I'm glad things ended well for you, but please realize that you were freed thanks to luck and not because you were actually innocent.
Don't ever talk to police. DON'T EVER TALK TO POLICE.
Call a lawyer and allow him to explain the mistake. There's just as much chance that the police could have used your explanation against you if they thought you were lying and you would be in jail right now, wrongfully convicted because you misremembered a small detail in your story.
DON'T EVER TALK TO POLICE, ESPECIALLY IF YOU HAVE BEEN EXPLICITLY CHARGED WITH A CRIME.
Commenting with emphasis in all caps is the textual equivalent of grabbing someone by the collar and screaming in their face.
Everyone who does so feels it's justified, but the effect is always obnoxious and it never conveys more information or meaning, only an insistence that the commenter is especially important and needs to be paid attention to.
Very common way people try and "win" on the Internet is by arguing a point not made by the parent. It wasn't all in upper case; your comment is invalid.
Comments by new accounts are autokilled if they trip certain filters that we have in place because of past abuse by spammers and trolls. I've unkilled your comment and marked your account legit so it won't happen again.
Soon, everyone will be able to contribute to unkilling good comments, so fixing these will no longer block on moderator attention. In the future, though, everyone: please send issues like this to hn@ycombinator.com. It's too random whether we'll see it on HN itself! Not to mention off topic.
Honest question: is everyone supposed to have a lawyer on standby? Who exactly am I supposed to call if I need one in this kind of emergency situation? Do I just look in a phone book for "lawyers"?
That, or calling your local bar association's referral line. Some cities and courts have low cost legal assistance either through government agencies or via nonprofits.
Better yet, spend 30 minutes on that exercise now, rather than when you're stuck in the situation for real.
I think you may be thinking of the US? In the UK it's pretty rare to prosecute the innocent. If anything things are a bit lenient with a quite a few criminals getting off free.
I don't think human nature changes drastically between politically defined boundaries. Besides, a simple google search shows roughly the same proportion of innocents convicted per trial.
Bear in mind that those statistics are enormously skewed by plea bargaining, for both good and bad reasons. Good plea bargaining is where the evidence is extremely strong and the defendant has little criminal history, so admitting guilt and serving a minimal sentence is in everyone's interest. The bad kind is where prosecutors have a weak case but bring so many charges that defendant is facing a horrendously long time in prison, and pleads guilty to a crime that wasn't committed rather than take the risk of extended incarceration.
Don't ever talk to police. DON'T EVER TALK TO POLICE.
Call a lawyer and allow him to explain the mistake. There's just as much chance that the police could have used your explanation against you if they thought you were lying and you would be in jail right now, wrongfully convicted because you misremembered a small detail in your story.
DON'T EVER TALK TO POLICE, ESPECIALLY IF YOU HAVE BEEN EXPLICITLY CHARGED WITH A CRIME.