And even when they were, they were likely able to lie because it was "to carry out the lord's will"

Unfortunately, most people, especially people who are poor, can't just call their lawyer. And getting a public defender assigned while being interrogated pre-charge is likely something that the police will delay until they want to release you anyway.

I agree that police should be allowed to lie about certain things. But I feel like its abused when dealing with cases that are more than likely not going to get solved (petty theft or muggings) to close the case and boost numbers, justice and truth be damned.

I just can't imagine being dumb enough to do this. Firstly, you KNOW you plagiarized extensively, then you fake a GROUND BREAKING paper, and expect for people NOT to find out? I mean, I have some reservations about the validity and ultimate reproducibility of most academic science, but at least the frauds seem to produce papers about sexual habits of Argentinian tree frogs (really riveting stuff). Did this person really expect not to get caught when writing about the holy grail of stem cell research? Or perhaps the author thought that our current peer review system for science is really THAT broken?