I May Have Listened to My Last Wrongful Conviction Podcast
I May Have Listened to My Last Wrongful Conviction Podcast
As you might have surmised, I listen to a lot of podcasts. I used to do a podcast recommendation on every episode of my own podcast. While True Crime isn’t my top genre, sometimes it can satisfy the itch for an involving, multi-layered mystery. There’s not always a solution or resolution (which I do not find satisfying) but the journey there is usually very compelling. There are a lot of great shows beyond Serial — which may have kicked off the popularity of this genre. I’ve gotten into stories about corruption ( Dead End, Trump Inc), drugs ( The 13thStep, Document), theft ( Last Seen, Believe in Magic), and, of course, murder ( Bone Valley, In the Dark, Suspect). I believe there’s a sub-genre in the murder True Crime scene — Wrongful Conviction.
And while I’m not sure I’m ready to swear off True Crime podcasts or even murder themed True Crime podcasts, I do think I’m done with the Wrongful Conviction podcasts. They just make me so angry! They are infuriatingly full of cops railroading young people into confessions or hiding evidence or obscuring facts. It is enraging. And now I can’t listen to one without shouting, “Don’t talk to the police!” — at the show. As if I could prevent the inevitable injustice that’s coming by persuading the person not to talk to the police. It’s so bad I feel like the whole genre should be called, “Don’t talk to the police.” Now, until my friend showed me this video I did not know how important it was to NOT talk to the police. I sort of thought, “Well, should I ever be in a position where the police want to talk to me, I should do my best to be helpful, to tell them what they need to know!” Nope. That is the wrong idea. Very little good can come from talking to the police. The police will tell you, if they’re trying to keep you out of trouble, not to talk to the police.
The thing of it is, in so many of these cases where they have the wrong guy, the guy went in to talk to the police because he thought he could be helpful, he wanted to help solve the crime — and then the next thing he knows he’s being arrested for that crime, or confessing to the crime — just because he came in to help the cops out. All of this would have been avoided, and maybe the real killers would have been caught, if they hadn’t talked to the police.
I just finished listening to Murder in Apartment 12, hosted by Keith Morrison who is a rightful king of this genre. His prose can get a little purple sometimes but he does not hesitate to ask people pointed questions that he must know will upset them. Murder in Apartment 12 might not technically be a Wrongful Conviction podcast because the wrongfully accused is not, in fact, convicted — but the tropes are all the same. Police make a snap decision and go after an innocent guy who does everything they ask because he wants to know who killed his girlfriend. He imagines the cops are working toward justice, until, or perhaps even during, their six hour interrogation of him, he takes a polygraph (junk science but still used for some reason) and they tell him he failed it, even though he didn’t. All the while he is imagining he can somehow convince them of his truth. He can’t. They’ve decided he’s the one, so he’s going down, regardless of the facts.
It is so hard to listen to someone becoming the victim of an injustice. This case happened almost twenty years ago and it made me mad all these years later. Someone stop this kid talking to the police!
A podcast that is sort of in this genre that I’m NOT sorry I listened to, if only because it inspired me to write a screenplay, is Believe Her, which is not so much a wrongful conviction podcast, because she DID kill her boyfriend — but it’s more of an overzealous conviction — as she did it in self defense. While it might not qualify as a Wrongful Conviction podcast — it definitely fits in to the Don’t Talk to the Police genre.
The fact is, a lot of True Crime is the story of mis-steps made by police. I can only think of one in which the police are eerily capable. ( Deep Cover ‘s most recent season, where the personable cop is in dogged pursuit of an identity thief. And maybe we wish he’d let her get away with it.) If TV is full of copaganda (and it is) True Crime podcasts are full of cops making mistakes and mis-steps — and worse, actively taking steps to ruin innocent people’s lives. In these stories, the only good cops are the ones who go in after the messes have already been made, to try and clean them up.
I think those Wrongful Conviction podcasts are probably very important in helping to adjust the way we see the whole justice system — but I have listened to my fill of them. I have heard all of the evidence I need to know that I should not talk to the police and that may be enough.
No! Don’t talk to the police! Even the nice ones.
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Originally published at http://artiststruggle.wordpress.com on November 25, 2023.
