Being Wrong - Kathryn Schulz [116]
These questions all add up to the same ethical dilemma: should we or should we not be held accountable for refusing to admit that we are wrong? So far, I’ve presented the case for compassion in the face of denial, on the grounds that it is a natural reaction to trauma. But it doesn’t take much to throw that case into serious question. What about people who deny that the Holocaust occurred? What about former South African President Thabo Mbeki, who, in defiance of the scientific consensus, insisted that AIDS is not caused by HIV and cannot be controlled with antiretroviral medication—a denial that contributed to the deaths of an estimated 320,000 South Africans, the mass orphaning of children, and widespread economic crisis? More broadly, what happens when the refusal to acknowledge error is so extreme—and the consequences of that refusal so grave—that compassion starts to seem like an inadequate, ingenuous, or even dangerous response?
Peter Neufeld is the codirector and one of the two founders of the Innocence Project, the organization I mentioned earlier that uses DNA evidence to overturn wrongful convictions. In addition to trying to free innocent people from prison, he and his colleagues work to improve criminal justice procedures so that fewer mistaken incarcerations occur in the first place. What with these two mandates, Neufeld spends a lot of time telling people that they are wrong, or that the way they do their work is unjust and dangerously error-prone. As you might imagine, dealing with denial is a de facto part of his job description.
When I met Neufeld in his offices in Lower Manhattan, one of the first things he did was walk me through the many different stages of denial he routinely encounters. He was quick to point out that not everyone goes through all these stages, or even through any of them: many people working in law enforcement support the work of the Innocence Project and cooperate fully in its efforts to free the wrongfully convicted. But some don’t, and the depth and scope of their denial can be staggering. That denial begins, Neufeld says, with a resistance to even seeking out the truth: a denial-prone prosecutor will simply oppose the Innocence Project’s request for DNA testing—even though prosecutors themselves use genetic tests all the time to get convictions. (While many states grant their prisoners at least some access to DNA testing, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 2009 that convicts don’t have a guaranteed right to such tests.) As a result, Neufeld and his colleagues spend thousands of hours and hundreds of thousands of dollars simply trying to get permission to conduct DNA tests.
Sooner or later, though, a judge will usually approve the request for genetic testing. You might imagine that if the results exonerate the convict, that would be that—but instead, Neufeld told me, prosecutors will often argue that the testing process must have been flawed and insist on redoing it. When those results also clear the convict, an intractable prosecutor will switch gears, concocting a new theory about how the crime was committed that renders the DNA evidence irrelevant. That strategy seldom impresses judges, and at this stage of the game, most of them will order that the convict be exonerated and freed.
The matter doesn’t necessarily end there, though, because judges can’t stop prosecutors from deciding to retry a case. “We’ll be leaving the courtroom after an exoneration,” Neufeld says, “and the prosecutor will say, ‘we still think your client is guilty, and we’re going to retry him.’” Months go by, “and then finally the prosecutor comes back and says, ‘we’re agreeing to dismiss the charges, not because your client is innocent, but because with the passage of time it’s too difficult to get the witnesses.’ Or, ‘we don’t want to put the victim through the hardship of having to testify again after she got closure.’” Such prosecutors give up the case, but not their conviction that they are correct. To the bitter end and beyond,