On Oct. 10, 1997, Fairbanks, Alaska, residents who had lived in the state at least a year received about $1,500-an equal share of the income produced by the sale of state’s oil and other natural resources. Residents receive these oil dividends, in part, to keep them vested in their state government. Inevitably some residents raucously celebrate the annual windfall, and that night the celebrating turned deadly as four young hooligans embarked on “Clockwork Orange”-style attacks on random individuals. When the night was over, a teenage boy, John Hartman, had been robbed, sexually assaulted and murdered, and an older man, Franklin Dayton, was seriously injured after being robbed and attacked. Within days, four suspects were arrested and locked up. At the trial two years later, the prosecutor’s case rested on an eyewitness account by Fairbanks resident Arlo Olson, who testified that as he stood in the doorway of Eagles Hall, he watched in horror as a group of men, whom he identified as the defendants, accosted and savagely beat Dayton in a parking lot 450 feet away.
“No physical evidence actually ties any of the defendants to the crimes,” wrote Fairbanks Daily News-Miner reporter Larry Campbell in an article on the trial.
The defense called as an expert witness Geoffrey Loftus, PhD, a University of Washington perception and cognition psychology professor who testified that Olson was too far away to accurately perceive the defendants’ facial features. Seeing someone from 450 feet away is like sitting high in the center field bleachers in Yankee Stadium and looking across the ballpark at another individual sitting in the stands behind home plate, Loftus testified. Despite Loftus’s testimony, the jury convicted the defendants of assault and murder. Four years later, the defense attorney learned that the jury had believed Olson’s identification because four jurors had conducted an illegal and unauthorized experiment in broad daylight: They paced out what they thought was 450 feet. And once one juror suggested that she could see clearly, it negated Loftus’s testimony, the defense attorney said. (Stambor, 2006)
Working in corrections I have had the unfortunate experience of experiencing many several assaults (some being extremely violent). During one such experience a male inmate who worked in the kitchen took a cup filled with hot coffee and hot oil from a deep fryer walked into the dining room and threw the searing hot liquid on to the face of another inmate. All of the staff members involved were required to write reports on the incident before being able to leave work that day. Once the reports were all turned in it was discovered that not a single staff member recalled the same events. We ended up with versions ranging from a pan full of hot liquid to a simple cup of water. Racial slurs being yelled by a white perpetrator to a black, Mexican, or Asian victim. The victim was surrounded being held down and yet also could have been alone in the dining room. After a reviewing video footage it was discovered that while several inmates were in the dining room no one was holding the victim down, he was a black man, and after investigating it was discovered that it was a gang hit in retaliation and was not even race motivated.
How did every staff member involved remember the incident differently? Why was the experiment the jury in Alaska preformed not accurate? As a direct result of the juror’s experiment, the conviction was sent to an appeals court.
There are several reasons for this. One is that images in our mind’s eye are never as clear as an actual perception. If you try to recall a room in your house, you can get a general image of the location of large and significant objects, their shapes, colors, etc. But the image is not nearly as detailed as what you would see if you were actually viewing the room. People are better at discriminating between two objects when they are physically present than when one is present and the other is in memory. Two colors which are easily distinguishable when presented side by side may be confused when one or both must be recalled. In fact, while humans can distinguish thousands (some say millions) of physically present colors, one study suggests that they can identify only 17 in memory.
Color is a good example of memory’s low resolution. While there are thousands of discriminable colors, color memory is very limited. Research suggests that people group colors into about 11 categories: white, black, red, green, blue, yellow, brown, orange, purple, pink and gray. Memory will easily distinguish between colors of different categories (red vs. blue) but will have a very difficult time distinguishing shades within a category (blue-green vs. blue-violet.) Color memory also has some biases. People typically remember colors as being closer to a purer color category, so an orange-red will be remembered as a more perfect red. For example, people often think of tomatoes as being red, but check them the next time you go to the supermarket: they are usually very orangey. People also remember colors as being brighter than they actually are. (Baddeley, 2004)
Mistaken or flawed identification has assumed a newfound prominence in recent years: It’s been cited as a factor in nearly 78 percent of the nation’s first 130 convictions later overturned by DNA testing, according to the New York-based Innocence Project, which works to free the wrongly convicted. As a result, a number of researchers are turning their attention to helping police departments and juries better understand the circumstances under which eyewitnesses observe crimes and later identify a suspect.
Works Cited
Baddeley, A. (2004). Your Memory: A User’s Guide. Richmond Hill, Canada: Firefly Books.
Stambor, Z. (2006, April). American Psychological Association. Retrieved April 19, 2014, from www.apa.org: http://www.apa.org/monitor/apr06/eyewitness.aspx