Mistakes Were Made by Caroll Tavris

Author:Caroll Tavris
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Published: 2008-05-05T05:00:00+00:00

Jumping to Convictions

If the system can't function fairly, if the system can't correct its own mistakes and admit that it makes mistakes and give people an opportunity to [correct] them, then the system is broken.

—appellate lawyer Michael Charlton, who represented Roy Criner

All citizens have a right to expect that our criminal-justice system will have procedures in place not only to convict the guilty, but also to protect the innocent, and when mistakes are made, to remedy them with alacrity. Legal scholars and social scientists have suggested various constitutional remedies and important piecemeal improvements to reduce the risk of false confessions, unreliable eyewitness testimony, police "testilying," and so forth.41 But from our vantage point, the greatest impediment to admitting and correcting mistakes in the criminal-justice system is that most of its members reduce dissonance by denying that there is a problem. "Our system has to create this aura of close to perfection, of certainty that we don't convict innocent people," says former prosecutor Bennett Gershman.42 The benefit of this certainty to police officers, detectives, and prosecutors is that they do not have sleepless nights, worrying that they might have put an innocent person in prison. But a few sleepless nights are called for. Doubt is not the enemy of justice; overconfidence is.

Currently, the professional training of most police officers, detectives, judges, and attorneys includes almost no information about their own cognitive biases; how to correct for them, as much as possible; and how to manage the dissonance they will feel when their beliefs meet disconfirming evidence. On the contrary, much of what they learn about psychology comes from self-proclaimed experts with no training in psychological science and who, as we saw, do not teach them to be more accurate in their judgments, merely more confident that they are accurate: "An innocent person would never confess." "I saw it with my own eyes; therefore I'm right." "I can tell when someone is lying; I've been doing this for years." Yet that kind of certainty is the hallmark of pseudoscience. True scientists speak in the careful language of probability—"Innocent people most certainly can be induced to confess, under particular conditions; let me explain why I think this individual's confession is likely to have been coerced"—which is why scientists' testimony is often exasperating. Many judges, jurors, and police officers prefer certainties to science. Law professor D. Michael Risinger and attorney Jeffrey L. Loop have lamented "the general failure of the law to reflect virtually any of the insights of modern research on the characteristics of human perception, cognition, memory, inference or decision under uncertainty, either in the structure of the rules of evidence themselves, or the ways in which judges are trained or instructed to administer them." 43

Yet training that promotes the certainties of pseudoscience, rather than a humbling appreciation of our cognitive biases and blind spots, increases the chances of wrongful convictions in two ways. First, it encourages law-enforcement officials to jump to conclusions too quickly. A police officer decides that a suspect is the guilty party, and then closes the door to other possibilities.

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