Within our community, the punishments given to individuals of various racial and cultural backgrounds has become a social norm. Recently, there have been many cases in which police officers have been put to fault for behaving a certain way with colored individuals. To eliminate this, police officers wear body cameras for many reasons such as keeping the officers protected, but more importantly, their body camera is used for providing evidence in various trails. While providing jurors with video evidence is helpful in many ways, video evidence can become distorted or altered very easily. The article, Teenager Claims Body-Cams Show the Police Framed Him. What Do You See? explains the benefits and the setbacks of utilizing video evidence in court and how the jurors respond to certain video evidence.
The New York Times article explains a case in Staten Island that the video evidence provided in court could possibly contain “proof that one of the police officers planted a marijuana cigarette” (Goldstein) in Lasou Kuyateh’s car. The court was not able to come to an agreement of who is guilty in this case. After the video was played for the court, individuals did not know whether the teenage boy was at fault or if the officer was at fault. The video provided by New York Times, shows Officer Pastran and Officer Erickson “search[ing] the back-seat and [both] [had] announced [they] [have] found nothing” (Goldstein). Moments later, Officer Erickson “said he had discovered a marijuana cigarette, which he claimed head been burning on the floor behind the driver’s seat” (Goldstein). Officer Erickson’s body camera shut off due to some “technical difficulties” (Goldstein), but his “camera turned back on just before he made the discovery” (Goldstein). By not coming to an agreement after many trails, Judge Robles declared “this case is dismissed and sealed” (Goldstein).
In the article, Justice Is Not Blind: Visual Attention Exaggerates Effects of Group Identification on Legal Punishment, written by Dr. Yael Granot focused on the thought of using video evidence in the legal system and how by utilizing videos may lead to various bias decisions. The punishment decision making is influenced by social group identifications- in and out groups- and visual attention. In the eyes of the juror, while watching the video evidence, their attention is divided, therefore resulting in a various amount of reasons of why certain people are guilty and innocent. Through various experiments conducted, individuals within the research, trusted the information they could physically see, even though that physical evidence could have been distorted. Individuals “are presented with evidence upon which they must make objective decisions” (Granot) “and offer [their] conclusions on the basis of that evidence in fundamentally different ways” (Granot).
Going back to the New York Times article, the jurors did not see Officer Erickson placing the marijuana cigarette in the car, but they saw him finding it. Here, even though Officer Erickson’s body camera being turned on right when he finds the cigarette raises many questions, the physical evidence that the jurors saw was the cigarette was in the car.
While having video evidence is very helpful especially in the legal system, there are many cases in which video evidence can become distorted-lighting, images, filters, perception, etc, therefore in in legal systems, it should not be the only source of evidence presented to the jurors.
Citations:
Goldstein, Joseph. “Teenager Claims Body-Cams Show the Police Framed Him. What Do You See?.” The New York Times, 19 November 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/19/nyregion/body-cameras-police-marijuana-arrest.html.
Granot, Yael, et al. “Justice Is Not Blind: Visual Attention Exaggerates Effects of Group Identification on Legal Punishment.” Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, vol. 143, no. 6, 2014.
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