MythBusters Helped a Wrongly Convicted Man Prove His Innocence

https://innocenceproject.org/discovery-channel-mythbuster-john-galvan-wrongful-conviction-innocence/

by gbourne • 4 years ago

198 176 4 years ago

pstuart2• 4 years ago

Such a great show.

They also censored themselves when they discovered a recipe for an incredibly easy and powerful explosive. I throw that out there as a case of self-regulation in the marketplace of ideas.

Edit: Adam Savage talking about it -- https://nerdist.com/article/mythbusters-destroyed-all-eviden...

Apparently it was not well known, so not an original discovery but still a legitimate use of the word.

My comment was a point about censorship in that it can be the right thing to do. I'm curious AF about what the recipe is but am ok with not knowing and and knowing that effectively no one else does.

dtx1• 4 years ago

meh, they also censored how to make thermite (iron oxide powder and aluminium powder ignited by magnesium) and you can get explosive material easily almost everywhere gunpowder is available. They censored how to make Nitrocellulose as well which requires strong acids that are arguably more dangerous than Nitrocellulose itself. Anyway that recipee is available on wikipedia anyway https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nitrocellulose#Guncotton

vore• 4 years ago

I don't think that's so much self-regulation as it is the producers would probably not let them publicize something like that on TV and avoid some 3-letter agency knocking on their doors.

louwrentius3• 4 years ago

Some people have a basic sense of morality, doing what's right.

mlindner6• 4 years ago

They didn't "discover a recipe". Anyone who was a kid at that time could look up on the internet the recipes for these things, and even pre-internet in things like "The Anarchist Cookbook" and other such literature.

anon_cow11112• 4 years ago

I had to look this up, it seems it was related to the myth of a LOX tanker truck spilling/crashing and turning the road asphalt itself into an explosive. Seems kinda weird to omit this though as it's not really arcane knowledge (Pretty sure "The Martian" had a scene where they blow open an airlock with something similar).

Other mythbusters censors include dropping an entire episode about credit card hacks/fakes because Visa and friends threatened to pull ads from the network, and another episode where they accidentally caused their test mice to cannibalize each other.

mlindner6• 4 years ago

This reminds me of how people get angry at me whenever I poke holes in the science of movies. Movies affect people's ideas of what is possible and what is impossible.

This is why I'm also quite against, in the general case, post-apocalyptic movies that predict a future based on non-science impossible things happening. Many spaceflight movies and TV shows for example show very bad things in the future giving people a false impression that the future will be worse than the past even that goes against direct evidence that throughout human history things have trended better, on average, every single year with a few moments of worsening.

walrus01• 4 years ago

Many spaceflight movies and TV shows for example show very bad things in the future giving people a false impression that the future will be worse than the past

I think The Expanse got it right, in that we're more likely in the near to medium term to get a bunch of oligarch type Jules-Pierre Maos (Hi Bezos!) running things behind the scenes. Not a utopia type technology + spaceflight + social inequity problems solved future.

mlindner6• 4 years ago

The Expanse is one of the TV series that I was thinking of actually when I wrote that comment. It'd be too long to write down here but I feel like while The Expanse got many things right it also portrayed all sorts of fundamental things that were completely off.

For example even in the first season things that are fundamentally off that result in very different futures:

* The idea that we would actively intentionally re-create the situation of MAD in another context. MAD was an accident of historical happenstance and now that we know about it, we wouldn't try to re-create it.

* The idea that a magical new engine would suddenly appear that made many of the things in the tv series possible.

* The idea that Earth will for some reason simultaneously become a massive welfare state, yet still somehow have solar-system spanning power.

* The idea that there would be a complete backtrack in labor rights and labor safety (the ice asteroid mining scene).

Laaas• 4 years ago

There's a 4chan post somewhere with a hypothesis about how people are subconsciously unable to discern between fiction and reality, even though they might be able to consciously, just as you describe.

saalweachter• 4 years ago

Isaac Asimov had an essay about how, in order for fantasy to exist as a genre, you first have to understand that some things aren't real. It's been awhile since I read it, but I believe he does address that many people have a problem with fantasy because they don't really distinguish between talking about something and believing in something. Reading a story about witches becomes believing in witches or trying to be a witch.

