Unfair (52 page)

She was determined to help:
Thompson, “I Was Certain, but I Was Wrong.”

Thompson was “completely confident”:
Thompson, “I Was Certain, but I Was Wrong.”

But then another man:
Thompson, “I Was Certain, but I Was Wrong.”

At Cotton's retrial, Poole was brought:
Thompson, “I Was Certain, but I Was Wrong.”

Without hesitation she responded:
Thompson, “I Was Certain, but I Was Wrong.”

Cotton was sentenced again:
Thompson, “I Was Certain, but I Was Wrong.”

But, just like White:
Thompson, “I Was Certain, but I Was Wrong.”

As Thompson wrote later:
Thompson, “I Was Certain, but I Was Wrong.”

While there are other ways:
Dan Simon,
In Doubt: The Psychology of the Criminal Justice System
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), 50.

Some witness memories, like the face:
Simon,
In Doubt
, 51.

Others are important for determining:
Simon,
In Doubt
, 90.

To cite just one statistic:
Gary L. Wells and Elizabeth A. Olson, “Eyewitness Identification: Information Gain from Incriminating and Exonerating Behaviors,”
Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied
8 (2002): 155, doi: 10.1037//1076-898X.8.3.155.

Our dependence on witness memory:
Simon,
In Doubt
, 53.

There is, for instance, compelling evidence:
Richard A. Wise, Clifford S. Fishman, and Martin A. Safer, “How to Analyze the Accuracy of Eyewitness Testimony in a Criminal Case,”
Connecticut Law Review
42 (2009): 440–41 n. 12.

When the actual perpetrator:
Steven E. Clark, Ryan T. Howell, and Sherrie L. Davey, “Regularities in Eyewitness Identification,”
Law and Human Behavior
32 (2008): 198–218.

And of those witnesses who do:
Simon,
In Doubt
, 53; Clark, “Regularities in Eyewitness Identification,” 198–218.

This is great news if:
Simon,
In Doubt
, 54.

But even more disturbing:
Simon,
In Doubt
, 54; Clark, “Regularities in Eyewitness Identification,” 198–218.

Moreover, people who successfully pick:
Simon,
In Doubt
, 54.

It is no surprise, then:
Garrett, “Introduction,” 676; Roy S. Malpass, Colin G. Tredoux, and Dawn McQuiston-Surrett, “Lineup Construction and Lineup Fairness,” in
Handbook of Eyewitness Psychology (Vol. 2): Memory for People
, eds. R. C. L. Lindsay et al. (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum & Associates, 2007), 1.

As we've seen before, one of the reasons that erroneous witness identifications or testimony can be so damaging is that they influence other evidence. Simon,
In Doubt
, 55. When the police get a positive identification of someone like White, they are likely to then work harder to find corroborating evidence to confirm his guilt and interpret such evidence in a biased way. That may mean placing more weight on the testimony of a jailhouse informant, who would otherwise be viewed skeptically, or interpreting genuinely ambiguous forensic evidence (like the hair sample found in the victim's apartment) in a manner that confirms guilt.

Of the first 250 DNA exonerations:
Adam Liptik, “34 Years Later, Supreme Court Will Revisit Witness IDs,”
New York Times
, August 22, 2011,
http://www.nytimes.com/​2011/08/23/​us/23bar.html?_r=1&src=rech
.

Victims tend to be strongly motivated:
Victims may, however, be fearful of helping the police or reluctant to confront the perpetrator at trial, despite wanting the offender to be caught and punished.

The vast majority of other witnesses:
Of course, certain witnesses may be reluctant to cooperate with the police particularly in neighborhoods with a strong “no-snitch” code. Mark Konkol, “Chicago Police Solve More Murders With New Strategy, Witness Cooperation,”
DNAinfo Chicago
, July 24, 2013,
http://www.dnainfo.com/​chicago/​20130724/loop/chicago​-police-solve-more-murders-with-new-strategy-witness-cooperation
.

There is nothing in:
Garrett, “Introduction,” 673.

