as the fake experts they allowed to testify. It only seems fair to allow the falsely accused and jailed to seek amends.

Punishments could range from demotions and reductions in pensions, to disbarment, to jail time in the most egregious cases where there’s proof that evidence was being manipulated or outright falsified. You can hear investigators, judges, and prosecutors up at arms at the very suggestion, claiming that now every mistake could cost them their livelihood and every aggrieved suspect could sue the pants off of them. This is a fair criticism, and we could address it in two ways. First, we should limit the ability to sue only to those who were convicted. Secondly, we should point out that those sent to jail for crimes they didn’t commit also lost their livelihoods.

Yes, it’s certainly nice to be able to do your job with impunity, to hold all the cards, to make decisions about life or death, and be able to just shrug and go back to work if a mistake costs someone their life and freedom unnecessarily. But as we’re taught by Lord Acton, power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Allowing anyone absolute power over the guilt or innocence of others by almost completely shielding them from the consequences of their actions can only enable such corruption. And as we learned from Uncle Ben, with great power comes great responsibility. How do you instill responsibility if not by imposing real consequences for inevitable corruption?

Finally, there’s also a step ordinary citizens concerned about all of this can take. They can vote, become eligible for jury duty, and instead of trying to escape it, serve for a trial. Being well informed, they can cast the required skepticism on bullshit forensics when necessary. They can ask to see the suspect interviews played in full and watch for any predatory tactics. They can debunk fake experts and change minds by using what they know to make sure the verdict is, in fact, fair, and accounts for the ways an innocent person could get railroaded. In the vast majority of cases, none of this will be necessary. But in the cases where it matters, it could make a huge difference.

In the end, the prevalence of junk science during investigations and in court all comes down to a profound lack of accountability, checks, balances, and skepticism. Taking on these entrenched systems which are openly hostile to change, transparency, and consequences is overwhelming at best and daunting at worst. You will face attacks in which you’ll be accused of “siding with the criminals” and intimidation tactics. Those who are used to getting their way aren’t going to take kindly to constraints. But what we’re doing now is not working. Unsolved murders are at record high and people lost faith in law enforcement. And if we don’t fix these issues, it will only get worse.