Fezzik• 4 years ago

Are people surprised by this? The vast (super?) majority of people on this planet seem to consciously claim to know or believe in supernatural things they cannot possibly know and that there is absolutely no evidence for. People appear to be extraordinarily bad at distinguishing between reality and their hopes and dreams.

taberiand• 4 years ago

How do you reconcile your prediction of a better future with the current scientific projections of the effects that climate change (and a myriad other environmental challenges and resources issues) will have?

Especially given that our current position at the top of the trend of improvement is in enormous part due to fossil fuels - the primary contributor to climate change and our expected future trajectory.

Past performance is not indicative of future results and quite frankly, to me, it all looks downhill from here.

chordalkeyboard• 4 years ago

giving people a false impression that the future will be worse than the past even that goes against direct evidence that throughout human history things have trended better, on average, every single year with a few moments of worsening.

This is called 'Whig history' and in my view it is an incorrect characterization of history that gives people a false impression that things will get better without them having to understand the enabling factors that lead to social improvement, ironically leading to the possibility of a decrease in prosperity and social welfare as people take improvement for granted and fail to bring it about through their actions.

emkoemko• 4 years ago

its art.... leave it alone, these films are not documentaries

dghughes2• 4 years ago

I find explosions are the worst specifically the sound of them. Far away exploding things don't make a sound the instant the explosive explodes there's a delay. What funny is the delay makes it dramatic it's intuitive to humans far away means delay.

stephen_g• 4 years ago

There is also the massive problem of torture and confessions through torture being so commonplace in movies and TV, which makes people more comfortable with it. It also gives people the false idea that it's effective.

In the real world (and the article here is a good example of it), generally most confessions from torture tend to be false because people will make up whatever they think they need to say to make it stop (unless they're trained to resist it, but obviously in that case they'll feed the interrogator false information).

awb• 4 years ago

A couple things misleading about the title.

1) Mythbusters wasn’t aware of this case

2) His confession under duress was the major factor in the release

In 2019, the appellate court granted John post-conviction relief on the grounds of actual innocence — a rarity in Illinois — largely based on the abuse used to coerce a false confession from John.

ergocoder• 4 years ago

The insulin inventor wasn't aware of millions of diabetic people either.

MythBusters's episode was the starting point for him. The title is okay.

boomboomsubban3• 4 years ago

MythBusters's episode was the starting point for him. The title is okay.

He already had an attorney helping appeal his case when he saw the episode. It's making a tiny part of his lengthy story the main theme, but that's not a huge issue.

woojoo666• 4 years ago

What kind of compensation do these people typically get? I can't imagine what compensation would be enough for losing 35 years of your life, especially the years 18-53. There goes almost all dreams of becoming famous, meeting your soulmate, starting a family, etc.

mlindner6• 4 years ago

None by default AFAIK. They can sometimes start a civil lawsuit against the state.

caminante8• 4 years ago

Here's info for wrongful incarceration compensation at the federal and state level [0].

[0] https://www.law.umich.edu/special/exoneration/Documents/Key-...

lucb1e3• 4 years ago

Takeaway from that link: around 50k/year in the USA, more or less depending on the region, and you have to go to another court (or similar) to get it, depending on the region. Additionally, in some regions you might get "tuition assistance", "medical expenses" (national healthcare for the rest of your life I think this might mean?), "job search assistance", and other things that you expect to get in a prosperous country without having to have been wrongfully convicted, and these benefits aren't even universal across the USA after a wrongful conviction. But the 50k×35=1.75 million USD should make for a nice retirement fund regardless of anything else.

hammock• 4 years ago

Many municipalities have an online database of all the wrongful death settlements, etc that they (aka the taxpayer, split with e.g. the police pension fund) have paid or are current paying.

Once out of curiosity I googled the name of the officer who simply “took” my online stolen property report, and found out both they and their partner had multimillion dollar judgments against them

hanniabu• 4 years ago

Deceptive tactics — like offering leniency in exchange for a confession or falsely telling children they can go home if they confess — have been identified as risk factors for false confessions, and young people are especially vulnerable to falsely confessing as a result of these tactics.

