The Dish

Lara Bazelon discusses the problem of false eyewitness testimony, which puts more innocent people in prison than you might think:

[A]ccording to Brandon Garrett, a law professor at the University of Virginia and the author of Convicting the Innocent, eyewitness misidentifications have played a leading role in nearly 75 percent of 250 convictions overturned by DNA evidence between 1989 and 2010. In more than one-half of those exonerations, the eyewitnesses start off unsure, a “glaring sign” of potential trouble as Garrett puts it, yet appear to become increasingly certain over time. This often corresponds with police practices like suggestive photo arrays, lineups, and even well-intentioned comments like “Good job!” after a witness makes an identification, however tentative. All of this can cause “contamination” of memory, Garrett says so that “there is no way to know after the fact whether the eyewitness could have actually picked the person with any degree of confidence.” …

[C]ourts, prosecutors, and juries routinely take eyewitness testimony at face value. Garrett describes as “toothless” the standard the Supreme Court set in 1977 for admitting eyewitness identifications as evidence: “Even in cases with eyewitnesses who were drunk, half blind, observing someone at night, from a distance, it is almost impossible to find examples where appellate judges say it was error” to allow jurors to hear their testimony, he says.

Update from several readers:

In her article, Bazelon identifies what is a serious flaw in the criminal justice system in the US, but she is pointing to what is only one part (eyewitness testimony) of the larger problem that is police and prosecutorial misconduct.

We all saw how police and the local District Attorney in Sanford “investigated” the killing of Trayvon Martin as a justifiable homicide, allowed Zimmerman to wash evidence from his hands, etc. So it was not surprising (though a sickening miscarriage of justice) that the murderer walked free. Eyewitness testimony in that case also was conflicted and unreliable, but for different reasons. But in the end, Kash Register, the wrongly convicted innocent man in Bazelon’s story, was exonerated by, wait for it …. eyewitness testimony that was ignored and not followed up on by the police and prosecutors.

Another:

This was one of my favorite episodes of This American Life. It directly relates to a reader update on police malpractice. In the case of this episode, it was accidental.

The first act is about a cop who was absolutely convinced that a woman committed a crime, and then after revisiting the case years down the road discovered it was his fault that she confessed.  He now gives presentations to police departments to educate cops not make the same mistakes he did.

The second act is about a guy who everyone in town believed (and some still believe despite another man being convicted of the crime) he was guilty, but he never allowed the cops to interview him.

Another:

In response to your post, I thought y’all might enjoy Dr. Elizabeth Loftus’ plenary talk from the Psychonomic Society’s 2013 annual meeting on memory and false memory. She is one of the, if not THE, pioneers in this area of research. Her talk was really great – she covered faulty eyewitness testimony, did a small example of studies of this nature with the audience, and talked about her more recent research on testimony from a period of great stress. She worked with SERE participants and their doctor and it’s fascinating. Here’s the link to the whole video. It shows her presentation side by side. For the mini study example, see around 27:10. For the SERE discussion, see around 37:30. For her discussion on doctoring political memories, see around 48:30. Finally, she talks about implanting false memory, and it’s terrifying (around 53:30). She poses the question of whether this type of research is leading is in an ethical direction.

Daniele Quercia examines what city-dwellers like and dislike about their surroundings:

With colleagues at the University of Cambridge, I worked on a web game called urbangems.org. In it, you are shown 10 pairs of urban scenes of London, and for each pair you need to choose which one you consider to be more beautiful, quiet and happy. Based on user votes, one is able to rank all urban scenes by beauty, quiet and happiness. Those scenes have been studied at Yahoo Labs, image processing tools that extract colour histograms. The amount of greenery is associated with all three peaceful qualities: green is often found in scenes considered to be beautiful, quiet and happy. We then ran more sophisticated image analysis tools that extracted patches from our urban scenes and found that red-brick houses and public gardens also make people happy.

