Why eyewitnesses get it wrong - Scott Fraser

the murder happened a little over 21 years ago January the 18th 1991 in a small bedroom community of Lynwood California just a few miles southeast of Los Angeles father came out his house to tell his teenage son and his five friends that it was time for them to stop horsing around on the front lawn and on the sidewalk to get home finish their schoolwork prepare themselves for bed and as the father was administering these instructions a car drove by slowly and just after it passed the father and the teenagers a hand went out from the front passenger window and bam bam killing the father and the car sped off the police investigating officers were amazingly efficient they considered all the usual culprits and in less than 24 hours they had selected their suspect Francisco Carrillo a 17 year old kid who lived about two or three blocks away from where the shooting occurred they found photos of him they prepared a photo array and the day after the shooting they showed it to one of the teenagers and he said that's the picture that's the shooter I saw that killed the father that was all a plenary hearing judge had to listen to to bind mr. Carrillo over to stand trial for first-degree murder in the investigation that followed before the absolute trial each of the other five teenagers was shown photographs the same photo array the picture that we best can determine was probably the one that they were showing the photo a is in your bottom left-hand corner of these mug shots the reason we're not sure absolutely is because of the nature of evidence preservation in our judicial system but that's another whole TEDx talk for later so at the actual trial all six of the teenagers testified and indicated the identifications they had made in the photo array he was convicted he was sentenced to life imprisonment and transported to Folsom Prison so what's wrong straightforward fair trial full investigation oh yes no gun was ever found no vehicle was ever identified as being the one in which the shooter had extended his arm and no person was ever charged with being the driver of the shooters vehicle and mr. Curry's alibi which of those parents here in the room might not lie concerning the whereabouts of your son or daughter in an investigation of a killer except prison adamantly insisting on his innocence which he has consistently for 21 years so what's the problem the problem is actually for this kind of case come many fold from decades of scientific research involving human memory first of all we have all the statistical analyses from the Innocence Project work where we know that we have what 250 280 documented cases now where people have been wrongfully victim and subsequently exonerated some from death row on the basis of later DNA analysis and you know that over three-quarters of all of those cases of exoneration involve only eyewitness identification testimony during the trial that convicted them we know that eyewitness identifications are foul well the other comes from an interesting aspect of human memory that's related to various brain functions but I can sum up for the sake of brevity here in a simple line the brain have Horrors a vacuum under the best of observation conditions the absolute best we only detect encode and store in our brains bits and pieces of the entire experience in front of us and they're stored in different parts of the brain so now when it's important for us to be able to recall what it was that we experienced we have an incomplete we have a partial Thor and what happens below awareness with no requirement for any kind of motivated processing the brain fills in information that was not there not originally stored from inference from speculation from sources of information that came to you as the observer after the observation but it happens without awareness such that you don't aren't even cognizant of occurring it's called reconstructed memories it happens to us in all the aspects of our lives all the time it was those two considerations among others reconstructed memory the fact about the eye witness infallibility that was part of the instigation for a group of Appeal attorneys led by an amazing lawyer named Ellen Eggers to pool their experience and their talents together and petition the Superior Court for a retrial for Fran sisqó Carillo they retained me as a forensic neurophysiologist because I had expertise in eyewitness memory and identification which obviously makes sense for this case but also because I have expertise and testify about the nature of human night vision well what's that got to do with this well when you read through the case materials in this curio case one of the things that suddenly strikes you is that the investigating officers said the lighting was good at the crime scene at the shooting all the teenagers testified during the trial that they could see very well but this occurred in mid-january in the northern hemisphere at 7:00 p.m. at night so when I do the CAD did the calculations for the lunar data and the solar data at that location on earth at the time of the incident of the shooting all right it was well past the end of civil twilight and there was no moon up tonight so all the light in this area from the Sun of the Moon is what you see in the screen right here the only lighting in that area had to come from artificial sources and that's where I go out and I do the actual reconstruction of the sea with photometers with various measures of illumination and various other measures of of colour perception along with special cameras and high-speed film right take all the measurements and record them and then take photographs and this is what the scene looked like at the time of the shooting from the position of the teenagers looking at the car going by and shooting this is looking directly across the street from where they were standing remember that vestigation officers report said the lighting was good Teter just said they could see very well this is looking down to the east where the shooting vehicle sped off and this is the lighting directly behind the the teenagers as you can see it is at best poor no one's going to call this well-lit good lighting and in fact as nice as these pictures are and the reason we take this I knew I was going to have to testify in the court and a picture is worth more than a thousand words when you're trying to communicate numbers abstract concepts like Lux the international measurement of illumination the Ishihara color color perception test values when you present those to people who are not well versed in those aspects of science net they become salamanders in the noonday Sun it's like talking about the tangent of the visual angle all right their eyes just glaze over all