POST: "There is no justice: What cops and courts get wrong about the human brain," by Laura Miller, published by Salon on June 6, 2015. (Laura Miller is a senior writer for Salon. She is the author of "The Magician's Book: A Skeptic's Adventures in Narnia" and has a Web site magiciansbook.com).
SUB-HEADING: "Neuroscience explains why our justice system keeps sending innocent people to prison — and letting guilty ones go."
GIST: "There seems to be no end to the biases that can land an innocent person in jail or debt. Our understanding of the neuroscience of cognition — how much of our behavior has unconscious origins for which we later make up rational excuses, how powerfully we are affected by extraneous stimuli, how we act preferentially while convinced that we’re being scrupulously fair — has grown exponentially over the past 25 years. However, we still operate a criminal justice system that treats everything we do as the end result of reasoned, self-aware thought. To convince us of how misguided that is, a law professor, Adam Benforado, has written “Unfair: The New Science of Criminal Injustice.” By the time you get to the end of it you might be inclined to throw in the towel and advocate a return to the ancient Viking custom of weregild. Benforado, who teaches a course in law and the mind sciences at Drexel University, would not want that. But his recommendations for how to fix the myriad baked-in discriminations in our legal system are so radical that he does need an entire book full of shocking examples to build up to them. Fortunately for him, America’s criminal-justice history has plenty on offer.........False confessions and bogus eyewitness IDs are just the two most glaring causes of such miscarriages of justice. Benforado lines them up: police bias, prosecutorial misconduct, unscrupulous trial consultants, purchasable expert witnesses, easily manipulated juries, a public with far too much confidence in its own snap judgements, prisons that take minor offenders and transform them into monsters. He sees all of these plagues as rooted in profound misunderstandings of human behavior and the mind. And he’s right, at least when it comes to our refusal to acknowledge how easily any of us can be influenced by others. False confessions, produced by a police questioning protocol knowing as the Reid Technique of Interviewing and Interrogation, result when vulnerable suspects (the young, the elderly and the mentally disabled) are subjected to unbearable pressure from investigators. The investigators typically have become wedded to one narrative about a crime and routinely ignore contrary evidence. Eyewitnesses can be manipulated in much the same way, picking up on subtle and/or unconscious cues from detectives and delivering what they sense is expected of them. This shaping of the evidence doesn’t have to be intentional on the detectives’ part, either; most often, it’s not.
Human beings are exquisitely suggestible, but we don’t want to admit it. We don’t want to face the fact that our memories aren’t reliable and can be fantastically reshaped by outside forces. (In one study, for example, over half the respondents, after being shown doctored photographs, reported memories of a nonexistent hot air balloon trip taken during their childhoods.) We want to believe that we know better than to judge others by the color of their skin or the prettiness of their faces. We may even have examined our souls on these issues and vowed to do better. But that’s easier said than done. We aren’t even aware of most of the biases that shape our understanding of the world. We also like to think that our response to crime is dispassionate and objective, but scratch the surface and you’ll find a lot of vindictiveness.........False confessions and bogus eyewitness IDs are just the two most glaring causes of such miscarriages of justice. Benforado lines them up: police bias, prosecutorial misconduct, unscrupulous trial consultants, purchasable expert witnesses, easily manipulated juries, a public with far too much confidence in its own snap judgements, prisons that take minor offenders and transform them into monsters. He sees all of these plagues as rooted in profound misunderstandings of human behavior and the mind. And he’s right, at least when it comes to our refusal to acknowledge how easily any of us can be influenced by others. False confessions, produced by a police questioning protocol knowing as the Reid Technique of Interviewing and Interrogation, result when vulnerable suspects (the young, the elderly and the mentally disabled) are subjected to unbearable pressure from investigators. The investigators typically have become wedded to one narrative about a crime and routinely ignore contrary evidence. Eyewitnesses can be manipulated in much the same way, picking up on subtle and/or unconscious cues from detectives and delivering what they sense is expected of them. This shaping of the evidence doesn’t have to be intentional on the detectives’ part, either; most often, it’s not. Human beings are exquisitely suggestible, but we don’t want to admit it. We don’t want to face the fact that our memories aren’t reliable and can be fantastically reshaped by outside forces. (In one study, for example, over half the respondents, after being shown doctored photographs, reported memories of a nonexistent hot air balloon trip taken during their childhoods.) We want to believe that we know better than to judge others by the color of their skin or the prettiness of their faces. We may even have examined our souls on these issues and vowed to do better. But that’s easier said than done. We aren’t even aware of most of the biases that shape our understanding of the world. We also like to think that our response to crime is dispassionate and objective, but scratch the surface and you’ll find a lot of vindictiveness.........“The main enemy of justice,” Benforado writes, “does not lie in the corrupt dispositions of a few bigoted cops, stupid jurors or egotistical judges. It is found within the mind of each of us.” He takes seriously, however, our claims that we want a criminal justice system that is as fair as possible and a penal system that improves our society instead of just warehousing huge swathes of the population we deem to be inherently dangerous. And if we do mean what we say, then Benforado has some recommendations."
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