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Although all chapters in Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me) are relevant to citizens and professionals who are concerned about minimizing and correcting the greatest mistake that can be made in the criminal-justice system—wrongful convictions—Chapter 5, “Law and Disorder,” specifically focuses on how this error occurs and on presenting the research bearing on why so many police officers, prosecutors, and judges are loath to correct it.
Posting by Steven A. Drizin, Professor of Law at Northwestern University, to his wrongful conviction listserv:
Subject: MUST READ: Mistakes Were Made (But Not By Me)
July 11, 2007
Why was it so hard for our President to admit that there were no W.M.D.'s in Iraq or that Saddam had no links to Al Qaeda? Why is it so difficult for some prosecutors and police officers to accept the reality of a wrongful conviction? Answers to these and other questions can be found in a new book by eminent social psychologists Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson. In Mistakes Were Made (But Not By Me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts, Tavris and Aronson explain that the reason why humans have so much difficulty in admitting error is our need for self-justification, an all too human tendency.
To protect our self-worth, even when faced with evidence of our errors, our first impulse is to dig in and justify our position with even more tenacity. We reject any evidence that disconfirms our original beliefs and find alternative explanations to explain why we were right in the first place. The engine that causes us to self-justify is cognitive dissonance—the uneasy feeling that surfaces when we hold two ideas that cannot be reconciled (e.g., the system works, the defendant is guilty, innocents don't confess versus the system makes mistakes, the defendant is innocent, some innocents can be induced to confess falsely). Dissonance produces mental anguish and causes us to look for a way to reduce it. There are plenty of good external reasons for self-justification (loss of job, reputation, preventing harm to a colleague) but it is the more powerful internal reasons that often are the cause—we want to think of ourselves as honorable and competent.
How do we reduce dissonance?. One of the ways is denial , write the authors: “the greatest impediment to admitting and correcting mistakes in the criminal-justice system is that most of its members reduce dissonance by denying that there is a problem.” The authors cite Joshua Marquis, the oft-quoted Oregon District Attorney, as one of the great deniers.
Using examples from real cases, the authors discuss how cognitive dissonance and self-justification influence almost every decision made by police officers and prosecutors in the course of a wrongful conviction. They single out certain individuals who admitted their mistakes as modern day heroes, including former Indiana prosecutor Thomas Vanes for changing his position on the death penalty after learning that he had participated in a wrongful conviction.
To combat the powerful engine of self-justification in the criminal justice system, Tavris and Aronson call on police academies and law schools to teach students about their own vulnerabilities for self-justification. (Aside: The study of the causes and consequences of wrongful convictions is one way to train officers and students.) Judges, prosecutors, defenders, and officers receive almost no information about their cognitive biases, how to recognize them, to correct them, and how to manage the dissonance that is created when their belief systems are confronted with disconfirming evidence. Some of the specific reforms advocated by the authors mirror those that form the reform agenda of the Innocence Network, including mandatory videotaping of interrogations and independent innocence commissions.
Mistakes Were Made is a highly engaging book, one that I simply could not put down. For those engaged in educating law students about self-justification, it should be mandatory reading material for your courses, right alongside Keith Findley and Michael Scott’s groundbreaking law review article The Multiple Dimensions of Tunnelvision in Criminal Cases at 2006 Wisconsin Law Review 291-397.
For non-lawyers, there are life lessons here that go well beyond how to recognize and understand self-justification in the criminal justice system. The book devotes one even more ink to the ways in which we deceive ourselves in our work, our relationships with others, our marriages, etc.
Review by Michael Connelly on correctionssentencing.blogspot.com:
May 13, 2007
We’ve all been there. We did something wrong (incorrectly, evil, whatever, take your pick). But we’re capable, we’re good, so this can’t be true. There has to be another explanation. Somebody else’s fault. Not wrong, just not right yet. This is what I actually intended. This is even better. As I’ve said here before, Jeff Goldblum nailed it in “The Big Chill”—we can go a long time without sex but we can’t go a day without a rationalization.
Social psychologists have long had a term for it—cognitive dissonance, when two realities collide in our belief systems and force us to either make them fit (however bizarrely) or jettison or deform one or both of them. Cognitive dissonance is the theme of Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson’s Mistakes Were Made (but not by me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts.
Tavris and Aronson are two of the best known social psych folks, and this book should be required reading for anyone laying claim to intelligence. It’s extremely easy to read, except for all the dogearring, margin-writing, and quoting you’ll be doing to anyone close by. And it’s applicable to every reader and everyone they know. Except you and me. Here’s their thesis in a nutshell:
As fallible human beings, all of us share the impulse to justify ourselves and avoid taking responsibility for any actions that turn out to be harmful, immoral, or stupid. . . . The higher the stakes—emotional, financial, moral—the greater the difficulty.
