I know it was him

Long ago, I read some advice from the author and politician James Michener.  He wrote Tales of the South Pacific, on which the musical "South Pacific" was based.  He wrote many other best-sellers.  In a short article in the Reader's Digest, he gave some of his rules for living.  Among them:

• Fool around until you are 40.  Before then, you are too young to know what you are doing.  I think that is good advice and I often repeated it to anxious college seniors worried about the first decade after college.
• Stay out of jail and out of mental institutions.  I think that is good advice but it can be more difficult than it sounds.  You may have heard of the USSR's use of mental institutions for political purposes or read "The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest" or seen the movie.  That is another story of justice failing and failing badly. 
  

Today's list of blogs being followed on Fear, Fun and Filoz includes a post on Mind Hacks called "How to Jail the Innocent."  As cleverly depicted in the movie "My Cousin Vinny," if you resemble the bad guy, you may be in trouble before you know it.  Law professor Brandon L. Garrett did a study of several hundred cases of DNA exonerating some who were convicted of crimes.  The two most likely reasons for the original convictions were false eyewitnesses (often more than one person) and false confessions.  Garrett's article in Slate explains what he knows about both causes.