january the eighteenth one thousand nine hundred and ninety one
in a small
bedroom community
to tell his teenage son and his five friends that it was time for them to stop horsing around on the front lawn and on the sidewalk to get home
finish their schoolwork and prepare themselves for bed
and as the father was administering these instructions a car drove by slowly
from the front passenger window
and the car sped off
they considered all the usual culprits and in less than twenty four hours they had selected their suspect
francisco carrillo a seventeen year old kid
who lived about two or three blocks away from where the shooting occurred
they found photos of him
that was all a preliminaryhearing judge had to
in the investigation that followed before the actual trial each of the other five teenagers was shown
photographs the same photo array
the reason we 're not sure absolutely is because of the nature of evidence preservation in our judicialsystem but that 's another whole tedx talk for later
all six of the teenagers testified and indicated the identifications they had made in the photo array
he was convicted he was sentenced to life imprisonment
so what 's wrong
straightforward fair trial full investigation
oh yes no gun was ever found
and mr carrillo 's alibi
which of those parents here in the room might not lie
concerning the whereabouts of your son or daughter
which he has consistently for twenty one years
so what 's the problem
the problems actually for this kind of case
involving human memory
on the basis of later dna analysis
and you know that over three quarters of all of those cases of exoneration
during the trial that convicted
the other comes from an interesting aspect of human memory that 's related to various brain functions but i can sum up for the sake of brevity here
bits and pieces of the entire experience in front of us
and they 're stored in different parts of the brain
so now when it 's important
we have an incomplete we have a partial store
the brain fills in information that was not there
not originally stored from inference from speculation
from sources of information that came to you as the observer after the observation
that was part of the instigation for a group of appeal attorneys
led by an amazinglawyer named ellen eggers
they retained me as a forensic neurophysiologist
because i had expertise in eyewitness memory identification which obviously makes sense for this case
the nature of human night vision
in this carrillo case
one of the things that suddenly strikes you is that the investigating officers said the lighting was good
but this occurred in mid january in the northern hemisphere
at seven p m
the screen right here the only lighting in that area had to come from artificial sources
and that 's where i go out and i do the actualreconstruction of the scene with photometers with various measures of illumination and various other measures of color perception along with special cameras and high speed film
looking at the car going by and shooting
this is looking directly across the street from where they were standing
this is looking down to the east where the shooting vehicle sped off
as you can see it is at best
no one 's going to call this well lit good lighting and in fact as nice as these pictures are and the reason we take them is i knew i was going to have to testify in court and a picture is worth
more than a thousand words when you 're trying to communicate numbers abstract concepts like lux the internationalmeasurement of illumination
so these are some of the pictures that in fact i used when i testified
but more importantly were to me as a scientist are those readings the photometer readings which i can
and from my readings
and that there would be only scotopic vision which means there would be very little resolution what we call boundary or edge detection and that furthermore because the eyes would have been totally dilated under this light the depth of field the distance at which you can focus and see details
would have been less than eighteen inches away
i testified to that to the court and while the judge was very attentive it had been a very very long hearing
and here i became a bit audacious
and i turned and i asked the judge i said your honor i think you should go out and look at the scene yourself now i may have used a tone which was more like a dare than a request
that he said yes i will
a shocker in american jurisprudence
so in fact we found the same identical conditions we reconstructed the entire thing again he came out with an entire brigade of sheriff 's officers to protect him in this community
so he stood a few feet from the curb
we had a car that came by
same identical car as described by the teenagers
this is the car thirty feet away from the judge
there 's an arm sticking out of the passenger side and pointed back at you
that 's thirty feet away
there 's fifteen feet
at this point i became a little concerned
this judge is someone you 'd never want to play poker with
he turned to me and he says is there anything else you want me to look at
and i want it to come and i want it to stop
right in front of you three to four feet away and i want
the passenger to extend his hand with a black object and point it right at you and you can look at it as long as you want
and that 's what he saw
furthermore the roof of the
car is causing what we call a shadow cloud inside the car which is making it darker
and this is three to four feet away
why did i take the risk i knew that the depth of field was eighteen inches or less
three to four feet it might as well have been
a football field away
there was a few more days of evidence that was heard at the end
and furthermore he released mr carrillo so that he could aid in the preparation of his own defense if the prosecutiondecided to retry
he his girlfriend was pregnant when he went to trial
he and his son are both attending cal state long beach right now taking classes
first of all there 's a long history of antipathy between science and the law
in american jurisprudence
over decades of experience as a forensic expert
the opposing council always fight it and oppose it
one suggestion is that all of us become much more attuned to the necessity
i think one large step toward that is more requirements with all due respect to the law schools
of science technology engineering
think about how we select our judges in this country it 's very different than most other cultures
the caution that all of us have to have i constantly have to remind myself about just how accurate are the memories that we know are true
that we believe in
there is decades of research
examples and examples of cases like this
where individuals
really really believe none of those teenagers who identified
none of them thought they couldn 't see the person 's face
we all have to be very careful
all our memories are reconstructed memories
they are the product of what we originallyexperienced and everything that 's happened afterwards
that the accuracy of our memories is not measured in how vivid they are
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