Being Wrong - Kathryn Schulz [119]
These lab workers, prosecutors, and attorneys general are not the victims of the crimes they investigate and prosecute. They haven’t been subjected to the trauma of violence and violation, nor to the secondary traumas of the legal and media circuses that so often follow. They are, supposedly, professionals. Moreover, as Neufeld notes, they are professionals who “rely on logic to make a living, who are part of a system that is predicated on the use of evidence and reason to see that justice is done.” So, to be blunt: What on earth is their problem?
The most obvious and least sympathy-inducing answer is that their careers are on the line. “Prosecutors’ reputations are made on these big cases,” Neufeld said, and they can be unmade there as well. But another, less contemptible motive for their denial is that these people, too, are protecting themselves from trauma. “It’s very difficult for anyone to admit, ‘Okay, yes, I played a role in convicting an innocent man, of depriving him of his liberty, or God forbid, his life,’” Neufeld said. As nightmares go, the one suffered by the prosecutor in a wrongful conviction is nothing compared to the ones suffered by the victim and the wrongfully accused. But it is a nightmare nonetheless, a recipe for sleepless nights and shattered faith in your work, your judgment, your moral worth. Even when our errors are comparatively anodyne, the experience of being wrong tends to challenge our faith that we are basically good, honest, smart, reliable people. Involvement in a wrongful conviction magnifies that problem a thousand-fold, both because the consequence of the error is so grave and because people who have signed on to serve the cause of justice generally see themselves, not unreasonably, as being on the side of the angels.
If anyone ever had cause to believe that she was on the side of the angels, surely it was Penny Beerntsen. In the aftermath of her assault, she summoned the strength not just to rebuild her own life, but to help other people repair their lives as well—and not just any other people, but convicts, including some who easily could have been her attacker. Likewise, if anyone ever had cause to be convinced that she was right, that was Penny, too. From the first moments of her attack, she focused on being able to accurately identify her assailant. Even as he beat and strangled her, she forced herself to memorize his features. Afterward, injured, traumatized, and unable to walk, she crawled to the shore on her wrists to preserve the blood on her hands as evidence.
In a sense, then, Penny Beerntsen was primed for denial. She had survived the kind of trauma that makes it an appropriate and even a necessary reaction. Through her conduct both during and after the assault, she had earned (insofar as any of us ever can) the right to feel righteous, and the right to feel right. When the DNA results exonerated Steven Avery, she easily could have turned her back on them. Like so many people who wind up involved in wrongful convictions, she could have remained unmoved by the evidence. She could have continued to insist on Avery’s guilt, and on her own rightness. She could have done all of this. But she didn’t.
Maybe it was her personality: conscientious, empathetic, sensitive to injustice. Maybe it was her years of working in the prisons, of learning to see the inmates as people and helping them face their own wrongdoings. Maybe it was the fact that she trusted the science. Probably it was some of all this. At any rate, when Penny Beerntsen’s lawyer and her husband broke the news about Steven Avery’s innocence, she instantly accepted that she had been wrong. And, just as instantly, she plummeted into one of the darkest periods of her life. “This might sound unbelievable,” Penny told me, “but I really feel this way: the day I learned I had identified the wrong person was much worse than the day I was assaulted. My first thought