Dear psion10,
This is not a sensible proposition.
It is not easy at all to build a case against an innocent person.
It requires lies lies and more lies. Please think about this and return with evidence that it is easy.
Examples of errors and biases in criminal justice process
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This is not a sensible proposition.
It is not easy at all to build a case against an innocent person.
It requires lies lies and more lies. Please think about this and return with evidence that it is easy.
Looking into those closely connected to the victim or the crime scene is reasonable. What makes it a problem is investigator tunnel vision. A possible suspect becomes the only suspect and confirmation bias drives the investigation.
The Peggy Hettrick murder caseWP is another interesting example. Investigators focused on a teenager who lived close to where her body was found. They tried to browbeat him into a confession and eventually got a conviction based on proximity and the testimony of a psychiatrist about his knife collection and drawings.
In An Unbelievable Story of Rape , investigators decided they didn’t believe the victim’s story based on her troubled history. They pressured her into saying that she had made up the story and later prosecuted and convicted her for false reporting.
What happened to this victim is horrifying. The way the case was eventually solved is a lesson in how an investigation should be done.
The Netflix miniseries Unbelievable is based on this case.
What happened to this victim is horrifying. The way the case was eventually solved is a lesson in how an investigation should be done.
The Netflix miniseries Unbelievable is based on this case.
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Chris_Halkides
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As easy as ABC
Good to see you again. When I first heard about that case, I was very surprised. However upon further thought I realized that
a) police sometimes get witnesses to change their statement
b) police sometimes get a suspect to wrongly confess
therefore, I should not have been terribly surprised to learn that
c) police sometimes get a victim to wrongly withdraw an accusation.
Hmm...I wonder what the moral of this story is.
Hi Kestrel,
Good to see you again. When I first heard about that case, I was very surprised. However upon further thought I realized that
a) police sometimes get witnesses to change their statement
b) police sometimes get a suspect to wrongly confess
therefore, I should not have been terribly surprised to learn that
c) police sometimes get a victim to wrongly withdraw an accusation.
Hmm...I wonder what the moral of this story is.
psionl0
Skeptical about skeptics
I think that Chris_Halkides is doing a better job on this than I ever could.
Thanks, that will be good further reading.
I've found most people are shocked when they hear about problems with forensic practice; even criminologists I have spoken with often seem to assume that evidence such as fingerprints and DNA is virtually infallible.
I have a bias towards biases because my background is cognitive science. Obviously this topic needs to consider the context in which investigation occurs, including the organizational structure (which is tricky because it is going to differ across time and place). But I doubt the majority of this issue involves intentionally setting out to get the wrong person (aside from some police who are simply corrupt).
Time pressure reduces hypothesis generation, although the decision-maker may not be aware of this as most biases are unconscious. Confirmation bias makes it easier to continue to build that case because looking for contrary evidence goes against the way the mind tends to work. Motivational issues such as pressure to close the case, career success and so forth can increase confirmation bias and dissonance when exposed to contradictory evidence. But confirmation bias affects even very basic cognitive processes such as perception - people literally just don't see things that don't fit the pattern.
Chris_Halkides
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On Evidentiary Independence
Hasel and Kassin wrote, "In the study reported here, we tested the provocative hypothesis that a confession will lead eyewitnesses to change their identification decisions and their confidence in those decisions." Link. Besides the study itself, the authors give some anecdotal evidence suggesting how false confessions color the judgment of forensic workers or juries. IMO their work has implications beyond eyewitnesses and false confessions.
Hasel and Kassin wrote, "In the study reported here, we tested the provocative hypothesis that a confession will lead eyewitnesses to change their identification decisions and their confidence in those decisions." Link. Besides the study itself, the authors give some anecdotal evidence suggesting how false confessions color the judgment of forensic workers or juries. IMO their work has implications beyond eyewitnesses and false confessions.
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RoseMontague
Published Author
Chris, I saw this and thought of you. Is it a major breakthrough and reliable?
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/16/science/hair-dna-murder.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/16/science/hair-dna-murder.html
Chris_Halkides
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worth keeping a close eye on this technique
Thank you very much. There is not much scientific detail in this article, but that is entirely understandable. If it is shown to be reliable, then it will be a breakthrough, and costs may come down. From the article to which you linked, "Dr. Green recently submitted a paper to a scientific journal." If it is accepted in a peer-reviewed publication, that is a strong indication that the technique is sound.
Nessie
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What you brilliantly describe, I have seen happen in the police in major and minor enquiries.
My point is it is not easy, it requires a lot of bad faith by investigators, and then bad faith by prosecutors until the perfect storm locks 'em up.
In New Zealand murder cases I consider just 8 victims of this have emerged, Walter Bolton, Arthur Thomas, David Tamihere, Teina Pora, David Bain, Rex Haig, Mark Lundy and Ewan MacDonald (acquitted).