The great american justice system

pstuart2• 4 years ago

The American Legal System. Justice is for sale.

louwrentius3• 4 years ago

Maybe this has always been obvious to everybody but the American justice system is not about truth or fairness.

The goal is to convict no matter what. That is how the incentives are lined up.

Case in point: the (famous) Serial podcast started about the (now evidently) wrongful conviction of a teenager. He was recently released after 20+ years because of a note found written by a prosecutor that pointed to other plausible suspects, information never shared with the defence.

You are very unlikely to ever be judged by a jury of your peers. You are much more likely to not 'risk' that and take the plea deal. From the perspective of a European (and we have our issues) it sounds the system is fundamentally rotten.

The mythbuster story only highlight how basic truth finding isn't really an issue.

twblalock• 4 years ago

The goal is to convict no matter what. That is how the incentives are lined up.

No, the goal of the prosecution is to convict no matter what. The goal of the defense is to prevent the prosecution from winning. In order to win, one side must convince a jury. This is an intentionally designed adversarial system.

The European system, where a judge is essentially an inquisitor trying to discover the truth rather than a referee, is not better, it's just different. It is not more immune to abuse or bad results than the Anglo-American system.

louwrentius3• 4 years ago

If that’s what you want to believe I can live with that.

dghughes2• 4 years ago

Curb Your Enthusiasm was filming an episode during a baseball game. A man accused of killing someone walked into frame as part of the crowd and that was proof of his location at the time of the crime.

YouTube video of 60 Minutes Australia: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3V5Cj8d43Yw

JoshGG• 4 years ago

There's a short documentary "Long Shot" about this on Netflix that is pretty good: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_Shot_(2017_film)

mijoharas3• 4 years ago

So, first off, given that they were trying to incarcerate an innocent person in the case I think that the detectives in this case were either incompetent, or immoral.

It did somewhat throw me, in that documentary, to have the policeman that they used to say that be mark fuhrman[0] from the OJ simpson case.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Fuhrman

mijoharas3• 4 years ago

unrelated, the audio in that clip keeps cutting out for me which is very distracting.

addicted2• 4 years ago

given that they were trying to incarcerate an innocent person in the case I think that the detectives in this case were either incompetent, or immoral.

It really doesn’t need to be that exciting. For the most part, it’s much more mundane. A detective comes up with a theory (let’s not forget…American “detectives” are poorly trained in actual detection), and they need to close a case so they are highly primed to prioritize any evidence that supports their theory.

pkrotich• 4 years ago

What scares me about US legal system is; Elected prosectutors are motivated by high conviction rate for obvious reasons (re-election and politics of it all). Add the fact that their line of work requires competitive personalities and you become just but a number, especially if you don't have competent cousel. I'm not saying ALL public defendors are incompetent, but we see to many cases of ineffective representation when the accused cannot afford a high powered attorney.

Yes - you should be scared of ordinary prosectutors in suits doing their "best" job more than a gang member for example! They want are motivated to win at all cost... short of obviously illegal ways.

caminante8• 4 years ago

False positives are rare in the US [0]: estimated at only 1% of incarcerations according to the Innocence Project (mentioned in HN article) and go even lower depending on who does the analysis.

Are you aware of legal systems in other countries with lower false positives?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miscarriage_of_justice#United_...

polygamous_bat• 4 years ago

If every time you enter the legal system and you have a 1% chance of being falsely convicted, that is a broken and dangerous system regardless of how other countries fare at that metric. Especially if you consider that certain underprivileged demographics are already at a higher risk of having more run-ins with the police regardless of their criminal state.

giantg217• 4 years ago

More like 2-10%. And that's only for the incarcerated. There are many more that take deals to avoid prison time and rotting in jail for 2 years just to get a trial, etc.

https://thehighcourt.co/wrongful-convictions-statistics/

Edit: can't find the actual article. Child commenter goes into great detail about this being a rather solid range though.