On the other hand, cars were the visual elements most strongly associated with sadness. In rich countries, car ownership is becoming unfashionable, and car-sharing and short-term hiring is becoming more popular. Self-driving cars such as those being prototyped by Google will be more common and will be likely to be ordered via the kind of mobile apps similar to the ones we use for ordering taxis nowadays. This will result into optimised traffic flows, fewer cars, and more space for alternative modes of transportation and for people on foot. Cities will experience transformations similar to those New York has experienced since 2007. During these few years, new pedestrian plazas and hundreds of miles of bike lanes were created in the five boroughs, creating spaces for public art installations and recreation. And it’s proved popular with local businesses too, boosting the local economy in areas where cyclists are freer to travel.

(Photo of London garden square via Charlie Dave)

Twenty years after MTV first aired Nirvana: Unplugged, Andrew Wallace Chamings revisits the “unforgettable document of raw tension and artistic genius.” He remarks that “there is no way of listening to Unplugged in New York without invoking death; it’s in every note, but that doesn’t mean that it’s not a masterpiece”:

[Their rendition of Lead Belly’s “Where Did You Sleep Last Night”] ranks among the greatest single rock performances of all time. All night, Cobain, while never quite able to hide his anxiety—sniping at band mates, grimacing and grasping at half smoked cigarettes—has remained definitely present and in control. That is, until the very end, when he briefly loses it.

For the final line, “I would shiver the whole night through,” Cobain jumps up an octave, forcing him to strain so far he screams and cracks. He hits the word “shiver” so hard that the band stops, as if a fight broke out at a sitcom wedding. Next he howls the word “whole” and then does something very strange in the brief silence that follows, something that’s hard to describe:

He opens his piercingly blue eyes so suddenly it feels like someone or something else is looking out under the bleached lank fringe, with a strange clarity. Then he finishes the song. When Neil Young first watched the performance, he described that final note of Cobain’s as “Unearthly, like a werewolf, unbelievable.” Four months later Cobain would quote Young in a scrawled letter to “Boddah,” his imaginary childhood friend, before shooting himself in the head with a shotgun at his Seattle home on Lake Washington Boulevard: “It’s better to burn out than to fade away.”

Judy Berman also can’t shake the feeling of tragedy:

Watching Unplugged for the first time in at least a decade, I was surprised at how different it felt to me as an adult — as someone who, while still a Nirvana fan, is no longer half-consciously displacing truckloads of adolescent loneliness and alienation onto a dead rock star. It’s not that it’s a “worse” performance than I remembered; the acoustic constraint alone imposes a mood of hushed intimacy that is entirely different from the loud, chaotic live shows Nirvana was known for. The wrenching string arrangements, the Meat Puppets guest appearance, the covers that transformed great David Bowie and Vaselines and Leadbelly songs — all are powerful. But still, what comes across to me in Cobain’s performance, and especially in his interactions with the audience, is not so much sorrow or wistfulness as flatness and detachment. Until the last two songs, “All Apologies” and “Where Did You Sleep Last Night,” which truly do reverberate with emotion, Unplugged shows us that performer from Cobain’s suicide note — the one who is struggling to connect with his audience but can’t shake the feeling that he’s punching a clock as he takes the stage to greet them.

The modest Vatican shake-up announced today is striking for a couple of reasons. The first is that the arch-conservative American, Raymond Burke, is no longer a member of the Congregation of Bishops, which has great influence on finding the future leaders of the church. Burke is, after Dolan, the most reactionary of the American bishops, and an architect of the very Benedict XVI policy of putting social and sexual issues at the obsessive forefront of the church’s mission. Only last week, he gave an interview to the hardline Catholic EWTN television channel, saying of the new Pope:

“One gets the impression, or it’s interpreted this way in the media, that he thinks we’re talking too much about abortion, too much about the integrity of marriage as between one man and one woman. But we can never talk enough about that.”

