Originally published by Douglas Keene.
It’s hard to know why research that is a almost a decade old is seen as fodder for a recent Op-Ed in the New York Times , but so it goes. Jennifer Mnookin , a law professor at UCLA, certainly has an impressive resumé, and it is likely most readers of the NYT are not familiar with camera perspective bias . We blogged about this research back in 2010 and mentioned it in our 2012 article on false confessions .
In short, the camera perspective bias research says that when confessions are videotaped, they “should be videotaped in their entirety and with a camera angle that focuses equally on the suspect and interrogator”. Apparently, if the videotape is focused only on the defendant, the observer is less likely to see the police interview as coercive–even when the interrogator makes an explicit threat. When the video is focused on both the interrogator and the defendant, the observer’s bias disappears.
Mnookin’s essay in the NYT describes the camera perspective bias and states that while videotaping interrogations is generally a positive thing, it doesn’t prevent the videotapes from being misleading, to jurors or even legal experts. This shouldn’t surprise us, says Mnookin, since the research has found that even “professionals like judges and police interrogators are not immune” to the camera perspective bias. Mnookin discusses the complexity of disentangling the false confession from the true confession and says videos may make that already difficult task nearly impossible.
“And yet by making confessions so vivid to juries, recording could paper over such complications, and sometimes even make the problem worse. The emotional impact of a suspect declaring his guilt out loud, on video, is powerful and hard to dislodge, even if the defense attorney points out reasons to doubt its accuracy.”
Mnookin’s op-ed piece echoes what many of the experts in the false confessions area have said for years: videotaping interrogations will not fix the problem of false confessions, it is simply a step on the way to making them less likely to occur. Multiple reader comments on Mnookin’s op-ed are remarkably cogent and coherent, in contrast to most comments on major news sites these days. Many of the commenters identify themselves as attorneys and offer thoughts on the advantages of videotaped interrogations, eye-witness fallibility, and the ethics of courtroom personnel. If a reader actually wants to be educated on the issues surrounding videotaped interrogations, it could happen here.
Daniel Lassiter (the researcher responsible for much of the research on camera perspective bias) came to the same conclusions back in 2010 that Mnookin shares in her current-day NYT op-ed.
“The video recording of police interviews and interrogations will bring an unprecedented degree of openness to the process that all interested parties can agree is essential to a fair and humane criminal justice system. That being said, it is far from certain whether this reform will actually reduce the number of wrongful convictions attributable to police-induced false confessions.”
Lassiter’s hope, back in 2010, was that as knowledge continued to grow in the area of false confessions, then jurors could be educated to see the videotaped interrogation as [just] one piece of data upon which to base decisions. We may not yet be at Lassiter’s 2010 wish for the courtroom, but hopefully we are moving in that direction.
On a related note, we are fans of the Sundance Channel’s fictional series Rectify which follows the post-release (based on new DNA evidence) life of a man who spent 19 years on death row for the rape and murder of his teenage girlfriend. This is not a feel good television show. It is dark, disturbing, confusing and poignant all at once. There are no easy answers. Just very hard questions. Did he or didn’t he? We are almost through Season 2 and do not yet know.
Lassiter GD (2010). Videotaped interrogations and confessions: what’s obvious in hindsight may not be in foresight. Law and Human Behavior, 34 (1), 41-2 PMID: 20087637
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