Damage

I love police shows. There's no reason to deny it, so I won't. I find the law interesting, and law enforcement even more so. Perhaps it's my mild fear of authority that spurs most of my interest, or perhaps it is something completely different. Either way, it's something I want to do--something I want to follow: psychology can lead to some interesting places.

I've been noticing more and more that Americans, or at least Hollywood, seem to have a very incorrect view of the criminal justice system. If any of you watch police shows, you'll notice that a lot of the confessions they get wouldn't be worth a dime in real court due to how they were obtained. My favorite new example of this arose in a new show: Detroit 1-8-7.

Detroit 1-8-7, I feel, has a lot of potential (unless they destroy it in the next few episodes, which I'm afraid seems somewhat likely at this point).

TANGENT! There are lines for every show and every character on every show. The writers of these stories don't seem to realize this. Every show wants their bad-boy character, and they take all sorts of strange routes to get one. Sometimes they succeed, other times... well, they try really hard. Detroit 1-8-7 was failing on the bad-boy front, and they over-compensated.
Back to the original point.

The episode story pertained to a crime regarding a vetran whose son had been murdered and his murder was attempted... I think that made sense. Suffering from severe amnesia due to a blow in the head, the soldier would not have been able to identify the two men who the police were sure were at fault for the crime. So what did the police do? Well, they told the two men that they could either plead guilty or they could go in for a line-up (obviously without informing them of the amnesia). If they chose the line-up, the prosecution would go for the death penalty. WAIT! They were threatening the suspect to get a confession!? And Michigan doesn't even have the death penalty!

Now there are plenty of reasonable explainations as to why this would not result in a false confession, but there is no way to explain that there was no option besides threating the suspects. Threatening to get a confession is one of those things that can get a case overthrown.

Perhaps there's a reason a lot of police show story-lines end before they reach the courtroom.