Being Wrong - Kathryn Schulz [121]
Five months later, Penny, Avery, and their respective lawyers met together for the first time outside a criminal court. “I don’t think I’ve ever been so nervous in my life,” she recalled. “I could hear my heart beat. But when Steve came in the room and I stood up and went over and extended my hand, he gave me this hearty, hearty handshake.” Avery is quiet and somewhat learning disabled, and Penny did most of the talking. But she knew he had expressed compassion for her in the past—on the day he was released from prison, he told the media, “I don’t blame the victim; this isn’t her fault”—and she felt that he listened to her with sympathy. When the meeting ended, she went over to him and asked if she could give him a hug. Without answering, he swept her into a bear hug, and, she recalled, “I said to him, so only he could hear me, ‘Steve, I’m so sorry.’ And he said, ‘It’s okay, Penny, it’s over.’ That was the most grace-filled thing anyone’s ever said to me in my life.”
But, of course, it wasn’t over. In many ways, Penny was just starting to come to terms with what had happened. She became friends with the lawyers at the Innocence Project—the people toward whom she had initially felt so much anger—and began to learn more about cases like her own. Before Avery’s exoneration, she said, “I remember watching some cop special on TV about a wrongful conviction and thinking, ‘oh, come on, how often does that really happen?’” Now, she says, she looks at the system differently. “I really believe that 99.9 percent of police would never intentionally target the wrong person, but there can be such a huge amount of tunnel vision.” She knows, because she experienced it herself. “When people would say, ‘Couldn’t Steven be innocent?,’ I would immediately remind myself of all the evidence that seemed to point to his guilt. I fixated on anything that seemed to affirm that I’d picked the right person.” This is confirmation bias at work, and Penny experienced another form of it as well: ignoring or misconstruing any evidence that challenged her belief in Avery’s guilt. At the trial, sixteen separate witnesses had testified that Avery had been at work on the day of the rape, but Penny dismissed their stories as too similar to each other to be believable—an outstanding example of interpreting the evidence against your theory as evidence for your theory instead.
As she learned more about the factors that contribute to wrongful convictions, Penny came to understand, intellectually, how her own mistake could have happened. Emotionally, though, she remained tormented by it. She never forgot that Avery had been confined to prison from the ages of twenty-three to forty-one—the prime of anyone’s life—and she never stopped feeling enormously, oppressively responsible. Finally, she decided to act on the maxim she had always shared with the inmates: the ultimate apology is how you live the rest of your life. Through her friends at the Innocence Project, she began reaching out to other victims who had misidentified their assailants.
One day, she found herself on the phone with a woman who had just learned that the man imprisoned for raping her was innocent. The woman wasn’t in denial, but she was undone by shock and distress. Penny told her that what had happened wasn’t her fault—that it was the job of the police, not the victim, to investigate crimes thoroughly and fairly. She reminded the woman that she had done her best under traumatic circumstances. She acknowledged that the woman couldn’t undo her error or give