[Note: Friends of Justice is a personal blog. I speak only for myself.]
“While cases like these often feature wrongdoing by individual prosecutors and police officers, a new study suggests the problem is deeper. After analyzing 50 wrongful convictions and other investigative failures, Texas State criminologists Kim Rossmo and Joycelyn Pollock found that confirmation bias, reinforced by groupthink and strong incentives to quickly identify the perpetrators of highly publicized crimes, figures prominently in the mistakes that send innocent people to prison.
“Once police decide they have the right suspect, Rossmo and Pollock report in the Northeastern University Law Review, they tend to develop “tunnel vision” that obscures other possibilities. They become focused on building a case against the person they’ve decided is guilty, ignore or minimize countervailing evidence, and interpret ambiguous evidence in a way that supports their initial conclusions.”
Read the article by Jacob Sullum in Reason.