Then there are another 3 or so I think are false prosecutions.
This is 11 of maybe 5,000 homicides in this time. One of the most classic symptoms of a miscarriage is a claim of innocence, this seems poorly understood, but Damien Echolls was exonerated and said he was the only deathrower to claim innocence, watching 20 or so fellow inmates executed.
psionl0
Skeptical about skeptics
I'm not saying that police intentionally pin a crime on somebody that they know is innocent. However, the reasons for their initial choice of suspect are often spurious (policeman's "hunch", relative etc) and they typically then focus on building a case against this suspect and ignore any evidence that might point elsewhere.
A classic case is that of Corryn Rayney who's body was found buried in King's Park in Perth. The police immediately decided that her husband Lloyd was the culprit. Why? Because their marriage was on the rocks (and husbands always do it, don't they?). They couldn't come up with a reasonable theory as to how Lloyd Rayney killed his wife but that didn't stop them taking the case to trial.
During the trial it was made aware that improper chain of custody issues meant that it couldn't be ruled out that some of the evidence may have been planted. Nevertheless, none of that stopped the police appealing the judge's "not guilty" verdict (a verdict which was upheld on appeal).
This is what I want to focus on for the first topic (on early stages of investigation), but I explain this in terms of confirmation bias and other related cognitive factors. Obviously there are wider background issues which you and Nessie and others point out (time pressure, organisational structure, career success, public approval etc). However, if the police are not setting out to intentionally frame the wrong person, then they are not fully aware of how these factors impact their evidence-gathering and decision-making processes.
In the case of forensic examiners the biases affect perceptual processes, which is a bit easier to get a handle on as there is a nice body of research on the topic.
If you look at Itiel Dror's presentation to the NCFS on the link below, about 13.10 he refers to an example where a fingerprint examiner is apparently exhorted to return the 'correct' result in a case involving a black suspect and white victim. This could be interpreted I think as either outright dishonesty (just say it's the guy) or simply urging the examiner to make every effort to correctly detect a match which is assumed to exist. Some might think that if the examiner adopts the latter interpretation then the irrelevant information doesn't affect judgment, because they see bias as an issue of integrity (bias involves bad intentions). But what the literature on contextual bias shows is that if the task involves any component of subjective judgment (even at a very basic level of perceptual judgment) then the examiner can't simply choose to disregard the contextual information. They will actually see the stimulus differently.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hNaljIMK_hY
In the case of fingerprints I have found that people can actually see this as a case of pattern recognition, because you can break down the fingerprint pattern and show it as a case of perceptual matching (where there is already a large literature on context effects). With the DNA studies people tend to be more shocked because they didn't realise that some types of DNA examination involve subjective judgement. That belief then obviously feeds back into the jury decision topic and the impact of different types of evidence on decisions.
I mentioned the Claremont murders and wrongful identification of Lance Williams as a key suspect, which lead to his being placed under intense surveillance for years. What really struck me is that there was no justification for that level of suspicion in the first place; although at the time like most people I just assumed the police must have some good reasons. He was socially awkward and had some odd personality characteristics causing his behaviour to be perceived as 'creepy'. He offered a lift to an undercover policewoman and although he dropped her off where she wanted to go and didn't assault her, this was apparently sufficient to immediately suspect him of a string of serial abductions, rapes and murders.
When he was placed under surveillance the crime stopped, which of course confirmed suspicions. There were several interesting features, including dubious personality profiling, and apparent failure of a polygraph (which of course was not admissible as evidence in Australia but nevertheless probably contributed to the tunnel vision). Even the fact that he stated in an interview that he wasn't angry because he knew the police were just doing their job was used against him, because an innocent person would have been angry! Although it didn't actually lead to wrongful conviction I might try to use it as an example because it illustrates relationships between confirmation bias, initial suspicions and dubious evidence. I'll have a look at the Rayney case you mentioned too.
theprestige
Penultimate Amazing
I don't know how accurate this is, but:
The role of public prosecutor, such as a district attorney, seems to be held in much higher esteem than the role of public defender. My impression is that the prosecutor's office generally gets more funding, and more prestige. It's seen as a valuable stepping-stone for a political career, and thus tends to attract more aggressive, ambitious, and talented lawyers, than the public defender's office.
So it seems to me that if you cannot afford an attorney, and the state has to provide one for you, there's going to be a huge bias working against you in court. The state will be sending one of its best to prosecute you, without making any commensurate effort to ensure one of its best to defend you.
This is probably my biggest concern with the American justice system. Only, it's not so much about the justice system itself, but about the society that produces it. As individuals, we're all pretty biased in favor of the best legal defense we can get. But as a society, we seem to be heavily biased in favor of the public prosecutor and dismissive of the public defender. This sucks, and should be changed.