BlargMcLarg• 4 years ago

The actual source mentions the 1% being 'conservative'. Considering the Duluth model rules in many DV cases and there is an obvious bias towards not admitting false positives, I'd be surprised if that conservative measure was a maximum.

justin66• 4 years ago

A 1% false positive conviction rate is not comforting.

sanp• 4 years ago

This doesn’t show what the false positive number is from African Americans or Latinos.

el_nahual• 4 years ago

That number doesn't seem right to me so I followed the wikipedia citation. It cites "The Innocence Project", which actually says:

the few studies that have been done estimate that between 2.3% and 5% of all prisoners in the U.S. are innocent (for context, if just 1% of all prisoners are innocent, that would mean that more than 20,000 innocent people are in prison).

https://innocenceproject.org/contact/#:~:text=How%20many%20i...).

Retric4• 4 years ago

2% of people on death row get exonerated and that’s an underestimate due to the difficulty in proving innocence. Most crimes don’t see anything close to that level of review before or after conviction with death row reserved for the most clear cut cases.

So, most estimates suggest in the range of 2-10% of convictions are probably wrongful.

tremon2• 4 years ago

Does that 1% include the number of people who accepted a plea deal, or only the number of wrongful convictions after a case has gone to trial?

rfrey2• 4 years ago

Notwithstanding the other replies to your comment estimating as high as 5%, 1% struck me as shockingly high.

sokoloff3• 4 years ago

1% false positive for criminal conviction is horrifically bad and does not meet with the plain English “beyond a reasonable doubt” standard, IMO.

vdqtp3• 4 years ago

Interesting that those are the numbers.

"That it is better 100 guilty Persons should escape than that one innocent Person should suffer, is a Maxim that has been long and generally approved."

Ben Franklin https://www.bartleby.com/73/953.html

lalopalota• 4 years ago

Most public defenders are competent at their job.

Unfortunately, their job is to minimize the court's time spent spent dealing with their clients.

everforward• 4 years ago

Unfortunately, their job is to minimize the court's time spent spent dealing with their clients.

I think this is the unfortunate reality of them being obligated to take cases even if they don't really have enough defenders. This is an interesting read [1].

The TL;DR of that link is in Montana the head of the public defender's office was held in contempt and fined for refusing too many cases because they don't have the staffing. I don't know what the judge wants them to do, other than providing useless, token representation to clear constitutional requirements. I.e. someone technically has representation, even if that representation doesn't have time to actually form a legal case and can only serve as a liaison for whoever makes the plea deals.

1: https://www.aclu.org/news/criminal-law-reform/if-you-care-ab...

nostromo3• 4 years ago

This works both ways. The US is experiencing a crime wave currently and in several major cities, it’s become next to impossible to actually send someone to jail due to political pressures. Most prosecutors are not running as tough on crime, but on equity platforms.

(In Seattle, for example, a candidate for prosecutor, Nicole Thomas-Kennedy, ran on abolishing the police, jails, and vowed not to prosecute most crimes.)

The US used to solve the majority of murder cases, but now it’s solving less than half. That’s 10,000 murderers just walking around free each year.

https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/archive/2022/07/poli...

lupire2• 4 years ago

The US used to solve the majority of murder cases, but now it’s solving less than half

Closs the cases, not solve. It's good that police can't convict innocent people as easily anymore.

googlryas• 4 years ago

Prosecutors are also motivated to not have an expose written on how they sent numerous innocent people to jail. It's not just about conviction rate.

ezoe• 4 years ago

What really bother me is that the police sting operation is legal in US. It's fundamentally wrong. They are creating the crime by criminal police activities, from my point of view and it's legally true in my country's law system.

gnicholas2• 4 years ago

So if it’s impossible to light a pool of gasoline with a match, what is being used in movies when this appears to happen?

MichaelDickens• 4 years ago

I would think any fire on film is either CG or, if real, is lit by a hidden fuse being controlled by a pyrotechnician. It would probably be too dangerous to have an actor directly light a fire using a match.

suzzer99• 4 years ago

I've lit a pool of gasoline with a match before. Screwing around in junior high melting our plastic toys in the driveway - not something we should have been doing.

giantg217• 4 years ago

A lot of times it looks like they're burning alcohol to me.