It goes further than that: Most people, when directly confronted by evidence that they are wrong, do not change their point of view or course of action but justify it even more tenaciously. Even irrefutable evidence is rarely enough to pierce the mental armor of self-justification.
The authors then spend the rest of their book illustrating exactly how with examples from politics (which is built on cog diss), science, wealth, personal memories (which are readily and frequently unreliable), psychoanalysis (and false memory debacles), alien abductions, love and relationships, fixing the starting point of blame. And, most importantly for us here, trials and sentencing.
Cog diss makes up an enormous portion of our work in corr sent. The rationalization and justifications offenders make to explain away their offense are the backbone of crime. Reading this book made me think most of Paul Cromwell's In Their Own Words, a compendium of articles on how criminals (white-collar, blue-, and no-) explain their actions that would (should) make economists give up their professions. But Tavris and Aronson don’t discuss criminals. No, they use for their examples . . . prosecutors and judges, especially those who can’t admit mistakes even in the face of incontrovertible evidence, as we frequently note here. They spend a whole chapter on them..
You send the wrong guy to prison. Do you admit being wrong? Or do you deny it, claim the new evidence is wrong, the guy’s a “bad guy” who’s done other things. You’re still a “good guy,” you’re still possessed of truth and righteousness, God still personally makes you His spokesperson on justice. “The alternative, that you sent an innocent man to prison for fifteen years is so antithetical to your view of your competence that you will go through mental hoops to convince yourself that you couldn’t possibly have made such a blunder.” IOW, the “bad” prosecutors we highlight here when they make these ridiculous, self-protective, God’s representative statements, like the OR DA they take to town for his blowhard hubris over and over.
Once cops and DAs zero in on someone, their training and experience over and over bracket off any contradictory info, and you don’t need this book to know that, although far too many of them do deny it themselves. The authors’ detailing of deceptive interrogation techniques that allow no refutation is scary, as scary as DAs' active efforts to block mitigating evidence from freeing innocent people. (Scariest, and the best proof of where their heads really are and what they really believe in, is their apparent indifference to reopening the cases in which this happens and finding who really did do the crime.) They know what they know, and disagreers are just wrong, despite all those facts and evidence on their side.
You come away from this book with many feelings, none good. Foremost is the realization of just how little contact someone really has to have with reality to survive and even prosper on this planet. You’d think all the wake-up calls we’ve gotten from sweeties and those we wished were in our lives would alert us to our innate confusion and blindness, but apparently not. They were stupid, and, really, they weren’t that hot anyway.
More related to corrections sentencing, once again, I found myself wondering how on earth we can have no specific training for practitioners in criminal proceedings, as practitioners are educated in Europe. When is a law school going to take a chance on this and help the entire country? Tied to this is the need for all these practitioners to be drowned in cognitive dissonance literature and other cognitive research until it is just second nature for them to look for where the biases and misconceptions are misleading the search for truth and justice.
You also, I think, will find it unfair that the authors don’t go after defense attorneys, too. I’ve found their self-justifications just as hard to bear and on just as shaky ground to any Mr. Spock who happened by. With their claims that innocence and justice don’t matter, in order to live with their protection and freeing of abusers, cheats, and psychopaths, they cede the moral high ground when DAs play the “they’re guilty of this or something else, I don’t care what you say” game. If cog diss were seen as a foundation of their work, maybe we could drop the games they’ve built into the system to justify, promote, and protect themselves and restore the “justice” part of criminal justice that the rest of us are paying for and expect.
The book also gives us a very good answer for why “evidence-based practice” finds such tough sledding and will likely never be what its advocates want it to be, the answer to those questions about “why don’t people listen to our studies???” Unless the costs of ignoring the evidence are just so high that all but the diehards recognize the need to change, the old guard will resist. The authors thankfully include the example of the doctor who figured out that washing hands before sticking them on patients would save lives made progress only funeral by funeral of the old guard doctors who refused to believe it. Why wouldn’t they, why won’t the current policymakers and practitioners? Because accepting the evidence would mean admitting they’ve been WRONG all these years, that they’ve put people away who shouldn’t have been, or for longer than they deserved. Who wants to own up to that? So it’s “you can prove anything with statistics” or “yeah, but I had a case once . . . .” La, la, la, can’t hear you.
