Mistakes Were Made - Carol Tavris [76]
Because no one, no matter how well trained or well intentioned, is completely immune to the confirmation bias and to his or her own cognitive blind spots, the leading social scientists who have studied wrongful conviction are unanimous in recommending safeguards, such as the videotaping of all interviews. Currently, only a handful of states require the police to electronically record their interrogations.46 Police and prosecutors have long resisted this requirement, fearing, we suspect, the embarrassing, dissonance-generating revelations it might create. Ralph Lacer, one of the interrogators of Bradley Page, justified this position on the grounds that “a tape is inhibiting” and makes it “hard to get at the truth.”47 Suppose, he complained, the interview goes on for ten hours. The defense attorney will make the jury listen to all ten hours, instead of just the fifteen-minute confession, and the jury will be confused and overwhelmed. Yet in the Page case, the prosecution’s argument rested heavily on a segment of the audiotaped interview that was missing. Lacer admitted that he had turned off the cassette player just before he said the words that convinced Page to confess. According to Page, during that missing segment, Lacer had asked him to imagine how he might have killed his girlfriend. (This is another maneuver recommended by the creators of the Reid Technique.) Page thought he was being asked to construct an imaginary scenario to help the police; he was stunned when Lacer used it as a legitimate confession. The jury did not hear the full context—the question that elicited the alleged confession.
In fact, in jurisdictions that do videotape interrogations, law enforcement has come to favor it. The Center on Wrongful Convictions surveyed 238 law enforcement agencies that currently record all interrogations of felony suspects, and found that virtually every officer with whom they spoke was enthusiastic about the practice. Videotaping eliminates the problem of suspects changing their stories, and it satisfies jurors that the confession was obtained honestly. And of course it permits independent experts and jurors to assess the techniques that were used and determine whether any of them were deceptive or coercive. 48
Reforms like these are slowly being implemented in Canada and Great Britain, which are instituting procedures to minimize the chances of wrongful convictions. But according to legal scholars and social scientists Deborah Davis and Richard Leo, American law enforcement remains steeped in its traditions, including adherence to the Reid Technique and similar procedures, maintaining “near absolute denial” that these techniques can and do produce false confessions and wrongful convictions.49 The American criminal-justice system’s unwillingness to admit fallibility compounds the injustices it creates. Most states do absolutely nothing for people who have been exonerated. They provide no compensation for the many years of life and earnings lost. They do not even offer an official apology. Cruelly, they often do not expunge the exonerated person’s record, making it difficult for the person to get an apartment or a job.
From the viewpoint of dissonance theory, we can see why the victims of wrongful convictions are treated so harshly. That harshness is in direct proportion to the system’s inflexibility. If you know that errors are inevitable, you will not be surprised when they happen and you will have contingencies in place to remedy them. But if you refuse to admit to yourself or the world that mistakes do happen, then every wrongfully imprisoned person is stark, humiliating evidence of how wrong you are. Apologize to them? Give them money? Don’t be absurd. They got off on a technicality. Oh, the technicality was DNA? Well, they were guilty of something else.
And yet, every so often, a man or woman of integrity rises above the common impulse to sacrifice truth in the service of self-justification: A police officer blows the whistle on corruption; a detective reopens a case that was apparently