#574 Musings Beyond the Bunker (Friday February 3)
Good morning,
There are those events in our childhood that resonate for our lifetimes, some great and some trivial. And some come from the most prosaic events—many of those in school.
Among the great lessons I learned were those from a single event in a single class. I never told the teacher of the profound impact of this event. The event supports the propositions that eye-witness testimony is imprecise and undependable, and that times have changed a lot.
In ninth grade, I was on the school newspaper. One of the requirements to be on the paper was to take a class in journalism. The class was taught by an energetic, passionate, knowledgeable teacher, Mr. Thimgan. His class had the air of a newsroom and he was the grizzled editor at the city desk. While I was the beneficiary of great English teachers who taught me how to write, it was in this class that I first grasped how to construct a paragraph, tell a story, and get to the point quickly (though I may not be doing so right now!).
EYEWITNESS TESTIMONY
One day we were sitting in class when a gentleman burst into the room holding what appeared to be a gun. He demanded that Mr. Thimgan open his filing cabinet and hand over an envelope full of money. He then ran off.
Of course, the gentleman sporting the revolver was not a thief, nor was he actually holding a gun. The purpose of this exercise was to demonstrate our ability, in real time, to recall the details of the episode. Needless to say, this demonstration could never have taken place these days. One can hardly imagine that any instructor would even make a joke of the fact that a person on campus was carrying a weapon. Yet, in the 1970s it was unimaginable that someone would come onto a high school campus wielding a gun. Today that scenario, sadly, is all too common. Things have changed quite a bit.
The lesson we were to learn was about the veracity of eyewitness testimony. After the “incident,” our teacher asked us to take out a pencil and answer a series of questions, in order to determine the accuracy of our recollection of a “crime” committed right before us. He posed a number of questions to determine the accuracy of our recollection, including (a) what door did the thief walk in, (b) what color hair was his hair, (c) which hand did he hold the gun in, (d) what were his precise words, (e) what was the style and color of his shirt, and (f) what did he actually take. After we wrote our answers, we got the answers. Not one of us got all the answers correct. In fact, few of us recalled very many of these details at all—and those who were most confident were the poorest performers.
It was in that moment I realized two things. The first is the power of words and how they can shape history, perception and reality. The second is how so much of our criminal justice system is based upon the word of eyewitnesses, who are treated as if they are all-knowing, with great powers of perception and recollection. That the word of someone who sees something “in the heat of the moment” often is dispositive of the facts that send a person to prison—when we know empirically how inaccurate recalling details can be—is, in itself, criminal. Witnesses that may appear confident to the point of certainty often are just stabbing in the dark. Human recollection is shaped not only in what happened, but our biases, our assumptions, our emotions, and our expectations.
A SINGLE WITNESS IS HARDLY DISPOSITIVE
With respect to journalistic accuracy, it is rare for a trained journalist to rely upon the word of a single interviewee, requiring multiple sources and corroboration. One would hope that, when a person’s liberty is at risk, we should require the same level of diligence and confirmation. But our justice system, it is not nearly as fair. A study of 65 wrongful convictions of innocent people concluded that fully 45% were the result of erroneous convictions. The following article, which has a subsection entitled “the brain is not a VCR,” from the Constitutional Rights Foundation, points out the great injustice associated with reliance on eyewitness testimony: https://www.crf-usa.org/bill-of-rights-in-action/bria-13-3-c-how-reliable-are-eyewitnesses#:~:text=Studies%20have%20shown%20that%20mistaken,errors%20resulted%20from%20eyewitness%20mistakes.
The Society for Psychological Science comes to similar conclusions: https://www.psychologicalscience.org/uncategorized/myth-eyewitness-testimony-is-the-best-kind-of-evidence.html
And if you want to take a short quiz on recall (memories without external cues) versus recognition (where a list or visual cues are provided to help), this is a four minute exercise on YouTube:
What we think we see isn’t always what we actually saw. A bit of humility about what we think we see, what we believe, and what we believe is true is something we all should consider.
Have a great day,
Glenn
From the archives: