Mistakes Were Made - Carol Tavris [66]
Caloca bypassed the local DA’s office and took that evidence to the California State Attorney General’s office in Sacramento. There, Assistant Attorney General David Druliner agreed to prosecute Tuite. In May 2004, six years after he had been ruled out by the investigating detectives as being nothing more than a bungling prowler, Richard Tuite was convicted of the murder of Stephanie Crowe. Druliner was highly critical of the initial investigation by the Escondido detectives. “They went off completely in the wrong direction to everyone’s detriment,” he said. “The lack of focus on Mr. Tuite—we could not understand that.”12
Yet by now the rest of us can. It does seem ludicrous that the detectives did not change their minds, or at least entertain a moment of doubt, when Stephanie’s blood turned up on Tuite’s sweater. But once the detectives had convinced themselves that Michael and his friends were guilty, they started down the decision pyramid, self-justifying every bump to the bottom.
Let’s begin at the top, with the initial process of identifying a suspect. Many detectives do just what the rest of us are inclined to do when we first hear about a crime: impulsively decide we know what happened and then fit the evidence to support our conclusion, ignoring or discounting evidence that contradicts it. Social psychologists have studied this phenomenon extensively by putting people in the role of jurors and seeing what factors influence their decisions. In one experiment, jurors listened to an audiotaped reenactment of an actual murder trial and then said how they would have voted and why. Instead of considering and weighing possible verdicts in light of the evidence, most people immediately constructed a story about what had happened and then, as evidence was presented during the mock trial, they accepted only the evidence that supported their preconceived version of what had happened. Those who jumped to a conclusion early on were also the most confident in their decision and were most likely to justify it by voting for an extreme verdict. 13 This is normal; it’s also alarming.
In their first interview with a suspect, detectives tend to make a snap decision: Is this guy guilty or innocent? Over time and with experience, the police learn to pursue certain leads and reject others, eventually becoming certain of their accuracy. Their confidence is partly a result of experience and partly a result of training techniques that reward speed and certainty over caution and doubt. Jack Kirsch, a former chief of the FBI’s Behavioral Science Unit, told an interviewer that visiting police officers would come up to his team members with difficult cases and ask for advice. “As impromptu as it was, we weren’t afraid to shoot from the hip and we usually hit our targets,” he said. “We did this thousands of times.”14
This confidence is often well placed, because usually the police are dealing with confirming cases, the people who are guilty. Yet it also raises the risk of mislabeling the innocent as being guilty and of shutting the door on other possible suspects too soon. Once that door closes, so does the mind. Thus, the detectives didn’t even try using their fancy voice analyzer on Tuite, as they had on Crowe. Detective McDonough explained that “since Tuite had a history of mental illness and drug use, and might still be both mentally ill and using drugs currently, the voice stress testing might not be valid.”15 In other words, let’s use our unreliable gizmo only on suspects we already believe are guilty, because whatever they do, it will confirm our belief; we won’t use it on suspects we believe are innocent, because it won’t work on them anyway.
The initial decision about a suspect’s guilt or innocence appears obvious and rational at first: The suspect may fit a description given by the victim or an eyewitness, or the suspect fits a statistically likely