{"id":70941,"date":"2009-12-08T09:15:00","date_gmt":"2009-12-08T14:15:00","guid":{"rendered":"tag:criminaljustice.change.org:\/\/56cd73c04014545c55490d999b75520d"},"modified":"2009-12-08T09:15:00","modified_gmt":"2009-12-08T14:15:00","slug":"do-you-see-what-you-believe","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/70941","title":{"rendered":"Do You See What You Believe?"},"content":{"rendered":"

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On November 17,\u00a0 a video from a crash involving a police car in Connecticut was released to the public.\u00a0 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.\u00a0\u00a0 If we didn\u2019t have this critical footage, there would be no contemporaneous visual record of the events immediately preceding the accident.\u00a0 But what will jurors and judges make of this ostensibly objective and probative visual evidence?<\/p>\n

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 \u201cLaw on Display<\/a>.\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

To test the public response to the video, I paged through reader comments in a New Haven Register story featuring the video<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Those who blame the officers outnumber those who blame the young people three to one.\u00a0 Some responders want to split the blame; others advise waiting for the evidence to be tested in court.\u00a0 A few speculate about what might be discerned from the tape about the driver of the cruiser that collided with the turning car\u2013 that he must have been looking back through his mirror, not forward, to have missed seeing the car.\u00a0 Many comments express the writers\u2019 common sense presumptions about the behavior of those involved \u2013 teenagers drinking, teenagers out late at night buying cigarettes, cops \u201cdrag racing,\u201d cops \u201cabusing their power\u201d by not obeying traffic laws themselves. <\/p>\n

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Some readers clearly see what they want to believe; others believe what they see.\u00a0 Some raise perceptual questions \u2013\u00a0 how drivers\u2019 best judgments about turning could be impaired, how hard it was for the victims to gauge the exceptionally high speed of the oncoming cruiser, whether the officer could see the victims\u2019 turn signal (if any) through the halos cast by their headlights.\u00a0 No one notes the slight bend in the road and the small hill that might have affected spatial judgments and no one asks about the recording itself. The technology on the three dashcam equipped cars of the Milford Police Department is state of the art technology<\/a>. Why is the picture in black and white and why is there no audio?<\/p>\n

The video, replayed in real time, may not be the only visual evidence that is seen and considered in court.\u00a0 Animated accident reconstructions may be offered to show what the drivers of the three vehicles could have seen in the moments just before the collision. Will these supplant the video picture in the minds of decision makers — pictures countering pictures?\u00a0 Or will the defense lawyers, taking a page from the Rodney King defendants\u2019 strategy, attempt to alter the jury\u2019s reading of the tape by showing it in ways that seem to reduce the police officer\u2019s culpability?\u00a0 One local broadcast, on Fox News 61<\/a>, did just that \u2013 either as a deliberate effort to lessen the tape\u2019s impact or as a matter of news-as-entertainment editing.<\/p>\n

Fox\u2019s crosscut narrative sequence invites viewers to reconstruct the story themselves and breaks the \u201cseduction\u201d of the single viewpoint of the dashcam footage; and like the Rodney King defense freeze-framing of the tape of King\u2019s beating, Fox\u2019s slower version of the crash lessens its horror.\u00a0\u00a0 Finally, it is hard to know whether this dashcam video will join the many jurors might have seen on YouTube, becoming another example of a genre, or whether, it will seem especially close to home because there doesn\u2019t seem to be much social difference between the police and these victims.<\/p>\n

On all of these levels and many more, interpreting the video may turn out to be much more complicated than appears at first glance.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On November 17,\u00a0 a video from a crash involving a police car in Connecticut was released to the public.\u00a0 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":414,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-70941","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/70941","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/414"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=70941"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/70941\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=70941"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=70941"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=70941"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}