Being Wrong - Kathryn Schulz [111]
The results of this study were disturbing then, and they remain so today. The best eyewitnesses got more than 25 percent of the facts wrong. The worst erred 80 percent of the time. As another professor who had observed the experiment wrote, “Words were put into the mouths of men who had been silent spectators during the whole short episode; actions were attributed to the chief participants of which not the slightest trace existed; and essential parts of the tragi-comedy were completely eliminated from the memory of a number of witnesses.”
In staging the first empirical study of eyewitness accuracy, Liszt made a dramatic contribution to both psychology and criminology. (And to pedagogy, since variations on his experiment are now staples of introductory psychology courses.) His study has been replicated countless times over the last hundred years, with no measurable improvement in eyewitness accuracy. Yet these experiments have had virtually no impact on our intuitive faith in firsthand accounts, and scarcely more on their legal standing.
Still, they underscore an important fact, one that has cropped up in different guises throughout this book: the sheer persuasiveness of first-person experience is not a good indicator of its fidelity to the truth. It’s as if we forget, when we are under the spell of that experience, about the other possible meaning of “first person.” Taken in a different context—in literature—it means almost the opposite of unassailable authority. It means limited omniscience. It means unreliability. It means subjectivity. It means, quite simply, one person’s story.
After Penny Beerntsen was transferred from the emergency room to the main hospital, a police artist came to her bedside and, in the presence of the sheriff, made a drawing based on her description of her assailant. “Immediately after he was finished,” she recalled, “I asked if they had a suspect in mind, and I was told yes.” The sheriff had nine photos with him, and he placed them on Penny’s bedside table and asked if any of the men looked like her attacker. Penny looked over the mug shots and picked out a man named Steven Avery. By the time she went to sleep that night, Avery was in custody.
Penny was discharged from the hospital the next day. Late the following night, she received an obscene phone call from someone who seemed to know the details of the attack—nothing he couldn’t have gleaned from the newspaper accounts, but still sufficient to alarm her. The next morning she contacted the sheriff’s department to report the call, and the department decided to conduct a live lineup to make sure they had the right man behind bars. “There were eight men on the other side of the one-way glass,” Penny said. “I was trying to look at each one carefully, like I had with the pictures, and when I came to Steve I had a real visceral reaction. I started to shake, I could feel the color drain from my face, I could feel the hair stand up on the back of my neck.” Penny chose Avery from the lineup. She would identify him once more, on December 9, 1985, when the trial started and she declared in front of the court that she was “absolutely sure” that he was her assailant. The trial lasted one week. At the end of it, Steven Avery was convicted of sexual assault and attempted murder and sentenced to thirty-two years in prison. At the time, he was twenty-three years old.
The trial brought Penny some closure, but, as she tried to return to normal life, she found that she was often angry—not usefully angry, she felt, but unpredictably and uncontrollably so: at her husband, at her kids, at herself. Then, early in 1987, she learned that a nearby university was hosting a talk on restorative justice. An alternative model of criminal