Renowned Expert: Memory and perception key in wrongful convictions
/Renowned psychologist and professor at the University of Washington, Geoffrey Loftus, highlighted the issues with perception in court testimony at last Thursday’s Wrongful Convictions lecture series on memory and perception. He told students that because of certain factors, they cannot trust their own memories.
Loftus brought in a composite case for the attendees based on a portion of more than 300 cases he has previously worked on in his professional career. Loftus described a scenario where a white woman was mugged by a black man.
Loftus said that even though some witnesses have great confidence when describing important details about the attacker, this does not mean their claims are accurate.
According to Loftus, there are several reasons for poor memory and recollection of traumatic events. Bad lighting, short duration of time, distance and obscuration can all be a detriment to the memory of a crime and even impact the efficiency of remembering details.
Loftus also said that attention is a factor. Due to a large amount of neural filters screening enormous amounts of information at once—much of that information being irrelevant—you only remember what you pay great attention to. This is limited to one part of your sensory world at a time, causing you to lose focus in other areas.
Many witnesses do not have a vivid memory of the perpetrator’s appearance simply because they have no reason to. With all aspects of the situation competing for your attention at one time, your mind focuses on details of certain things and not others.
Loftus cited examples, such as if the attacker had a weapon, that victims primarily focus on. He said that, in many cases, the witness can describe the weapon better than the perpetrator.
“I am sort of evangelical in getting the word to everybody that, prospective jurors or not, people, just as they have misbeliefs about everything, have misbeliefs about how human perception and memory work,” Loftus said.
Loftus said that some misbeliefs can be critical, especially for a juror who needs to pass judgment on somebody accused of committing a crime; understanding how memory works and how one can be influenced by misconceptions of memory is important.
“Research in human perception and memory has important uses in the real world. Don’t trust your memory or somebody else’s no matter how certain they seem. Examine the circumstances that lead up to this memory that’s expressed with so much confidence,” he said.
Bethany Barratt, associate professor of political science, spearheaded the event and said it is important for attendees to know that they cannot trust their own memory and to learn about the injustices that plague our criminal justice system today.
“The thing about wrongful convictions that should make it important to everybody is it can happen to anybody,” Barratt said. “It’s not even about being at the wrong place at the wrong time; you can still get identified as being a perpetrator when you had nothing to do with the case at all...even if one doesn’t care about injustice in the criminal justice system, just from a self-interest perspective, people should care.”
According to Barratt, a lecture like this is important to Roosevelt students because many of them come from areas in Chicago where police brutality and racial biases have played significant roles, experiencing these types of things firsthand.
Barratt said that correcting the issues surrounding the criminal justice system and the problems surrounding wrongful convictions are extremely vital.
“In the U.S. I think that we pride ourselves on having a pretty fair criminal justice system, so it’s like when we see these kinds of problems we want to keep being an inspiration for other nations,” she said.
Another installment of the Wrongful Convictions lecture series will be “False Confessions: Causes, Consequences and Solutions” on Wednesday, Nov. 14 from 4-5:30 p.m. in the Gage Gallery.
