The fluctuating of punishments given to people of different backgrounds has become extremely prevalent in our society and within our justice system. These disparities have led to people looking into alternative mechanisms for nipping these differences in the bud, trying to get rid of biases between jurors. A popular technique is the use of video evidence in court cases; however, this method is not as unbiased as originally presumed. The article, Jurors Find Video Isn’t Providing 20/20 Vision in Police Shootings, discusses the positive and negative effects of using video footage in court. In this article, Bosman, Smith, and Hines review several cases throughout the Midwest to show examples of how videos, that prosecutors thought would be cut and dry that would demand a conviction, actually split the jurors and caused cases to end in a hung jury.
The NYTimes article, that focuses on cases in the Midwest, specifically shows a video of Officer Jeronimo Yanez firing at Philando Castile during a traffic stop in Minnesota. When the video was shown in court, it left jurors in question of what events actually took place. They felt that they didn’t get a full picture, even with the video played for them. Some jurors believed the officer was at fault, while others sided with Castile. The jury ended up acquitting Officer Yanez.
Dr. Yael Granot’s Justice Is Not Blind: Visual Attention Exaggerates Effects of Group Identification on Legal Punishment provided data showing how visual attention and disparities in the law connect to create ingroup and outgroup biases. She used the example that when participants were told to close their eyes and hold an object to determine the size of it, then look at the object in a blown up, distorted image, the participants were more likely to trust the information because they could physically see it, even though the image was false and exaggerated. She then went on to explain the results of her experiment, showing that divided attention can change what people see and are able to process. Using eye-tracking technology, she was able to categorize people’s attention when shown video evidence of an event. The data from Dr. Granot can explain why video evidence in court, when prosecutors believe it shows there is a clearly guilty defendant, can leave the jury in question of what actually happened. Each person dividing their attention differently can result in mixed views of what events actually took place.
In this case of Officer Yanez vs. Castile, the jurors could be used as an example of how Dr. Granot’s research can be applied to yield factual results. In cases like this, it would be interesting to see how Dr. Granot’s research could connect to give facts about where each juror was giving their attention and how it led them to side with the person that they did.
In the article, Shannon McMurray, a Tulsa lawyer, explained that videos can be “awesome, but it’s really misleading, and it can make [the case] worse than if you don’t have a camera” depending on the attention and background of the jurors. Some, like David Harris, a law professor, believe that “videos have changed things [in the legal system], but it is naive to think that they solve all of our problems or get us all the way home on the question of guilt or innocence.” There are mixed views in the legal systems on how and when videos should be used as evidence, which is why neurological research, like that of Dr. Granot’s, can be used to provide a scientific basis for why these results are occurring.
References
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, pp. 2196–2208., doi:10.1037/a0037893.
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