> He was consistent and clear when he talked about his identity in California courtrooms as he tried to fight the charges on the grounds that he really was the man whose name he was accused of stealing. But Mr. Woods made other remarks that seemed to amplify the doubts. In court appearances, transcripts show, he would sometimes interrupt the judge, talk about historical figures or assert that he had tried to warn the F.B.I. in advance of the Sept. 11 attacks.
I wonder how many people are telling the truth about something, and aren't taken seriously because they're problematic about something else.
I was once dragged to a hospital by police because they were looking for a drug smuggler that was not me. They told hospital staff I was a druggie criminal with drugs up my ass, as I sat there in cuffs.
It is incredibly hard to overcome such accusation by someone in authority. Nurses cursed me, touched me without consent, and several doctors examined me. They ultimately found nothing, and noted no intoxication, but noted in my medical record that they think i am a smuggler anyway, with no explanation as to why.
I am now in medical debt for a non-existent 'overdose' bill that notes no intoxication...
I imagine as soon as some official person insists the identity isn't yours, just as multiple doctors wouldn't believe despite all evidence to contrary, they won't believe you.
Something similar happened to one of our sons. Unfortunately he has a history of drug use that landed him in legal trouble. The local police recognize him. He had a minor fender bender. The police tested him for alcohol there, clean. But then given history they detained him and took him to the nearest ER for a battery of drug tests -- for which the hospital billed our son, and for which our son is on the hook. It's bonkers.
For people from most places outside the US, I bet such stories from US's medical system sound totally crazy. It is crazy for a medical system to function like this charging somebody for being involuntarily treated, and even more for no medical cause.
What would have happened, to the hospital's part, if they had declared that you were not intoxicated and you should not have been brought to the hospital, and sent you on your way? Would the police have had to justify dragging you to the hospital, and pay for your examination? I suspect that going along with the police may have been the decision with the simplest and most profitable outcome for everybody (apart from you) and that the hospital side was incetivised to go along with police's story rather than against, but I am not sure how things there typically work in such cases.
Being skeptical about authority figures is always a good thing, it always surprise me to see populations so deferent to them like americans are to law enforcement.
Authority bias is very real, very problematic, and very well documented. As a consequence, those in authority must always be held to a high standard. Always doubt an assertion by authority unless accompanied with sufficient evidence.
I have a cousin who is paranoid schizophrenic. He makes all kinds of wild claims about all sorts of things: family abuse, screwed over by employers/landlords, beaten up by the police for no reason, the people living in the crawl space are poisoning him, etc, etc... Many of them are provably false e.g. those family members didn't live there at the time of the allegation, the body cam clearly shows him charging the police and then trying to grab their guns while they try to wrestle him into handcuffs, nobody in the crawl space, etc. The problem is that it'd take a full time detective to track down all his various claims. It's very sad that as a vulnerable person he probably is sometimes taken advantage of by people, but at the same time he's never been compliant with medicine and therapy for more than a couple months at a time, despite extensive support. It's kind of a no win situation.
It is a weird twist on the fairy tale. What if you had a medical condition that compelled you to cry “Wolf” all the time? Obviously the townsfolk can’t spend all their time responding to false wolf sightings, but there is no lessoned to be learned when The Boy actually believes he sees a wolf every day.
I have been close to multiple people who made similar paranoid allegations while psychotic. It is sometimes hard for people to understand the allegations are false or part of an illness. This can include judges and mental health professionals.
Someone I know who has a psychotic illness was telling people “my dad is having an affair”. And people didn’t believe her because they just assumed it was another one of her delusions
Then guess what we find out a few months later? Yep, her father really is having an affair, and her mother has just discovered it and is now filing for divorce over it
>I wonder how many people are telling the truth about something, and aren't taken seriously because they're problematic about something else.
(Un)fortunately, there is a quite famous experiment
>The Rosenhan experiment or Thud experiment was an experiment regarding the validity of psychiatric diagnosis. For the experiment, participants submitted themselves for evaluation at various psychiatric institutions and feigned hallucinations in order to be accepted, but acted normally from then onward. Each was diagnosed with a psychiatric disorder and given antipsychotic medication.
> For the experiment, participants submitted themselves for evaluation at various psychiatric institutions
How did anyone volunteer for this? Isn't there a risk of actually getting stuck at the asylum, or failing to clarify it was an experiment to have it removed from your records?
This is how divorce goes now based on my experience. The legal system is not setup to handle these sorts of problems well and leaves the innocent to deal with the fall out of bad actors and lawyers who empower them.
This won’t be corrected until there are penalties for political, legal, and administrative professionals who don’t do their due diligence.
Yes! This is divorce in America right now, if one party is willing to make up a series of lies, no matter how unbelievable the court will just default to the one making the accusations because its too much work to even try to sort out truth from lie, thats why the lawyers call it, "Liars Court" because the biggest liar wins.
