In one respect, they were. On “matched” senders, the seasoned interrogators were perfect. You or I would probably come in at 70 or 75 percent on that set of tapes. But everyone in Levine’s group of highly experienced experts got every matched sender right. On mismatched senders, however, their performance was abysmal: they got 20 percent right. And on the subcategory of sincere-acting liars, they came in at 14 percent—a score so low that it ought to give chills to anyone who ever gets hauled into an interrogation room with an FBI agent. When they are confronted with Blushing Sally—the easy case—they are flawless. But when it comes to the Amanda Knoxes and Bernie Madoffs of the world, they are hapless.
This is distressing because we don’t need law-enforcement experts to help us with matched strangers. We’re all good at knowing when these kinds of people are misleading us or telling us the truth. We need help with mismatched strangers—the difficult cases. A trained interrogator ought to be adept at getting beneath the confusing signals of demeanor, at understanding that when Nervous Nelly overexplains and gets defensive, that’s who she is—someone who overexplains and gets defensive. The police officer ought to be the person who sees the quirky, inappropriate girl in a culture far different from her own say “Ta-dah” and realize that she’s just a quirky girl in a culture far different from her own. But that’s not what we get. Instead, the people charged with making determinations of innocence and guilt seem to be as bad as or even worse than the rest of us when it comes to the hardest cases.
Is this part of the reason for wrongful convictions? Is the legal system constitutionally incapable of delivering justice to the mismatched? When a judge makes a bail decision and badly underperforms a computer, is this why? Are we sending perfectly harmless people to prison while they await trial simply because they don’t look right? We all accept the flaws and inaccuracies of institutional judgment when we believe that those mistakes are random. But Tim Levine’s research suggests that they aren’t random—that we have built a world that systematically discriminates against a class of people who, through no fault of their own, violate our ridiculous ideas about transparency. The Amanda Knox story deserves to be retold not because it was a once-in-a-lifetime crime saga—a beautiful woman, a picturesque Italian hilltop town, a gruesome murder. It deserves retelling because it happens all the time.
“Her eyes didn’t seem to show any sadness, and I remember wondering if she could have been involved,” one of Meredith Kercher’s friends said.
Amanda Knox heard years of this—perfect strangers pretending to know who she was based on the expression on her face.
“There is no trace of me in the room where Meredith was murdered,” Knox says, at the end of the Amanda Knox documentary. “But you’re trying to find the answer in my eyes.…You’re looking at me. Why? These are my eyes. They’re not objective evidence.”
1 Here’s another example: Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, one of the two Chechen brothers who planted a series of deadly bombs at the Boston Marathon in 2013. The chief issue in Tsarnaev’s trial was whether he would escape the death penalty. The prosecutor, Nadine Pellegrini, argued strongly that he shouldn’t, because he felt no remorse for his actions. At one point Pellegrini showed the jury a photograph of Tsarnaev in his cell, giving the finger to the video camera in the corner. “He had one last message to send,” she said, calling Tsarnaev “unconcerned, unrepentant, and unchanged.” In Slate magazine, on the eve of the verdict, Seth Stevenson wrote:
And though it’s risky to read too deeply into slouches and tics, Tsarnaev certainly hasn’t made much effort to appear chastened or regretful before the jury. The closed-circuit cameras that were broadcasting from the courtroom to the media room Tuesday were not high-resolution enough that I can 100 percent swear by this, but: I’m pretty sure that after Pellegrini showed that photo of him flipping the bird, Tsarnaev smirked.
Sure enough, Tsarnaev was found guilty and sentenced to death. Afterward, ten members of the twelve-person jury said they believed he had felt no remorse.
But as psychologist Lisa Feldman Barrett points out, all of this discussion of whether Tsarnaev did or did not regret his actions is a perfect example of the pitfalls of transparency. The jury assumed that whatever Tsarnaev felt in his heart would be automatically posted on his face, in a way that matched American ideas about how emotions are supposed to be displayed. But Tsarnaev wasn’t American. In her book How Emotions Are Made, Barrett writes:
In the Boston Marathon Bombing case, if Tsarnaev felt remorse for his deeds, what would it have looked like? Would he have openly cried? Begged his victims for forgiveness? Expounded on the error of his ways? Perhaps, if he were following American stereotypes for expressing remorse, or if this were a trial in a Hollywood movie. But Tsarnaev is a young man of Muslim faith from Chechnya.…Chechen culture expects men to be stoic in the face of adversity. If they lose a battle, they should bravely accept defeat, a mindset known as the “Chechen wolf.” So if Tsarnaev felt remorse, he might well have remained stony-faced.
2 Knox’s list of lovers wasn’t what it seemed, either. In an effort to intimidate her, the Italian police lied to Knox and told her she was HIV positive. Knox, afraid and alone in her cell, wrote a list of her past sexual partners to work out how this could possibly be true.
3 There is an endless amount of this kind of thing. For the prosecutor in the case, the telling moment was when he took Knox into the kitchen to look at the knife drawer, to see if anything was missing. “She started hitting the palms of her hands on her ears. As if there was the memory of a noise, a sound, a scream. Meredith’s scream. Undoubtedly, I started to suspect Amanda.”
Or this: At dinner with Meredith’s friends in a restaurant, Amanda suddenly burst into song. “But what drew laughs in Seattle got embarrassed looks in Perugia,” she writes. “It hadn’t dawned on me that the same quirks my friends at home found endearing could actually offend people who were less accepting of differences.”
4 “What’s compelling to me about Amanda Knox is that it was her slight offness that did her in, the everyday offness to be found on every schoolyard and in every workplace,” the critic Tom Dibblee wrote in perceptive essays about the case. “This is the slight sort of offness that rouses muttered suspicion and gossip, the slight sort of offness that courses through our daily lives and governs who we choose to affiliate ourselves with and who we choose to distance ourselves from.”
Chapter Eight
Case Study:
The Fraternity Party
1.
Prosecution: And at some point on your way over to Kappa Alpha house, did you observe anything unusual?
Jonsson: Yes.
P: What did you see?
Jonsson: We observed a man on top of a—or a person on top of another person, I should say.
P: And where was that?
Jonsson: Very close to the Kappa Alpha house.
Palo Alto, California. January 18, 2015. Sometime around midnight. Two Swedish graduate students are cycling across the campus of Stanford University on their way to a fraternity party. They see what looks like two people, lying on the ground, just outside a fraternity house where a party is full swing. They slow down so as not to disturb the couple. “We thought that it was their personal moment,” one of the students, Peter Jonsson, would say when he testified in court. As they drew closer, they saw that the man was on top. And beneath the man was a young woman.