Lately I have been listening to a bunch of true crime podcasts. One of the things that I have realized while listening to them is just how hard it is to prove you are innocent. Unless you have a solid alibi then it is not hard to imagine being arrested for some of these crimes. Think about it for a second. How much of your day can you really account for? When the cops come to talk to you about a crime, they are going to want specific times. Where were you between 1:15 and 1:27. Can you definitely say what you were doing at that exact time on a certain date?
When I listen to these shows, I think about how bad of a person I would be in those situations. For example, pretend something happened to my wife (yes, I am morbid, forgive me). I come home from walking Samson and she is on the floor and there is blood. What would be my first reaction? Well for one, I would probably rush over to her and see if she is okay. I bet there would be blood on me, I am sure I would mess up the crime scene. When the cops come to investigate, I am going to be the prime suspect. And I would probably do something weird, like try to wash the blood from my hands or keep Samson out of the blood. Something that people would say made me look guilty.
Then it comes time for an interrogation. I would be terrible in that situation. When authority figures push me, I start to get annoyed and when I am annoyed, I give snarky answers. Especially if I am stressed out. I bet that would look pretty bad. If the cops didn’t charge me, then I would have the difficulty of having a funeral and all of that stuff. I deal with things differently (hey, there is no right way to deal with grief) and I can almost bet people would think it was weird that I was not crying constantly. What if I cracked a joke? Yikes, people would be calling for the electric chair. And sadly, that is how I am. I make jokes about painful things, it helps me cope and process. Does it make other people uncomfortable? Probably, but oh well.
If you listen to enough of these shows, you start to realize that our justice system is a bit messed up, but I cannot imagine a better way to do it. It would be great if we could just read a person’s memories and say “nope, he did not kill his wife.” Unfortunately, the technology does not exist yet. So we have to settle for the things we do have and those methods have improved, but they are still not perfect.
I think back to the movie Gone Girl and how when I saw it, I felt really bad for Ben Affleck’s character. I mean, yeah he was a dickbag, but when they were searching for his wife, I could see how a person might behave like him and how everyone could misconstrue it. The perfect example is during the search and he is thanking people for coming to help and his in-laws are upset that he is shaking hands and smiling. Or when the cop asks if he knows his wife’s blood type and when he says he does not, she makes it sound strange (and then the other cop says he does not know his wife’s blood type either).
Scary stuff to think about.
I’m going to call the cops and tell them you have a blog post up with a headline picture of a chalk outline, with Lindsey tagged on the post.
Guilty.
It sure seems like this post is your 1st step in creating reasonable doubt. We see you, Josh. We see you.
In those cases, the defense would just claim that someone hacked the computer and wrote the post to make me look guilty.