(I think they meant 'atruistic' to be in quotation marks, which would explain the oddity.)
I was looking (unsuccessfully) for a Defoe quote on politicians, and came across this. It's a good piece, and the part about the near-universal rejection of the sequential line up is particularly striking:
PUNISH THE CRIMINALS (EVEN IF INNOCENT)
EXECUTE THE CRIMINALS (EVEN IF INNOCENT)
AND IGNORE THE SCIENCE THAT COULD CLEAR THEM
HERB DENENBERG COLUMN FOR WEEK OF APRIL 30, 2001"I hear much of people's calling out to punish the guilty, but very few are concerned to clear the innocent." Daniel Defoe, the great English author (1660-1731), said that centuries ago, and he's still ahead of his time. I'd add that politicians cry out for executions and punishments, while ignoring the more interesting issue of the innocent being convicted and then being scheduled for murder by the state. Outrage is satisfied by execution, guilty or innocent, and no outrage is generated by men and women, some retarded, being tried by lawyers who sleep and judges who are incompetent.
We're intent on executing criminals, guilty or innocent, even the retarded, but we are reluctant to provide fair trials or a fair system of criminal justice. Yet, the most elementary moves toward fairness for the accused are resisted. The nation's instincts for justice don't rise much higher than that of a lynch mob, and politicians, as in Defoe's time, still call for the punishment of the guilty with virtually no concern for clearing the innocent.
A friend recently called my attention to an article in the January 8, 2001 issue of The New Yorker magazine that proved how distorted our approach to the criminal justice system is. Over 15 years ago, an expert on eye-witness identification, Gary Wells, professor of psychology at Iowa State University, performed a long series of experiments proving that the conventional criminal lineup often produces erroneous results. But the experiments also proved there's a simple and easy to implement alternatives. Instead of showing a lineup with multiple possibilities show one person at a time. In other words, make the lineup sequential (one-at-a-time). That, according to scientific study, reduces false identifications by well over 50 percent and at the same time it does not sacrifice correct identifications.
That would seem to be a perfect solution, a miraculous remedy, something - if not demonstrated by careful scientific investigation - that seems almost too good to be true. It doesn't cost anything and cuts down the number of those falsely accused by well over 50 percent.
You would assume that miraculous improvement in our criminal justice system would be adopted universally and immediately. But what happened tells you something about our system. When the author of the article was asked how many police departments have adopted his reform, he laughed because the answer was almost no departments.
Wells said, "In general, the reaction before criminal-law audiences was 'Well, that's very interesting, but…'" Except for a few police departments, mainly in Canada, the reform remains un-adopted and unused. What's more shocking, a Department of Justice report that came out in 1999 admits that scientific evidence establishes that the sequential methods is better than the conventional lineup, but the report still says the department has no preference between the two methods. That disregard of a proven method to save the innocent from conviction and execution is almost insane. That attitude is so irrational as to be either inexplicable or a reflection of an utter lack of concern for clearing the innocent. The Department of Justice, as exemplified by this report, obviously knows nothing of justice.
But the article makes a point more damning to the criminal justice system in particular and the entire legal system in general: That the system not only doesn't adopt better methods even after demonstrated by scientific investigation, but also the system seems both disinterested in and distrustful of scientific investigation into the working of the system.
There's virtually no research on the inadequacies of the criminal justice system because there is no financial support for such research, according to Professor Lawrence Sherman, a sociologist at the University of Pennsylvania. Most of the money for this kind of research comes for an agency called the National Institute of Justice modeled after the National Institutes of Health. But the NIJ has less than one percent of the budget of the NIH, and the government spends more on meat and poultry research than on justice.
Wells says this all comes about because the legal system doesn't understand science and mistrusts it. In fact, the article cites a case where a prosecutor went to court to stop research. In Broward County, Florida, researchers started a study to see whether counseling for convicted wife-beaters reduced violence. Prosecutors actually went to court to stop the study. But before the study was shut down, the researchers found that counseling actually increased violence (because it made the wives more prone to again see the husband who had been beating them).
Sherman agrees that the "courts are immune to science." He also told me that defense attorneys aren't sharp enough to raise such issues as unscientific lineups likely to lead to misidentification, and the public doesn't seem to get outraged by the seeming conviction and execution of the innocent. He explains most people think that "it can't happen to them" so it is easily tolerated. In fact, Sherman told me even his students at the University of Pennsylvania don't seem to get outraged at some of the outrages that dot our criminal justice system.
The article cites only one case of a study carried out with cooperation of police, and shows the potential that this scientific approach might produce. Sherman of the University of Pennsylvania obtained the cooperation of the Minneapolis Police Chief for a study of non-life-threatening domestic violence. It looked at the three alternative approaches to the problem - arrest, mediation, or ordering the abusing party out of the home for eight hours. The study found that violence was minimized by arrest. Before the study arrest in such cases was rare. As a result of the study, arrest became the standard police response.
There seems to be no explanation for what we find in the criminal justice system. We embrace electrocution and lethal injection with enthusiasm but we neglect, shun and disregard science and scientific investigation. No wonder our criminal justice system is a disgrace to our values and a blight on our civilization. Perhaps the politicians who are quick to embrace that system and who are slow to reform it are also a disgrace to our values and a blight on our civilization.
(Herb Denenberg is a former Pennsylvania Insurance Commissioner, Public Utility Commissioner and Professor at the Wharton School. He is now an adjunct professor of information science and technology and insurance at Cabrini College.
thedenenbergreport.org |
