So what was the precise "offer" ?
Mercury posted this as post 53
From Madeleine,ch 16
The only conclusion I could draw was that we’d been framed, though this seemed completely implausible. Faced with something like this, way beyond the sphere of your experience, it is natural to dismiss it as impossible, but that doesn’t mean it is. When I thought about all that had happened so far, maybe anything was possible. In any event, it seemed we’d underestimated the magnitude of the fight we had on our hands. Even our own lawyer appeared to think, based on what he’d been told, that the police had a good case against us. I could see by this time that Gerry was starting to crack.
Then came the best bit. Carlos announced what the police had proposed. If we, or rather I, admitted that Madeleine had died in an accident in the apartment, and confessed to having hidden and disposed of her body, the sentence I’d receive would be much more lenient: only two years, he said, as opposed to what I’d be looking at if I ended up being charged with homicide.Pardon? I really wasn’t sure if I could possibly have heard him correctly. My incredulity turned to rage. How dare they suggest I lie? How dare they expect me to live with such a charge against my name? And even more importantly, did they really expect me to confess to a crime they had made up, to falsely claim to the whole world that my daughter was dead, when the result would be that the whole world stopped looking for her? This police tactic might have worked successfully in the past but it certainly wasn’t going to work with me. Over my dead body. ‘You need to think about it,’ Carlos insisted. ‘It would only be one of you. Gerry could go back to work.’
I was speechless.
The incentive to accept this ‘offer’ seemed to be that if we didn’t agree to it, the authorities could or would go after us for murder, and if we were found guilty, we might both receive life sentences. Was this what it came down to? Confess to this lesser charge or risk something much worse?