Oh yes you can, as the Pope has explicitly said. Burke is, like Benedict, a fan of ornate vestments and has aired the possibility of denying communion to politicians who do not follow to the letter the hierarchy’s views on faith and morals. It seems to me that the latter is one reason for his being sidelined. If you want to know why, read Evangelii Gaudium, section 47:

The Church is called to be the house of the Father, with doors always wide open. One concrete sign of such openness is that our church doors should always be open, so that if someone, moved by the Spirit, comes there looking for God, he or she will not find a closed door. There are other doors that should not be closed either. Everyone can share in some way in the life of the Church; everyone can be part of the community, nor should the doors of the sacraments be closed for simply any reason. This is especially true of the sacrament which is itself “the door”: baptism. The Eucharist, although it is the fullness of sacramental life, is not a prize for the perfect but a powerful medicine and nourishment for the weak. 

The second reason for this shake-up being notable is an absence. Where is Cardinal Dolan? How odd is it that the Cardinal of New York is basically a non-entity in Francis’ church. Francis has picked another American, Seán Patrick O’Malley, to be part of his new council of eight global cardinals, and has also picked Archbishop Wuerl, a pragmatist in Washington DC, for the Congregation of Bishops. Dolan? Nowhere to be seen.

Know hope.

Last Friday, Beyoncé stunned her fans and even the music industry by dropping her new album exclusively on iTunes for download, selling 80,000 copies within three hours and reportedly causing the online store to crash. In the first three days, sales hit 800,000. Angela Watercutter considers what Beyonce’s brilliant move means for the future:

She announced the album, posted a “Surprise!” on Instagram and gave fans enough material to keep them busy for days. Then she dropped the mic. Thanks to whatever death-to-snitches plan she had in place, word of the album never got out and nothing leaked. Even the NSA can’t keep a secret that well. In the annals of minimal-marketing marketing, it was a pretty smart move, particularly for an artist who is obsessively discussed on social media but engages with it selectively. (She has pretty active Tumblr and Instagram accounts, but hasn’t tweeted to her 13 million followers since August.)

Of course, this wouldn’t work for every artist. Only someone with albums as highly anticipated as Beyoncé’s can do this. Like her husband Jay Z, who can pretty much guarantee one million people will download his album via a Samsung app, she knows people are going to find her record no matter how she promotes it. So why not let everyone else spread the gospel for you? Or, as one smart tweet put it, “Beyoncé doesn’t need publicity. Publicity needs Beyoncé.”

It’s all very selfie and instagrammy. And perfect. Claire Suddath notes the precedent set by Radiohead and David Bowie, who also released music online with minimal promotion:

But there’s a difference between what Radiohead and David Bowie did and what happened today: Beyoncé is still considered a pop star, and pop music relies heavily on the traditional marketing machine sponsored by record labels. The stars begin with a hit single, hopefully follow it up with another hit single, release an album and perform at some heavily watched live event like the Grammys or on American Idol, launch a world tour, and then reap the profit. They leave it to the rock stars and hip-hop artists to experiment with free downloads and unofficial mixtapes.

Beyoncé is changing all that. Her new album doesn’t have an obvious hit single (her last one, 4, didn’t have one, either) but that seems to be by design. Beyoncé is a polished work of electronic-inspired dance pop—peppered with Jay-Z and Blue Ivy cameos—yet it’s made for a listening world dominated by curated playlists rather than preprogrammed, Clear Channel-style broadcasts. This is the work of an artist who’s graduated beyond the usual pop star marketing machine and started making music that’s free of the three-and-a-half minute hook-heavy formula that makes a big hit. And by forcing everyone to pay $15.99 for the album now, she might be more successful because of it.

James West argues that “this may well be one of the most climate-friendly major studio releases yet”:

Purchasing “Beyoncé” on iTunes instead of as a CD could result in a greenhouse-gas-emissions savings of between 40 and 80 percent, according to a 2009 study for Intel and Microsoft by researchers from a group drawn from Carnegie Mellon University, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and Stanford.