It wasn't a story of some evil:
Errin Haines, Georgia Innocence Project, “Man Cleared by DNA Eager for Christmas in Freedom,” December 20, 2007,
http://www.ga-innocenceproject.org/​Articles/Article_94.htm
.

One of the most widely shared:
Daniel J. Simons and Christopher F. Chabris, “What People Believe About How Memory Works: A Representative Survey of the U.S. Population,”
PLoS ONE
, 6, no.8 (2011), doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0022757,
http://www.plosone.org/​article/info:​doi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0022757
. A number of studies suggest that high percentages of people, including police officers, find the video camera metaphor to be accurate. Simon,
In Doubt
, 95; Richard S. Schmechel et al., “Beyond the Ken? Testing Jurors' Understanding of Eyewitness Reliability Evidence,”
Jurimetrics
46 (2006): 177–214; Richard A. Wise, Martin A. Safer, and Christina M. Maro, “What U.S. Law Enforcement Officers Know and Believe About Eyewitness Interviews and Identification Procedures,”
Applied Cognitive Psychology
25 (2011): 488–500; John C. Yullie, “Research and Teaching with Police: A Canadian Example,”
International Review of Applied Psychology
33 (1984): 5–23.

Sure, sometimes we forget:
Simons, “What People Believe.”

Not only do a large majority:
Schmechel, “Beyond the Kin”; Wise, Safer, and Maro, “What U.S. Law Enforcement Officers Know”; Yullie, “Research and Teaching with Police”; Simon,
In Doubt
, 95, 150–51; John C. Brigham and Robert K. Bothwell, “The Ability of Prospective Jurors to Estimate the Accuracy of Eyewitness Identifications,”
Law and Human Behavior
7 (1983): 19–30; Erin M. Harley, Keri A. Carlsen, and Geoffrey R. Loftus, “The ‘Saw-It-All-Along' Effect: Demonstrations of Visual Hindsight Bias,”
Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition
30 (2004), 960–68.

As a result, we have great faith:
Simon,
In Doubt
, 150–57.

We have an uncanny ability:
That said, although we can be adept at spotting the faces of those whom we previously had reason to focus on, we do not generally excel at encoding the images of
strangers
. Simon,
In Doubt
, 55–56; Ahmed M. Megreya and A. Mike Burton, “Matching Faces to Photographs: Poor Performance in Eyewitness Memory (Without the Memory),”
Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied
14 (2008): 364–72. And human memories are not all the same: some people are much, much better than others at certain memory tasks. Roni Caryn Rabin, “A Memory for Faces, Extreme Version,”
New York Times
, May 25, 2009,
http://www.nytimes.com/​2009/05/26​/health/26face.html
. So, when it comes to faces, there are both “super-recognizers” and those with “face blindness” (a condition called prosopagnosia), who sometimes cannot even recognize their immediate family members. Rabin, “A Memory for Faces”; Rick Nauert, “Ability to Recognize Faces is Hardwired,”
PsychCentral
, accessed December 5, 2011,
http://psychcentral.com/​news/2011/12​/05/ability-to-​recognize-faces-is-hardwired/32196.html
.

How is it possible that:
Charles Darwin,
On the Origin of Species
(London: John Murray, 1859).

The answer is that our memories:
Overall, there is a large gap between widely held beliefs about memory and the scientific consensus. Simons and Chabris, “What People Believe.” Indeed, in a recent study, only 1.5 percent of participants demonstrated an accurate understanding of memory across the six basic questions that were asked. Simons and Chabris, “What People Believe.”

To begin with, our real memories:
Simons and Chabris, “What People Believe.”

Just seeing or hearing or smelling:
University of California, Los Angeles, “Did You See That? How Could You Miss It?”
ScienceDaily
, November 26, 2012,
http://www.sciencedaily.com/​releases/2012/11/​121126151058.​htm?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign​=Feed%3A+sciencedaily​%2Fmind_brain%2Fpsychology+%28ScienceDaily​%3A+Mind+​%26+Brain+News+–+Psychology%29
.

We don't generally take notice:
University of California, Los Angeles, “Did you See That?”

