On November 17, a video from a crash involving a police car in Connecticut was released to the public. The video shows the last moments in the lives of two young people in a car hit by a police cruiser moving 94 miles per hour with no siren and no flashing lights. It was carried on local news broadcasts and quickly circulated on the Internet. If we didn’t have this critical footage, there would be no contemporaneous visual record of the events immediately preceding the accident. But what will jurors and judges make of this ostensibly objective and probative visual evidence?
My research and teaching focuses on visual persuasion — the use of images to communicate and create their own meaning in legal settings. Together with Neal Feigenson, I recently published a book on the topic, entitled “Law on Display.” The case in Connecticut provides a striking example of the potential power of visual evidence in a criminal case, and the many ways seemingly simple images can be interpreted and presented in a courtroom.
To test the public response to the video, I paged through reader comments in a New Haven Register story featuring the video.
Those who blame the officers outnumber those who blame the young people three to one. Some responders want to split the blame; others advise waiting for the evidence to be tested in court. A few speculate about what might be discerned from the tape about the driver of the cruiser that collided with the turning car– that he must have been looking back through his mirror, not forward, to have missed seeing the car. Many comments express the writers’ common sense presumptions about the behavior of those involved – teenagers drinking, teenagers out late at night buying cigarettes, cops “drag racing,” cops “abusing their power” by not obeying traffic laws themselves.