Security guard wrongly jailed for 17 years has rape conviction quashed
Andrew Malkinson, 57, is now a ‘free man’ after spending nearly two decades incarcerated for a crime he did not commit
And time served was double what it would have been if he’d agreed to accept his guilt – to, umm, lie that is.
As Mark Twain so nicely put it, when in doubt tell the truth. But the whole point of the sentencing procedure was to persuade him to lie.
But of course, people can be stubborn and pig-headed. They don’t always react like AI.
Once the guilty verdict is declared, then it is assumed by the justice system and all of TPTB that you did the crime. That is why it is so difficult to get a second look by anyone. It was only by the intervention of a charity and a lot of pro-bono legal work that this was eventually reversed. There are dark murmurings about the culpability of Manchester Police too. For your average innocent-but-convicted person this won’t happen – the power imbalance is immense. The rational response is to do your time, and lie through your teeth about remorse to the parole board ☹️
@Boganboy
I’ve always thought the best way to lie is to tell the truth. But selectively. People will believe what they want to believe. So sometimes one tells the truth in an unconvincing manner. Then they’ll select the explanation best suits their prejudices. The trick is guiding those prejudices to the one you want. Great thing about that is when the truth is revealed it was what you were claiming all along.
Question: When people lie, why do they put in so much detail instead of just the basic lie? It’s how you can tell they’re lying.
I saw a report elsewhere that the Prison Service want him to pay back 17 years bed & board. How true this is I don’t know…
@Dave: yes, it’s true, any compo he gets will have that deducted from it. It’s monstrous.
So, because he’s innocent, he is therefore deemed to have defrauded the Prison Service.
How lovely.
Good job by the charity concerned, though I don’t imagine anything will change at GMP.
@bloke in spain – “When people lie, why do they put in so much detail instead of just the basic lie?”
Because they have to invent a whole story. If you tell the truth, you can leave stuff out and if you’re subsequently asked further questions your memory will allow you to answer consistently. Also, the world is complex, so you probably have to leave out stuff because of the sheer volume of things you could say. However, if you’re lying you need to have come up with a consistent story to avoid being caught out, so you have the whole thing fresh in your mind and it’s risky to omit detail in case you cannot remember everything that you made up. Saying it all helps you remember and there’s a lot less as you had to invent it, so there’s an obvious place to stop when you have said everything you invented.
This also means that if someone is lying to you and comes up with a new fact on later questioning, they probably made it up then rather than in advance, so that fact is more likely to be inconsistent with the rest of their story (or it’s something you’d expect them to have mentioned before).