If you missed DIY on "This American Life," you need to listen to it.
It is heartbreaking and joyful and maddening and sad, all at once. And it raises so many questions. Such as: if a 15 year old can be bullied into a lie by a screaming policeman, what kind of stories does torture produce?
And at the end, when the attorney details how the justice system really works, v. how we all think it works because of decades of cop and lawyer shows on TV. Convictions without forensics, without a murder weapon, without even a good story about how it happened. Consider that it took 21 years of dogged effort, and no small amount of luck, to get Colin Warner declared innocent (and the story of how quickly that happened stunned me. I was almost laughing and crying, because I knew what it meant for a judge to call after 4 days, and the prosecuting attorney declines to oppose the motion. How good a case they must have amassed, but how long it took, and how hard it was!) And the last blow: if Colin Warner had lived in Texas, or Louisiana...he'd have been dead long before that motion could have been filed.
And it would have all been over.
It's a powerful reflection on innocence, guilt, and, yes, power.
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