It's even more funny when they show them lighting jet fuel with a match or lighter.

anon_cow11112• 4 years ago

Cigarette, not a match, which is an important detail. Gasoline absolutely will ignite if you drop a burning match on it (assuming the match doesn't go out as it's falling).

If a movie shows a close-up slow motion shot of a match hitting the ground+igniting gasoline, it's probably "real", but the larger shot of the building or whatever going up is filmed separately. They usually use propane/natural gas for large fires because it can be piped in and turned on/off easily.

gnicholas2• 4 years ago

Ah yes, good point. So what is it different about a match and a cigarette? Is the latter always successful?

giantg217• 4 years ago

So why is deception wrong in an interrogation? I can see some of the other tactics as problematic, but not that directly.

lupire2• 4 years ago

Why is deception right? Even the 10 commandments oppose it.

Deception leads to false convictions.

giantg217• 4 years ago

"Deception leads to false convictions."

How?

Per_Bothner• 4 years ago

Deception can lead to false confessions (people's memories are very malleable) or plea bargains (accept 2 years vs risking 15 years).

giantg217• 4 years ago

Aren't those false confessions usually the result of the other tactics (long interrogations, intimidation, etc)? I'm wondering if there's some data on deception without these other factors. Even plea bargains aren't a bad thing except if they're abused.

motoxpro4• 4 years ago

Huh? I've never been so saddened by a comment actually.

"We have a video of you at the scene of the crime with indisputable evidence. It doesn't matter what you say, there are 10 policemen waiting to testify against you. It's your word against theirs. If you don't take this deal you will go away for life."

You don't have money for a lawyer and you have no idea if there are actually 10 policemen waiting to testify against you. Do you take the chance? How is that not problematic?

giantg217• 4 years ago

"How is that not problematic?"

Because that's an unrealistic scenario (based on my other points). You have access to a lawyer even if you don't have money. The confession can (and should) be verified. There are ways to do this with safeguards.

"Huh? I've never been so saddened by a comment actually."

It sounds like you already have your mind made up. Otherwise I strongly suggest looking into proper interrogation techniques (which avoid abuse but can leverage deception, and uses techniques to verify the confession is true/real).

pas2• 4 years ago

the problem with false conviction is that both an innocent gets punished and the guilty goes unpunished.

worst of both worlds.

giantg217• 4 years ago

It seems you're skipping the actual question. We know that false convictions are wrong. What I'm asking is why deception during questioning would lead to that (absent the other abuses and with confession verification).

lucb1e3• 4 years ago

Even if the cigarette gasoline thing were possible, just, how the heck does this situation even happen? Doesn't this belong as an example in a war movie about nazi germany or north korea?

When Mr. Galvan asserted his innocence, Detective Switski beat him, Mr. Galvan said. Through the walls, his older brother Isaac listened helplessly to the detective’s yelling and John’s cries. [...] Detective Switski also threatened John, telling him he would face the death penalty and end up “laying next to” his late father. [...] [The defendants] — 18, 20, and 22, respectively at the time — were all convicted and sentenced to life in prison without parole [for setting one building on fire which lead to the death of two persons].

A lifetime in prison, for an 18-year-old, for setting one house on fire? Even with the intent to kill, that seems very excessive. I'd be curious how murder through arson in the USA and other countries turned out if anyone happens to know of any.

A quick check on the Dutch wikipedia for Moord reveals that the maximum sentence for murder is thirty years. Belgium and Germany have life sentences, but then the Netherlands is the only EU country where a life sentence is actually the rest of your life (from https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levenslange_gevangenisstraf). Depending on whether the person was already 18 at the time the arson was committed, in Germany the highest amount of prison you can get as a minor is 10 years. All not mild at all, and if the motive and method are all firmly established then indeed it shouldn't be, but quite a difference from "you will stay incarcerated and then you die".

The court concluded that without John’s false confession, which he did not give voluntarily, “the State’s case was nonexistent.”

I listen to a podcast sometimes called Napleiten, which is quite interesting. It's not super legally technical, but it sounded like, in the Netherlands, it's effectively impossible to convict someone solely based on a confession. There has to be other (even if only circumstantial) evidence supporting the claim. (Edit: this is correct, already since 1926 it seems, according to https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valse_bekentenis and https://wetten.overheid.nl/BWBR0001903/2022-10-01/0/BoekTwee...). Even without torture, false confessions are a thing, which I thought was well known.

