By Dan Simon
The felony justice technique is inevitably human. Police detectives, witnesses, suspects, and sufferers form the process investigations, whereas prosecutors, safety legal professionals, jurors, and judges have an effect on the end result of adjudication. during this sweeping assessment of mental examine, Dan Simon exhibits how unsuitable investigations can produce inaccurate proof and why well-meaning juries ship blameless humans to felony and set the to blame unfastened.
The investigator’s activity is certainly tough and at risk of bias. This usually leads investigators to attract defective conclusions, check suspects’ truthfulness incorrectly, and behavior coercive interrogations which can bring about fake confessions. Eyewitnesses’ identity of perpetrators and specific reminiscences of legal occasions depend on cognitive methods which are usually fallacious and will simply be skewed by way of the investigative techniques used. within the court, jurors and judges are ill-equipped to evaluate the accuracy of testimony, particularly within the face of the heavy-handed rhetoric and powerful feelings that crimes arouse.
Simon deals an array of possible how you can increase the accuracy of felony investigations and trials. whereas the restrictions of human cognition will consistently be a disadvantage, those reforms can increase the felony justice system’s skill to come to a decision adequately whom to unlock and whom to punish.
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Extra resources for In Doubt: The Psychology of the Criminal Justice Process
Example text
The Investigative Task Any discussion of criminal investigations in the United States must be qualified by the fact that investigations vary widely among the some 20,000 law enforcement agencies at the federal, state, and local levels. 4 The following discussion will refer generally to investigators, a category that encompasses mostly police detectives, but also forensic examiners and even patrol officers, who perform a great deal of evidence gathering. Much of the discussion pertains also to prosecutors, who are often involved in one way or another in major investigations, and who are subjected to similar incentives and pressures in the performance of their role.
First, from the investigator’s perspective, the need to avoid false charges is an abstract principle, not a concrete incentive. It is a constraint that is often experienced as a hindrance to the goal of clearing crimes, hardly a desideratum in its own right. Investigators get rewarded and recognized predominantly for making arrests, not for refraining from charging innocent people (imagine a chief of police convening a press conference to announce that although a dangerous perpetrator remains on the loose, the department succeeded in not arresting any innocent persons).
200 The Investigation of Brandon Mayfield The investigation of Brandon Mayfield, an Oregon lawyer suspected of involvement in an Al Qaeda terrorist attack, provides a good illustration of the potential of police investigations to go astray. 202 The affair also demonstrates that even highly regarded professionals in a flagship law enforcement laboratory can get swept up in the dynamics of an investigation gone awry and ultimately insist on improbable conclusions. In March of 2004, the FBI was called on to assist the Spanish National Police with the investigation of a massive terrorist attack by Al Qaeda on commuter trains in Madrid.
