TalkLeft: Courts Should Allow Expert Testimony on False Confessions brings up a story of a ridiculous false confession I've been following for a couple of years.
It's about Deputy Sheriff Paul Ingram of Washington State. The following is an except of his story.
In 1988 his two daughters accused him and a number of prominent men in the community of satanic ritual abuse and sexual abuse. There were months of whispered rumors, extensive questioning, and finally, arrest, incarceration, interrogation, and even an exorcism to "cast out" the evil that Paul's pastor was convinced caused Paul to perform such insidious acts. After all this Paul confessed, pled guilty without a trial, and served a lengthy sentence in a state prison. What is especially startling about Paul's case, however, is that neither he nor many people with the most knowledge of the case believe he is guilty. Instead, he has become a victim of the child abuse/satanic ritual abuse hysteria of the late 1980's.
The moronic Sheriff, Gary Edwards, and the extremely stupid District Attorney began to believe the most irrational delusions possible and eventually convinced Paul Ingram to plead guilty to crimes that are impossible to commit. Some of the investigators even said that the reason there was no evidence of the crimes was because Satan erased the evidence, so you know the investigators didn't have a firm grasp on reality. Every single one of the so-called "investigators" involved in this farce should have been fired and never allowed to get a job in law enforcement for the rest of their lives.
It seems everybody involved acted stupidly, cowardly, dishonestly, incompetently and just plain foolishly.
Even the Governor of Washington state, Gary Locke, acted cowardly when confronted with the opinions of many experts on false confessions and delusional and supernatural crimes. Now, you might think that Governor Gary Locke wouldn't be convinced of something that is impossible, violates physical laws, is supernatural, and just plain silly, right? You would be wrong. When confronted with evidence that the crimes Paul Ingram confessed to could never have happened, didn't happen, and experts proved the crimes never happened, Gary Locke retreated into his cowardly spider-hole and pretended everything was hunky-dory.
In my opinion, that decision of his not to right an obvious wrong proves that he should never have been elected in the first place. Anybody delusional enough to believe in supernatural crimes is too delusional to make a very good governor.
NOTE: I've got better things to do than erase the childish, immature, psychotic, obscene comments from looney Roger Weidner and his gang of illiterate morons, so just put your opinions at the Johnhays.net Forum.