And then to top it all off, the thing described in the confession isn't even physically possible. But fair enough, that's not something one would necessarily think to question (in the lawyer's words: "I feel like all of us have seen [this in] movies [...] and I really had never given much thought to whether or not that might be real").

Edit: as an interesting aside, I found while reading up on false confessions that, in Sweden, 130 people confessed to the same murder. The prime minister was shot in 1986, leading to the longest running murder investigation in the country. 788 firearms were tested but not one could be conclusively linked to the bullets found. 10k people were interrogated, some more than once. 130 confessions were obtained. The person who they now assume did it (but has since died) was not among the confessions. Source is unfortunately in Dutch https://nos.nl/artikel/2336792-zweedse-om-moordzaak-premier-...

Archelaos• 4 years ago

In 2021, Illinois and Oregon became the first states to ban the use of deception during interrogations of minors ...

Is there any other modern democracy that allows deception as a method of interrogation to the same extent as the US?

In my country, Germany, deception during interrogations is forbitten even for adults. There exist only some minor exceptions, for example, that prior wrong ideas of the suspects may be exploited.

The central paragraph of the law is as follows:

(1) The accused's freedom to decide and exercise his or her will may not be impaired by ill-treatment, by fatigue, by physical intervention, by the administration of drugs, by torment [Quälerei], by deception [Täuschung] or by hypnosis. Coercion may only be used to the extent permitted by the law of criminal procedure. The threat of a measure inadmissible under its provisions and the promise of an advantage not provided for by law shall be prohibited.

(2) Measures that impair the accused's capacity to remember or to reason shall not be permitted.

(3) The prohibition in sections 1 and 2 shall apply without regard to the consent of the accused. Statements made in violation of this prohibition may not be used even if the accused consents to their use.

§ 136a StPO -- German text at https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/stpo/__136a.html

aikinai• 4 years ago

Not that it makes it okay, but Japan also extensively uses deception in interrogations. Japan and America seem to be similar as highly-advanced, rule-of-law democracies with abhorrent criminal justice culture.

david38• 4 years ago

If you anything about Japan you wouldn’t say this. Japan’s criminal justice system is so bad as to rival Central America, not the US.

Stevvo2• 4 years ago

In the UK it's commonplace because it's a very effective tactic on victims and first time offenders.

Anyone who has been arrested before learns to answer either "no" or "no comment" to all questions, so deception doesn't come into play anymore.

nickkell• 4 years ago

I'm not sure that's correct. As far as I'm aware they can't claim to have evidence implicating the suspect if they don't really have it.

kbelder• 4 years ago

... may not be impaired by ill-treatment, by fatigue, by physical intervention, by the administration of drugs, by torment [Quälerei], by deception [Täuschung] or by hypnosis.

Has there ever been a documented case of a suspect hypnotised by law enforcement to (rightly or wrongly) confess? That would be an interesting story.

hedora• 4 years ago

So, what happened to the police officers that tortured multiple suspects across multiple cases?

saithier• 4 years ago

Full pension, and a gold watch I'm sure. What else?

twawaaay3• 4 years ago

Except, a lit cigarette can ignite a pool of gasoline. All those videos with stupid people holding cigarettes and igniting vapours at the gas station are proof that gasoline can be ignited with a cigarette.

What you need is for the cigarette to have enough time in contact with right concentration of vapours (2% to 8% by volume). Too little but also too much and you will not get it ignited.

Here is a handy table listing necessary concentrations: https://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/explosive-concentration-l...

Now, if you just drop the cigarette into a bucket of gasoline it will not ignite. This is because on a typical small pool/bucket of gasoline the layer with the right concentration of vapours is very thin and the cigarette does not fly long enough through it to ignite it before it reaches the surface and gets completely doused.

There is couple of ways this can be prevented, the easiest is if you let the cigarette lay close to the pool of gasoline but not exactly within it. Drop it on the part of ground that only has very little gasoline on it so that the cigarette will not immediately get doused with it and can lay there waiting for the right concentration of vapours to happen. Bonus points if part of the cigarette get damp with gasoline.

