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By Root 1209 0

category. Follow the trail of love and money, and the force is with you. Thus, in the case of most murders, the most probable killer is the victim’s lover, spouse, ex-spouse, relative, or beneficiary. When a young woman is murdered, said Lieutenant Ralph M. Lacer, “the number one person you’re going to look for is her significant other. You’re not going to be looking for some dude out in a van.” Lacer was justifying his certainty that a Chinese-American college student named Bibi Lee had been killed by her boyfriend, Bradley Page, which was why he did not follow up on testimony from eyewitnesses who had seen a man near the crime scene push a young “Oriental” woman into a van and drive away.16 However, as attorney Steven Drizin observes, “Family members may be a legitimate starting point for an investigation but that’s all they are. Instead of trying to prove the murder was intra-family, police need to explore all possible alternatives. All too often they do not.”17

Once a detective decides that he or she has found the killer, the confirmation bias sees to it that the prime suspect becomes the only suspect. And once that happens, an innocent defendant is on the ropes. In the case of Patrick Dunn of Bakersfield, California, which we mentioned in the introduction, the police chose to believe the uncorroborated account of a career criminal, which supported their theory that Dunn was guilty, rather than corroborated statements by an impartial witness, which would have exonerated him. This decision was unbelievable to the defendant, who asked his lawyer, Stan Simrin, “But don’t they want the truth?” “Yes,” Simrin said, “and they are convinced they have found it. They believe the truth is you are guilty. And now they will do whatever it takes to convict you.”18

Doing whatever it takes to convict leads to ignoring or discounting evidence that would require officers to change their minds about a suspect. In extreme cases, it can tempt individual officers and even entire departments to cross the line from legal to illegal actions. The Rampart Division of the Los Angeles Police Department set up an antigang unit in which dozens of officers were eventually charged with making false arrests, giving perjured testimony, and framing innocent people; nearly one hundred convictions that had been attained using these illegal methods were eventually overturned. And in New York, a state investigation in 1989 found that the Suffolk County Police Department had botched a number of major cases by brutalizing suspects, illegally tapping phones, and losing or faking crucial evidence.

Corrupt officers like these are made, not born. They are led down the slope of the pyramid by the culture of the police department and by their own loyalty to its goals. Law professor Andrew McClurg has traced the process that leads many officers to eventually behave in ways they never would have imagined when they started out as idealistic rookies. Being called on to lie in the course of their official duties at first creates dissonance: “I’m here to uphold the law” versus “And here I am, I’m breaking it myself.” Over time, observes McClurg, they “learn to smother their dissonance under a protective mattress of self-justification.” Once officers believe that lying is defensible and even an essential aspect of the job, he adds, “dissonant feelings of hypocrisy no longer arise. The officer learns to rationalize lying as a moral act or at least as not an immoral act. Thus, his self-concept as a decent, moral person is not substantially compromised.”19

Let’s say you’re a cop serving a search warrant on a rock house, where crack cocaine is sold. You chase one guy to the bathroom, hoping to catch him before he flushes the dope, and your case, down the drain. You’re too late. There you are, revved up, adrenaline flowing, you’ve put yourself in harm’s way—and this bastard is going to get away? Here you are in a rock house, everyone knows what is going on, and these scumbags are going to walk? They are going to get a slick lawyer, and they will be out in a heartbeat. All