The role of public prosecutor, such as a district attorney, seems to be held in much higher esteem than the role of public defender. My impression is that the prosecutor's office generally gets more funding, and more prestige. It's seen as a valuable stepping-stone for a political career, and thus tends to attract more aggressive, ambitious, and talented lawyers, than the public defender's office.
So it seems to me that if you cannot afford an attorney, and the state has to provide one for you, there's going to be a huge bias working against you in court. The state will be sending one of its best to prosecute you, without making any commensurate effort to ensure one of its best to defend you.
This is probably my biggest concern with the American justice system. Only, it's not so much about the justice system itself, but about the society that produces it. As individuals, we're all pretty biased in favor of the best legal defense we can get. But as a society, we seem to be heavily biased in favor of the public prosecutor and dismissive of the public defender. This sucks, and should be changed.
I do have some points in the false confessions topic about confessions affecting other evidence, but could develop that further. For example, one issue we look at in relation to jury decisions is whether or not experts should be allowed to address juries on issues such as the reliability of confessions or eyewitness evidence. We also look at ways of presenting confession evidence that might affect how much weight a jury places on a disputed confession, such as including full context. But even if there are ways of overcoming the tendency to see confessions as conclusive evidence of guilt, this doesn't address the issue of confessions causing exculpatory evidence to be overlooked, tainted etc. I probably need to rewrite the confession and jury lectures to convey these issues more clearly.
Nessie
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Hanlon's Razor applies. Along with a healthy dose of Dunning-Kruger.
I think the biggest problem with many senior and detective police officers is that they are just not as clever as they think they are. Many take price in their lack of academic qualifications and despite having joined the police at 18 years old, they claim to have graduated from the university of life.
They mean well, but just do not understand their "hunches" are not a substitute for actual evidence. They then find it very hard to admit to mistakes, due to their mistaken belief in their own brilliance.
The closest to pinning a crime on an innocent was pinning a crime on a known criminal, because he had got away with lots of other crimes. I am thinking of habitual shoplifters, housebreakers, car thieves, domestic abusers etc
This relates to another recurring theme; whether expertise is acquired simply through experience. We look at some research which suggests that highly experienced investigators sometimes perform no better than untrained novices on certain tasks (e.g. recognising deception or identifying false confessions). There is human factors literature supporting the fact that people don't become experts simply through experience and practice; improvement requires reliable and consistent feedback on performance (which also implies independent criteria for evaluating performance). In the case of decisions, this requires that there are criteria for evaluating decisions, identifying mistakes, and feedback. Not only does experience not automatically make performance better, expertise can actually lead to errors in some cases. Experts rely more on expectations developed from prior experience, meaning they engage in less data-analysis (i.e. they may be more prone to certain types of confirmation bias than novices). Experience can also lead to overconfidence where experts are not routinely held to account or subjected to consistent feedback.
In applied settings such as police work, I would imagine that many procedures are classified as correct because they are consistent with standard practice, which is obviously unsatisfactory. For example, some police officers in the US are trained to detect deception using outside agencies which teach methods inconsistent with actual research on reliable ways to detect it. Yet these methods would be seen as correct because that's how things have always been done (and absence of reliable feedback about negative consequences). To change procedures is to admit that past procedures were inadequate, and accept implications of that. Admitting mistakes is not/should not be a problem in science or academia but frequently is in applied fields.
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Nessie
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Initial training to be a police officer (my knowledge is with Scotland) involves rote learning of the law, without testing to see if the law is understood and then learning, initially through the experience of a tutor cop and then being put to various departments for short secondments.
More advanced training, such as detective training, is not much more than the initial training. Trainee detectives do a basic course, which concentrates on interview techniques and then learn from the experience of more senior detectives. Once accepted as a detective and the DCs course, learning of the law goes into more detail and there is some testing of understand through case law.
A lot of policy and procedure training is by completing online modules and there is rampant cheating, whereby officers who have completed the training sit with others who then go through the module being told the answers. I have seen brighter officers being tasked with completing a module to then take a shift through the course.
To assist officers, there are what we called toolkits, which are checklists as to what needs to be done in an enquiry. They do get updated as policies and procedures change and "best practice" is identified. But that is rather ad hoc and my experience (in particular with frauds) was that the toolkit was often out of date.
Experience, the so called "university of life" is valued far more in the police than academic training. There is presently a lot of resistance to the Police College (for E&W) to make police training degree level, so all police either have a degree on joining or have to work to obtaining a degree level qualification). The cry is that many supposedly excellent police officers do not have degrees and they think that they do not need one. They say that policing comes from experience.
It's interesting to hear this perspective. Lots of the students want to join the police when they graduate, so I need to be careful how to present the material that relates to police investigation. If it comes across as 'Let's have a look at some stupid things police can do/have done' it won't go down too well.
Your point about valuing on-the-job experience come back to the issue of whether experience leads to improvement. People assume it does, but it can lead to improvement, no improvement, or worse performance depending on availability of valid and consistent feedback.