Another way is if the ground is hot and there is a lot of vapours. Or if there is very little wind. Or if the pool is somehow enclosed so that a fairly thick layer of vapour can form before it gets blown.

lamontcg• 4 years ago

All those videos with stupid people holding cigarettes and igniting vapours at the gas station are proof that gasoline can be ignited with a cigarette.

The ones I've seen are all consistent with static electricity sparks being the source of ignition, or else someone is screwing around with a cigarette lighter.

mytwocentsworth• 4 years ago

Here is a handy table listing necessary concentrations

The table lists concentrations but not ignition temperature. And temperature is a key factor mentioned in the article: "Based on the ignition temperature of gasoline and the temperature range of a lit cigarette [...] the team determined it was highly unlikely that dropping a cigarette into gasoline could cause a fire."

twawaaay3• 4 years ago

https://hypertextbook.com/facts/2003/ShaniChristopher.shtml

Spontaneous ignition temperature for gasoline vapour listed as 280C, well below "red hot".

aaron695• 4 years ago

All those videos with stupid people holding cigarettes and igniting vapours

But you couldn't even link one? Very HN of you.

Lots of videos showing how it doesn't work.

https://vt.tiktok.com/ZSRq6aBjw/

twawaaay3• 4 years ago

You can't prove something is impossible by showing a bunch of people try it and fail. That's faulty logic.

boomboomsubban3• 4 years ago

I could see some TV producer reading this title and pitching a Mythbusters like show where they try to recreate crimes to show if the official version is plausible.

I bet it would be a huge hit, add an extra often graphic layer to the hugely popular true crime with the added bonus of potentially creating another Serial like situation where your fan base are positive of someone's innocence.

ummonk2• 4 years ago

So it took 10 years after they found the evidence to even have an evidentiary hearing and another 5 to get them out? This is enraging.

mijoharas3• 4 years ago

But soon after, a judge later decided that they would only receive a suppression hearing — which would allow them to motion to suppress their false confessions — instead of granting them a new trial. At that hearing, their motions were denied.

One thing I'd like to know is what exactly happened here. Obviously there were multiple miscarriages of justice, but this seems like a pertinent one.

EDIT: (obviously not _the most_ pertinent one, but still one I'd like details/reasoning on. Why would the judge do that, once they had the evidence in front of them).

pas2• 4 years ago

judges in many places are elected, but even if not, they still simply reflect the biases of the electorate. and of course this leads to an ugly feedback loop.

TedDoesntTalk• 4 years ago

I wanted to donate to his GoFundMe, but the link says the campaign has been taken down??

https://www.gofundme.com/f/us2zh-free-after-35-years-in-pris...

(Click “donate now” button to see what I mean)

franga2000• 4 years ago

This is even more fucked up than the title suggests. It's not that a Mythbusters episode helped a man prove his innocence, it helped him overthrow a false confession he gave under coercion!

TL;DR: 18 year old was forced by a detective with threats and violence to sign a false confession and despite that detective having been accused of multiple cases of forced and falsified confessions, the way he finally got out after 20 years of a life sentence later was by finding a scientific impossibility in the fabricated and coerced confession.

Like yeah, "yay science!" and it's a great thing he finally got out, but how is the real story here not that once you sign a confession, you're basically fucked no matter what the circumstances of the confession were?!? I guess this might not be a surprise to people in or more familiar with the US, but holy shit it's scary to me as an outsider from a (yes, I'll say it) actually developed county!

silexia2• 4 years ago

I see lots of these "wrongful conviction" articles that are not very convincing. Claiming that we somehow know better decades later with less than 1% of the evidence still available that the original judge and jury had seems egotistical and foolish.

JoeAltmaier2• 4 years ago

Yet this case had zero evidence other than a coerced confession. There was 100% (of zero) evidence available. The original judge and jury had nothing to go on but the confession.

silexia2• 4 years ago

Are you sure? You sat there in that courtroom decades ago and heard all the testimony and viewed all the evidence? Or are you going off of a blog post written decades later?

MythBusters Helped a Wrongly Convicted Man Prove His Innocence

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