This is in most small civil law areas and even summary criminal cases. They simply aren't important enough for the people in power to do their due diligence or give a shit. Nobody can force them to do their jobs either.
Imagine if some member of the bin Laden family was high on something and had rumors of their cousin's shenanigans and were spilling them out on some IRC channel or BBS or whatever, and that guy happened upon them and tried to alert the police, only to be dismissed as a lunatic and end up in prison for unrelated reasons while the disaster happened. That would be a true Kafkian nightmare.
No, i don't think so. I have an older friend that is persuaded to have seen something most people don't believe in back in the 90s. He just won't claim it publicly, and don't talk about it all the time, it's not a core part of his personality. Even if some people make fun of him for it (i don't think it happen nowadays, but it might), they can, and probably will believe him on other subjects (he is a very precise and knowledgeable in electronics, and have really interesting philosophical point of views).
This is just the system getting rid of (in their eyes) an undesirable. The truth doesn't really matter in these cases unless you have tens of thousands of dollars to hire a lawyer to plead your case.
Having grown up in the Deep South, I feel like every single person in the justice system from police to judge make decisions about you based on how you look and subconsciously decide to not believe facts or allow weak facts to have more weight. Nothing about this question seems outrageous to me whatsoever. And I think that’s the shocking part here.
> I wonder how many people are telling the truth about something, and aren't taken seriously because they're problematic about something else.
Likely a metric fuck ton. The perceived quality of one's character plays an outsized role in getting people to believe you. Serial killers figured that out a long time ago.
I wonder the same but I also firmly believe it's a useless and unproductive thing to worry about.
I mean, I wonder how many gold coins are laying in the forest? Surely there are many, and you can find ample news stories of people locating them out there, but I can confidently tell you that if you assembled a team an combed the forest for a year, maybe you would find one object worthy of a news story. And definitely you would wasted thousands of man hours that could have produced far far far more than what the object is worth.
I'm not sure that being "problematic" was the issue here; it sounds more like they might have thought he wasn't fully sane. I could imagine thinking that someone fully believed what they said about their identity in the same way they believed that they could have stopped 9/11 if people had listened to them beforehand. The issue isn't thinking they have bad takes or unsavory opinions, but that they have trouble distinguishing reality from delusions.
This is how these institutions work. If someone behaves erratically, holds unconventional beliefs or just doesn't present themselves in the "right" way, they can be dismissed entirely
> But unlike the other investigators, Detective Mallory arranged for DNA tests of Mr. Woods’s father in Kentucky — whose identity was certain — and of Mr. Woods, who was then spending time at a shelter in Santa Monica, Calif. A comparison of the results showed that the California man was telling the truth.
It's really absurd they didn't do something like this in the first place. I'm presuming there was no living family that could tell them which man is which.
Even more scary: without any living relatives, there would be no way to identify himself with that degree of accuracy. Sure, you can disinter a corpse, but that's bureaucratically way more difficult than performing a DNA test on a live human, and assumes you know where your relatives are buried to begin with.
I wonder if that is at all possible. Could there be someone alive today who has no blood kin ( father, mother, siblings, uncles, aunts, cousins 1st, 2nd, etc )?
Probably. That assumes that the father was still alive and of sound mind. Also assumes that the father had much contact with the son.
If they have become strangers to each other a long time ago he might not even be able to tell who is his real son, but his DNA still can provide evidence.
Well, Woods discovered the issue when he was age ~50, homeless, and 2000+ miles away in another state, so it's plausible to think there was some breakdown in relationships.
I wish the times would just call this "identity fraud" instead of "theft". That mindset of "theft" creates a reverse-onus, while "identity fraud" makes it clear who should bear the risk.
The responsible party, in the case of the Federal government failing to provide a national ID, is the contingent American citizens who are rabidly against the idea of national ID.
We have these little things called elections for doing that. Parts of the government would love to have this perfect registry and things like RealID are attempts at that but there's a lot of push back and reasons not to have some mythical impervious citizen tracking system too.
The US government isn't responsible for that failing. The people of the US generally do not want a national ID, and elect their representatives accordingly.
He was homeless and likely lost his ID and the papers needed get a new one. Then the identity thief obtained an ID and birth certificate.
Unless you are suggesting that the government take biometrics. Except that wouldn't have helped in this case, cause the identity thief would have shown up with ID and gotten scanned.
You know, there's a good chance that if so many important institutions didn't insist on having your life history, the guy that stole his identity wouldn't have stolen it. Even if he takes the name, two people can have the same name. It depends on where his motive was in the scale from fresh start to deranged and malicious. And no, I'm not excusing his later actions.
It looks like, from the article, his motive was "to escape responsibility from crimes he was accused of when he was young." It's utterly bonkers that running afoul of the law as a child can and still does affect people's lives decades later. The Criminal Justice System needs a graceful way to leave the past in the past and let minor crimes done long in someone's past age out of relevance.