In one study, researchers found that:
Alan Castel et al., “Fire Drill: Inattentional Blindness and Amnesia for the Location of Fire Extinguishers,”
Attention, Perception, and Psychophysics
74 (2012): 1391–92; University of California, Los Angeles, “Did you See That?”

The fire extinguishers were not germane:
Castel, “Fire Drill,” 1391, 1395. This is the potent influence of inattentional blindness and amnesia—our failure to attend to elements in a scene when our focus is directed elsewhere, with a corresponding inability to recall those elements later despite having seen them. Castel, “Fire Drill,” 1391. Perhaps the most famous demonstration of inattentional blindness comes in the so-called “invisible gorilla” experiments,
in which people shown a video of two teams of basketball players and asked to count the number of passes made by one team fail to notice a man in a gorilla suit walking into the picture. Castel, “Fire Drill,” 1391; Daniel J. Simons and Christopher F. Chabris, “Gorillas in our Midst: Sustained Inattentional Blindness for Dynamic Events,”
Perception
, 28 (1999): 1059–1074.

On the bright side:
Castel, “Fire Drill,” 1394–95.

When the experimenters returned:
Castel, “Fire Drill,” 1394–95; University of California, Los Angeles, “Did you See That?”

Ten Dollar Bill image:
“File: US10dollarbill-Series 2004A.jpg,”
Wikimedia Commons
, last accessed May 15, 2014,
http://en.wikipedia.org/​wiki/File:US10dollarbill​-Series_2004A.jpg
.

They lack the permanence:
Simon,
In Doubt
, 98.

We tend to be best at remembering:
Dan Simon, “The Limited Diagnosticity of Criminal Trials,”
Vanderbilt Law Review
, 64 (2011): 161; Simon,
In Doubt
, 97.

The specifics are also the fastest:
Simon,
In Doubt
, 97, 109.

Events that elicit strong emotion:
Simon,
In Doubt
, 107; John C. Yuille et al., “Eyewitness Memory of Police Trainees for Realistic Role Plays,”
Journal of Applied Psychology
79 (1994): 931–36; Lynn M. Hulse and Amina Memon, “Fatal Impact? The Effects of Emotional and Weapon Presence on Police Officers' Memories for a Simulated Crime,”
Legal and Criminological Psychology
11 (2006): 313–25.

The trouble with relying on:
Simons, “What People Believe.”

As a result, two people will not:
Simons, “What People Believe.”

And once formed:
Simons, “What People Believe.”

Memory is a constructive process:
Simon,
In Doubt
, 96.

When we go to retrieve a memory:
Simons, “What People Believe.”

The malleability of our memories:
Dario Sacchi, Franca Agnoli, and Elizabeth Loftus, “Changing History: Doctored Photographs Affect Memory for Past Public Events,”
Applied Cognitive Psychology
21 (2007): 1005, doi: 10.1002/acp.1394,
https://webfiles.​uci.edu/eloftus​/Sacchi_Agnoli_Loftus_ACP07.pdf
.

The alteration of the photograph:
Sacchi, Agnoli, and Loftus, “Changing History,” 1008–09.

We can even remember things:
Simon,
In Doubt
, 99.

One study found that:
Steven Frenda, Rebecca Nichols, and Elizabeth Loftus, “Current Issues and Advances in Misinformation Research,”
Current Directions in Psychological Science
20 (2011): 22.

Tiananmen Square photographs:
The original photo used in the experiment is by Stuart Franklin, “The Tank Man” (Magnum Photos, 1989).

Contrary to what we'd expect:
Simon,
In Doubt
, 104–105; Margery A. Eldridge, Philip J. Barnard, and Debra A. Bekerian, “Autobiographical Memory and Daily Schemas at Work,”
Memory
2 (1994): 51–74.

In most cases, our false memories:
Simon,
In Doubt
, 100–105.

Put differently, roughly every:
Simon,
In Doubt
, 93.

But the problem is not just that:
Jennifer L. Tomes and Albert N. Katz, “Confidence-Accuracy Relations for Real and Suggested Events,”
Memory
8 (2000): 279.