Saturday, December 26, 2009

Reading Brooks' Bests and Reexamining What We Know

How do people know what happened?  Even things they've seen themselves.  How does what other people say affect what they 'know?'   We really don't know that much about these things.  Kevin L. Leahy, an attorney who has defended corporations against asbestos personal injury claims writes about the memory of witnesses:
Cognition specialists discuss memory as a process that has three primary stages: (1) encoding; (2) consolidation and storage; and (3) retrieval. (Id.) Each step involves biological efforts within our brains to ensure that an eyewitness account is accurately retained. (May 2003 issue of HarrisMartin’s COLUMNS-Asbestos.)
He goes on to say that unlike artists or story tellers, who can fill in the details after the fact, and not necessarily accurately,
eyewitnesses have no license to stray from their understanding of past events during trial. Our system expressly demands that witnesses “tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.” Once the bailiff and judge forbid conscious manipulation of testimony, however, the remaining instructions are generally silent about the accuracy of the witness’ recall.
So, you might ask, where is this coming from and where is it going?  David Brooks, in the Friday, Dec. 25, 2009 NY Times gives out his Sidney Awards to the best magazine essays  of 2009.

One of his choices is a lengthy story about Todd Willingham, an unemployed auto mechanic, who was put to death in Texas for killing his three daughters by burning his house down.  All the expert witness arson evidence pointed to Willingham.  And so did the eyewitness evidence.  But a friend who came to know Willingham when he was on death row, decided to  recheck the evidence.  And what she found suggested that  some of the details the eyewitnesses gave, was revised later on, after they were exposed to what the 'experts' thought.  From the New Yorker artcle,  "Trial by Fire"   by David Grann:
The witnesses’ testimony also grew more damning after authorities had concluded, in the beginning of January, 1992, that Willingham was likely guilty of murder. In Diane Barbee’s initial statement to authorities, she had portrayed Willingham as “hysterical,” and described the front of the house exploding. But on January 4th, after arson investigators began suspecting Willingham of murder, Barbee suggested that he could have gone back inside to rescue his children, for at the outset she had seen only “smoke coming from out of the front of the house”—smoke that was not “real thick.”

An even starker shift occurred with Father Monaghan’s testimony. In his first statement, he had depicted Willingham as a devastated father who had to be repeatedly restrained from risking his life. Yet, as investigators were preparing to arrest Willingham, he concluded that Willingham had been too emotional (“He seemed to have the type of distress that a woman who had given birth would have upon seeing her children die”); and he expressed a “gut feeling” that Willingham had “something to do with the setting of the fire.”
Dozens of studies have shown that witnesses’ memories of events often change when they are supplied with new contextual information. Itiel Dror, a cognitive psychologist who has done extensive research on eyewitness and expert testimony in criminal investigations, told me, “The mind is not a passive machine. Once you believe in something—once you expect something—it changes the way you perceive information and the way your memory recalls it.”

3 comments:

  1. I wouldn't say US is a cultural leader because US culture is just a mirage. OK, you have Hollywood but other than that it is just the mixture of many cultures.

    I can't really name anything specificly American in connection with culture other than Hollywood movies and country music but it has Celtic roots also.

    ReplyDelete
  2. About the story on the number of people infected at hospitals, almost everytime my partner has been treated at Providence in Anchorage, he gets an infection.

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  3. Brook's should hav fact checked "trial by Fire"

    See Media Meltdown

    The Innocence Scam: The Anti Death Penalty Movement
    Dudley Sharp, contact info below

    "Cameron Todd Willingham: Another Media Meltdown", A Collection of Articles
    http://homicidesurvivors.com/categories/Cameron%20Todd%20Willingham.aspx


    "The Innocent Executed: Deception & Death Penalty Opponents"
    http://homicidesurvivors.com/2009/10/08/the-innocent-executed-deception--death-penalty-opponents--draft.aspx


    "The Exonerated: Are Any Actually Innocent?"
    http://homicidesurvivors.com/2006/08/21/the-exonerated-are-any-actually-innocent---new-mexico.aspx



    "Sister Helen Prejean & the death penalty: A Critical Review"
    http://homicidesurvivors.com/2009/05/04/sister-helen-prejean--the-death-penalty-a-critical-review.aspx


    "At the Death House Door" Can Rev. Carroll Pickett be trusted?"
    http://homicidesurvivors.com/2009/01/30/fact-checking-is-very-welcome.aspx


    "The Death Penalty: More Protection for Innocents"
    http://homicidesurvivors.com/2009/07/05/the-death-penalty-more-protection-for-innocents.aspx


    The 130 (now 139) death row "innocents" scam
    http://homicidesurvivors.com/2009/03/04/fact-checking-issues-on-innocence-and-the-death-penalty.aspx


    23 recent deterrence studies finding for deterrence, Criminal Justice Legal Foundation,
    http://www.cjlf.org/deathpenalty/DPDeterrence.htm


    "Deterrence and the Death Penalty: A Reply to Radelet and Lacock"
    http://homicidesurvivors.com/2009/07/02/deterrence-and-the-death-penalty-a-reply-to-radelet-and-lacock.aspx


    "Death Penalty, Deterrence & Murder Rates: Let's be clear"
    http://prodpinnc.blogspot.com/2009/03/death-penalty-deterrence-murder-rates.html


    Sincerely, Dudley Sharp
    e-mail sharpjfa@aol.com, 713-622-5491,
    Houston, Texas

    Mr. Sharp has appeared on ABC, BBC, CBS, CNN, C-SPAN, FOX, NBC, NPR, PBS , VOA and many other TV and radio networks, on such programs as Nightline, The News Hour with Jim Lehrer, The O'Reilly Factor, etc., has been quoted in newspapers throughout the world and is a published author.

    A former opponent of capital punishment, he has written and granted interviews about, testified on and debated the subject of the death penalty, extensively and internationally.

    ReplyDelete

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