right a good forensic expert also has to be a good educator a good communicator and that's part of the reason why we take the pictures to show not only the where the light sources are and what we call the spill the distribution but also so that it's easier for the Trier of fact to understand the circumstances so these are some of the pictures that in fact I use quite testify but more importantly work to me and the scientists are those readings the Fatah Marines which I can then convert into actual predictions of the visual capability of the human eye under those circumstances and from my readings that I recorded at the scene under the same solar and lunar conditions at the same time so on and so forth I could predict that there would be no reliable color perception which is crucial for face recognition and that there would be only schoo topic vision which means there'd be very little resolution what we call boundary or edge detection and that furthermore because the eyes would have been totally dilated under this light the depth of field the distance at which you can focus and see details would have been less than 18 inches away I testified to that to the court and while the judge was very attentive it had been a very very long hearing for this petition for a retrial and as a result I noticed out of the corner that I II thought that maybe the judge was going to need a little more of a nudge than just more numbers and here I became a bit audacious and I turn and I asked the judge I said Your Honor I think you should go out and look at the scene yourself now I may have used the tone which is more like a dare than a request but nonetheless it's to this man's credit and his courage that he said yes I will a shocker in American jurisprudence so in fact we found the same identical division so he reconstructed the entire thing again he came out with an entire brigade of sheriff's officers to protect him in this in this community we had him stand actually slightly in the street so closer to the suspect vehicle shooter vehicle then the actual teenagers were so he stood a few feet from the curb for the middle of the street we had a car that came by same identical car as described by the teenagers right they had a driver and a passenger and after the car had passed the judge by the passenger extended his hand pointed it back to the judge as the continued on just as the teenagers had described it right now he didn't use a real gun in his hand so he had a black object in his hand that was similar to the gun that was described he probably bought and this is what the judge saw this is the car 30 feet away from the judge there's an arm sticking out of the passenger side and pointed back at you that's 30 feet away some up to usurer said that that in fact the car was 15 feet away when it shot okay there's 15 feet at this point I became a little concerned this judge is someone you never want to play poker with I he was totally stoic I couldn't see a twitch of his eyebrow I couldn't see and the slightest bending of his head I had no sense of how he was reacting to this and after he looked at this reenactment he turned to me and he says is there anything else you want me to look at I said your honor and I don't know whether I was emboldened by the scientific measurements that I had in my pocket and my knowledge that they are accurate or whether it was just sheer stupidity which is what the defense lawyers thought when they heard me say yes your honor I want you to stand right there I want the car to go around the block again and I want it to come and I want it to stop right in front of you three to four feet away and I want the passenger to extend his hand with a black object to point right at you and you can look at it as long as you want and that's what he saw you'll notice which was also in my test report all the dominant lighting is coming from the north side which means that the shooters face would have been photo occluded would have been backlit furthermore the roof of the car is causing what we call a shadow cloud inside the car which is making it darker and this is three to four feet away why did I take the risk I knew the depth of field was 18 inches or less three to four feet and might as well had been a football field away this is what he saw went back there was a few more days of evidence that was heard at the end of it he made the judgment that he was going to grant the petition for a retrial and furthermore he released mr. Carrillo so he could aid in the preparation of his own defense if the prosecution decided to retry him which they decided not to he is now a freed man this is this is him embracing his grandmother in law he his girlfriend was pregnant when he went to trial right and he had a little baby boy he and his son are both attending Cal State Long Beach right now taking classes what does what does this example what's important to keep in mind for ourselves first of all there's a long history of antipathy between science and the law in American jurisprudence I could regale you with horror stories of ignorance over decades of experience as a forensic expert of just trying to get science into the courtroom the opposing counsel always fight it and oppose it one suggestion is that all of us become much more attuned to the necessity through policy through procedures to get more science in the courtroom and I think one large step toward that is more requirements with all due respect to the law schools of science technology engineering mathematics for anyone going into the law because they become the judges think about how we select our judges in this country it's very different than most other cultures the other one is I want to suggest the caution that all of us have to have I constantly have to remind myself about just how accurate are the memories that we know are true that we believe in there is decades of research examples and examples of cases like this where individuals really really believe none of those teenagers who identified him thought that they were picking the wrong person none of them thought they couldn't see the person's face we all have to be very careful all our memories are reconstructed they are the product of what we originally experienced and everything that's happened afterwards they're dynamic they're malleable they're volatile and as a result we all need to remember to be cautious that the accuracy of our memories is not measured in how vivid they are nor how certain you are that they're correct thank you

Channel: TED-Ed

Views: 33,282

Rating: 4.8613334 out of 5

Keywords: \Scott Fraser\, \create, memories\, crime, eyewitness, TED, TED-Ed, \TED, Ed\, TEDEducation

Id: 4TQETLZZmcM

Length: 18min 27sec (1107 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 03 2013