I don’t read many books more than once — my dog-eared copy of W.O. Mitchell’s Who Has Seen the Wind being the notable exception. But after I read the first crime fiction work of Italian novelist Giancarloa Carofiglio I just couldn’t get it out of my mind.
It was a peculiar coincidence that on the day in September that I retrieved it from my bookshelves for a second reading that the New York Times reported the imminent death by injection of convicted murderer Troy Davis in Georgia. It seems patently unsurprising that Davis is black.
In Carofiglio’s brilliant novel, attorney Guido Guerreri, fighting his own personal demons, finds himself defending an African man accused of the murder of a child in a small town in southern Italy. The fictional murder has some commonalities with the shooting of a police officer who was moonlighting as a security guard when he was shot in the face in a parking lot one night 22 years ago. In neither case could the prosecution provide physical evidence that tied the accused with the crime — both relied primarily on eyewitness testimony and circumstantial evidence.
Davis was put to death by lethal injection when no last-minute legal intervention was able to save him, as it had three previous times. His last real chance to avoid death ended in June, when “a federal district judge in Savannah said Mr. Davis’s legal team had failed to demonstrate his innocence,” according to the Times. Despite the admission by some witnesses that they had provided false testimony in the original trial, and reports that the Georgia parole board was split in its support of the death sentence, Davis was executed.
As I reread Involuntary Witness, I was once again moved by Guer-reri’s concluding arguments in a case that he had once thought to be hopeless.
He coolly explains the difficulties with eyewitness testimony and explains how easily witnesses can be lead to adjust their beliefs in what they saw by police and prosecutors, none of whom are consciously trying to influence the witnesses’ version of events.
Guerreri quotes Albert Einstein, “It is the theory that determines what we observe,” and a Chinese aphorism, “Two-thirds of what we see is behind our eyes.” He then goes on to explain about perception filters, those pieces of information that determine how we see what we see.
A psychological experiment had the elder brothers and sisters of nine- or 10-year-olds tell their siblings a story of an attempted kidnapping when they were preschool age. The children are told that their mother had been distracted for a moment in a supermarket, at which point a stranger grabbed the child by the hand and headed for the exit. Shouts by the mother caused the culprit to unhand the child and flee.
Months later the children were interviewed. They had become certain that the fictional account had indeed happened and they even added their own details to the story. (I have a very clear preschooler’s “memory” of a nighttime ride in a semi that took my father and I from Calgary to Fernie. It never happened.)
In another test, three groups of university students were shown a film of a woman leaving a grocery store, pushing a cart. A young man approaches from behind, grabs her purse from the cart and flees.
The groups were asked different questions. “Did the thief barge into the woman?” and “In what way did the aggressor push the woman?” were asked of the first two groups. The third was asked to simply tell what they had seen.
Of course, no push or barging had occurred in the film. But 70 per cent of the group responding to the second question described seeing those actions. To the first question, 20 per cent of the respondents said there had been physical contact. Of those in the third group, only 10 per cent said there had been physical contact.
Imagine — even those who were not asked a leading question could not find unanimity in what they saw.
Eyewitness testimony, we all know from personal experience (“Hey, that play was offside!” “No, it wasn’t!”), is questionable at the best of times, effective only when used in conjunction with other evidence. In the absence of other evidence, it’s a terrible excuse to put someone to death.
Lorne Eckersley is the publisher of the Creston Valley Advance.