LastWeekTonight
1 HN recommender · recommended in 4 months, 2022–2023
24:43 · 7.1M views · Apr 18, 2022
John Oliver's Last Week Tonight segment on police interrogation tactics and how they can lead innocent people to give false confessions.
Cited in threads on coerced confessions and plea bargains, and praised for well-researched coverage.
4 comments from Hacker News
His show does proper research and points to numerous actual cases of harm before making a claim. Detaining suspects for long periods of time and forcing confessions is a topic that comes up repeatedly, each time with different examples. I don't know how anyone can say with a straight face that this isn't anything of substance. this video
Forced confessions are unfortunately not unique to Japan [1]. Police will behave like that when you reward them based on the number of convictions and don't hold them accountable for screwing over innocent people. Still sucks, though. [1]: this video
Is this news at this point? Last year there was a whole episode of Last Week Tonight with main subject "Police interrogations and false confession" [1] documenting exactly how innocent people are coerced into guilty pleas. [1] this video
Or you know, it being the standard work process for police these days apparently, so they can pat themselves on the back and go home early: this video