Tavris and Aronson don’t promise us remedies to all these dilemmas and disasters that our cog diss can lead us to. What they do offer is a thorough and unforgettable overview of what it is and does so that we can try to overcome the problems. “Drivers cannot avoid having blind spots in their field of vision, but good drivers are aware of them . . . . We cannot avoid our psychological blind spots, but if we are unaware of them we may become unwittingly reckless, crossing ethical lines and making foolish decisions. . . .” Not only does this apply to all the players in our sentencing—offenders, cops, prosecutors, defense, victims, and judges—it also applies to our entire corr sent policy nationally and in every state. Until we get that fact and reality are more important than our beliefs and egos, we will keep doing what CA did with its recent “solution” to its fiscal nightmare with prisons. Bandaids, not cures. Tavris and Aronson should be required reading in that first new law school that decides to take criminal justice seriously.
The reason that innocents get prosecuted
Jonathan Kay
National Post (Canada)
July 27, 2007
Nine years ago, in the town of Escondido, Calif., a 12-year-old girl named Stephanie Crowe was stabbed to death in her bedroom. Detectives quickly identified their main suspect: Michael, the girl's 14-year-old brother.
At first, Michael denied everything. But after a marathon interrogation session—during which police threatened him with a life sentence in an adult prison filled with sex offenders—Michael confessed. So did his 15-year-old friend, Joshua Treadway, who told police that he and Michael had conspired to kill Stephanie with a third teenager named Aaron Houser. Case closed.
Or not. It later turned out that the confessions were bogus. Just as the case was going to trial, Stephanie's blood was discovered on the sweatshirt of a schizoid vagrant named Richard Tuite, who was eventually convicted for the girl’s murder. Like so many frightened suspects who spit out "confessions" under interrogations, Michael and Joshua simply had told the cops whatever they wanted to hear.
The truly appalling thing about the Crowe case was that Tuite should have been the obvious suspect from the beginning. He had a history of stalking women and breaking into their homes. And just a day before Stephanie's murder, neighbours had called 911 to complain about his strange behaviour. Yet against all evidence, local police and investigators from the FBI's Behavioral Analysis Unit instead focused on the victim's brother. But not for the late-breaking DNA evidence, those three teenagers might now still be in jail. How did trained investigators screw up so badly?
Two eminent California social psychologists have a convincing explanation. In a new book, Mistakes Were Made (but not by me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts, Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson argue that many of the problems that plague our society, from lying politicians to dysfunctional marriages, originate with the fact that humans simply cannot admit when we're wrong. We form an opinion about something—say, about who committed a murder—and then systematically reject or explain away any incoming evidence that contradicts our preferred thesis. We think we're being rational and scientific. But in fact, we’re subconsciously falling prey to mental defence mechanisms that protect us from cognitive dissonance.
In the case of millennial cultists who remain unbowed when the prophesized date of the global apocalypse passes without incident, the phenomenon is merely curious. But in the case of murder investigators, such mental intransigence destroys lives.
Astonishingly, police and prosecutors often refuse to admit they screwed up even when slam-dunk evidence has proven them wrong. As Tavris and Aronson note in their book, this was the case with the Crowe murder: Following Tuite's conviction, the detectives who originally bungled the file self-published a book arguing that the drifter was just a fall guy.
The justice system is supposed to provide checks and balances to ensure weak cases get weeded out. But those checks and balances don't work when everyone involved feels pressured to close ranks with investigating officers. Again, the Crowe case is a textbook example: When the original detectives were thrown off the case, their replacement, an independent-minded officer named Vic Caloca, was shunned by colleagues. The crime lab wouldn't give him the evidence he needed. Prosecutors ignored his requests for assistance. Even a judge chastised him for making waves. In cop culture, being a team player is sometimes more important than finding the real crook.
Here in Canada, a poster boy for this phenomenon is Edmonton's blood-spatter expert Joe Slemko, who has testified as a forensic expert in defence of several criminal defendants.
Most recently, Slemko testified at a B.C. coroner's inquest into the death of a suspect shot while in RCMP custody. As reported by Adrian Humphreys in Saturday's Post, Slemko's willingness to stand up for defendants has earned him two reprimands for insubordination. His boss has banned him from providing testimony to criminal defendants.
Of course, police aren't the only people in our society who exhibit misplaced professional solidarity. But the nature of their jobs means that the stakes are particularly high: Innocent people can rot in jail for crimes they didn't commit. There's no surefire way to make cops place their commitment to truth above their commitment to colleagues. But getting every Canadian man and woman in uniform to read Mistakes Were Made would be a good start.
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