Recently, a man named Thomas Perez Jr reported his father missing. For some unknown reason the cops just decided that a) the father had been murdered (even though they had literally zero evidence), and that b) Thomas Perez Jr himself was the killer.
So they proceeded to interrogate him for a whopping 17 hours straight, and apply more and more psychological pressure and manipulation as the hours passed by. They lied through their teeth again and again, over and over, that they had absolute proof that he had killed his father. They even called a friend of his and convinced him to tell Thomas to confess.
After 17 hours of non-stop interrogation, with extreme psychological pressure and manipulation, Mr Perez suffered from what most people suffer in such a situation, ie. confusion caused by mental and physical exhaustion, and he got completely gaslighted and started doubting his own memory. This is a very well known psychological phenomenon, and it worked like a marvel here. When you are mentally and physically completely exhausted, under tremendous pressure and stress, and authorities are constantly gaslighting you about something you did, it requires an extraordinarily strong-willed person to not start doubting. Most people are not capable of doing that, and they just break. They start doubting their own memories, they start forming false fuzzy memories, tiredness and exhaustion causes the rational part of the mind to be overwhelmed by the mental pictures that you are being constantly bombarded with.
Another aspect of this kind of mental exhaustion is a different form of not-thinking-straight, when your rational mind and rational thinking has been overwhelmed by sheer exhaustion: You start having silly thoughts like "I can't take this anymore, this has to stop, I have to make it stop, I'll just say whatever they want me to say, and then fix it later." Of course one should never do that, but you aren't thinking rationally in this kind of situation. In a completely tired confused state such thinking starts sounding reasonable, because the actual rational part of the mind can't intervene and "object".
After the 17 hours of this psychological torture he ended up confessing.
Turned out, the entire thing was just a completely trivial case of miscommunication: His father had departed to go fly to another part of the country to visit a family member, there was absolutely nothing unusual going on, and he was alive and well at the airport waiting for his flight. Somehow this fact hadn't reached his son, who thought he had gone missing.
Why the cops decided that the father had been murdered, with literally zero evidence, and thus proceeded to force a confession from the son, is absolutely incomprehensible. They just decided it, and did that. Because they are tyrants, I suppose.
Mr Perez filed a federal lawsuit against the police precinct, and it was settled for almost 900 thousand dollars.
It could have ended much, much worse. If the father had actually been killed by someone and that had been the reason for him going "missing", his son would have been falsely convicted of it.
But this is precisely the reason why all lawyers very strongly advice people to always, always, always demand a lawyer if interrogated for a crime, even if you are completely innocent. Demanding a lawyer immediately stops the interrogation (cops have to stop it by law) until the lawyer arrives, and even a free lawyer provided by the state would have put an immediate stop to such an inhumane interrogation, and would have absolutely and categorically not allowed it to go to the false confession.
Most people don't know their rights. Even the free lawyers provided by the state do. Such lawyers are also excellent chaperones that will be watching over such clients and stop them from being psychologically manipulated, exhausted and gaslighted into false confessions. And they would absolutely not allow such interrogations to go on for 17 hours straight.
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