When he first started using someone else's identity, the crimes might not have been "long in the past" yet, but once you start doing something like that and have established a life under the assumed identity, it's not easy to go back.
The real problem here is the attempt to maintain permanent one-to-one mappings between ID numbers and humans. The legitimate purpose of a government ID is so you can e.g. go to the bank, open an account and then later establish to the bank that you're the same person who opened the account. If you want to get a new ID number and start over, you shouldn't have to steal someone else's in order to do that, you should just be able to go to the DMV or the social security administration and get a new ID under a new name that isn't already somebody else's.
The hypothesis that this would help criminals is pretty thin. They're already going to use an assumed name, which is why law enforcement uses photos/fingerprints/DNA to identify suspects rather than a government ID that people aren't actually required to carry regardless.
Readit News
I wonder how many people are telling the truth about something, and aren't taken seriously because they're problematic about something else.
It is incredibly hard to overcome such accusation by someone in authority. Nurses cursed me, touched me without consent, and several doctors examined me. They ultimately found nothing, and noted no intoxication, but noted in my medical record that they think i am a smuggler anyway, with no explanation as to why.
I am now in medical debt for a non-existent 'overdose' bill that notes no intoxication...
I imagine as soon as some official person insists the identity isn't yours, just as multiple doctors wouldn't believe despite all evidence to contrary, they won't believe you.
What would have happened, to the hospital's part, if they had declared that you were not intoxicated and you should not have been brought to the hospital, and sent you on your way? Would the police have had to justify dragging you to the hospital, and pay for your examination? I suspect that going along with the police may have been the decision with the simplest and most profitable outcome for everybody (apart from you) and that the hospital side was incetivised to go along with police's story rather than against, but I am not sure how things there typically work in such cases.
Deleted Comment
Then guess what we find out a few months later? Yep, her father really is having an affair, and her mother has just discovered it and is now filing for divorce over it
Dead Comment
(Un)fortunately, there is a quite famous experiment
>The Rosenhan experiment or Thud experiment was an experiment regarding the validity of psychiatric diagnosis. For the experiment, participants submitted themselves for evaluation at various psychiatric institutions and feigned hallucinations in order to be accepted, but acted normally from then onward. Each was diagnosed with a psychiatric disorder and given antipsychotic medication.
How did anyone volunteer for this? Isn't there a risk of actually getting stuck at the asylum, or failing to clarify it was an experiment to have it removed from your records?
This won’t be corrected until there are penalties for political, legal, and administrative professionals who don’t do their due diligence.
That’s a very long shot but I now want someone to verify this claim too, in case he was also telling the truth.
Isn't that everybody now? Credibility is a strange thing in the age of social media.
Likely a metric fuck ton. The perceived quality of one's character plays an outsized role in getting people to believe you. Serial killers figured that out a long time ago.
I mean, I wonder how many gold coins are laying in the forest? Surely there are many, and you can find ample news stories of people locating them out there, but I can confidently tell you that if you assembled a team an combed the forest for a year, maybe you would find one object worthy of a news story. And definitely you would wasted thousands of man hours that could have produced far far far more than what the object is worth.
Deleted Comment
... probably all of them.
Dead Comment
It's really absurd they didn't do something like this in the first place. I'm presuming there was no living family that could tell them which man is which.
I wonder if that is at all possible. Could there be someone alive today who has no blood kin ( father, mother, siblings, uncles, aunts, cousins 1st, 2nd, etc )?
Probably. That assumes that the father was still alive and of sound mind. Also assumes that the father had much contact with the son.
If they have become strangers to each other a long time ago he might not even be able to tell who is his real son, but his DNA still can provide evidence.
Well, Woods discovered the issue when he was age ~50, homeless, and 2000+ miles away in another state, so it's plausible to think there was some breakdown in relationships.
Deleted Comment
Unless you are suggesting that the government take biometrics. Except that wouldn't have helped in this case, cause the identity thief would have shown up with ID and gotten scanned.
The real problem here is the attempt to maintain permanent one-to-one mappings between ID numbers and humans. The legitimate purpose of a government ID is so you can e.g. go to the bank, open an account and then later establish to the bank that you're the same person who opened the account. If you want to get a new ID number and start over, you shouldn't have to steal someone else's in order to do that, you should just be able to go to the DMV or the social security administration and get a new ID under a new name that isn't already somebody else's.
The hypothesis that this would help criminals is pretty thin. They're already going to use an assumed name, which is why law enforcement uses photos/fingerprints/DNA to identify suspects rather than a government ID that people aren't actually required to carry regardless.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39938005
Former University of Iowa hospital employee used fake identity for 35 years - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39938005 - April 2024 (377 comments)