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Police video helped Laquan McDonald’s killer get convicted, but it could have helped him get acquitted
In what was most likely the second-biggest legal story of last week, a jury in Chicago convicted former officer Jason Van Dyke of second-degree murder, an exceedingly rare conviction for a police officer. Many were not expecting the guilty verdict, despite seemingly clear video evidence that Van Dyke shot Laquan 16 times as Laquan, armed with a 3-inch pocket knife, walked away. He continued shooting after the 17-year-old was lying on the ground, dying. During the trial, “Officer Jason Van Dyke asked 12 jurors to trust his memory, not a widely circulated dashboard camera video, to know what really happened,” writes Mitch Smith for the New York Times. “The jurors chose the video.” [Mitch Smith / New York Times]
The jurors said they relied heavily on the video to reach their verdict, watching it over and over. “They were not swayed by Officer Van Dyke’s testimony that Laquan targeted him with a menacing stare, made a threatening movement with a knife and tried to get up off the ground after being shot. None of those claims were backed by the video.” During his testimony, Van Dyke sought to explain the gaps between the video and his story. “That video may not show it, but that wasn’t from my perspective,” Officer Van Dyke said when pressed by prosecutors about his decision to continue shooting after pausing briefly. “I was coming at it from a completely different angle.” [Mitch Smith / New York Times]
Even though jurors ultimately chose to believe their eyes over Van Dyke’s testimony, similar cases have gone very differently. “It’s worth remembering that the most famous video of police violence, the Rodney King video, recorded in 1991” did not lead to convictions, writes Ethan Zuckerman for the MIT Technology Review. “While the video showed the assault on King, it also showed him charging at officers after being Tased.” The lawyers for the Los Angeles Police Department claimed that this behavior justified the use of extreme force. Video of Eric Garner being choked to death by an NYPD officer, while he shouted “I can’t breathe,” failed to lead to that officer’s indictment. Shootings of Alton Sterling, Philando Castile, and Samuel Dubose, all caught on video, did not bring about criminal convictions. Officers involved in Sterling’s death weren’t even charged. [Ethan Zuckerman / MIT Technology Review]
Perspective matters. Videos that do lead to accountability are often civilian video, not official police video from dashboard cameras or body cameras. In 1981, an MIT grad student named Steve Mann started wearing a computer and a head-mounted camera throughout the day, he was thinking about a world in which cameras would become ubiquitous, where millions of people with connected cameras could collectively hold authorities accountable for abuses. He called this phenomenon “sousveillance,” watching from below. [Ethan Zuckerman / MIT Technology Review]
An interactive feature in the New York Times dramatically demonstrates the difference that perspective can make when watching video: what looks like a chaotic and violent encounter turns out to be a friendly dance. [Timothy Williams, James Thomas, Samuel Jacoby, and Damien Cave / New York Times] (Curator note: This link is worth a click.)
“It’s not the end-all, be-all,” said Milwaukee District Attorney John T. Chisholm, who used body camera video in the case against Dominique Heaggan-Brown, a police officer who fatally shot Sylville K. Smith last year. Chisholm said he would never have brought criminal charges in the first place without the video, but it was not enough for a conviction: Heaggan-Brown was acquitted. In that case, like many others, the same video was used for diametrically opposed purposes. “Slowed-down, frame-by-frame video was used to show that the suspect had no weapon when he was shot a second time,” according to the New York Times. “The same video, played at regular speed, revealed a scene that was swift, confusing and chaotic, a boost to the defense.” And when videos do not fully show critical moments, jurors must fill in the blanks, which many do in favor of police officers. [Julie Bosman, Mitch Smith, and Michael Wines / New York Times]
In many cases, a “calculated, rather than an impulsive, crime can be the difference between ‘lethal injection and a lesser sentence.’” John Lewis was found guilty of murdering a police officer in 2007 during a robbery and was sentenced to death, but his lawyers appealed, arguing that slowing down the video evidence used in the trial made jurors more likely to believe that the killing was premeditated. This argument failed, but research shows that perhaps it should have succeeded. One group of researchers has found that when jurors are shown slowed-down footage, “they are more likely to think the person on screen has acted deliberately,” writes Homa Khaleeli for The Guardian. “While a slow-motion replay may allow jurors to see what is taking place more clearly, it also creates ‘a false impression that the actor had more time to premeditate’ than when the events are viewed in real time.” In a series of experiments, scientists showed participants footage of an attempted armed robbery in which a shop assistant gets shot; those who watched the footage slowed down were three times more likely to convict. [Homa Khaleeli / The Guardian]
Another study asked whether screen size affects jurors’ perceptions of information presented during trials. The researchers manipulated video image size as well as defendant emotion level presented during testimony, the defendant-victim relationship, and the strength of the evidence. Larger screens were found to accentuate what was presented––they made strong evidence seem stronger and weak evidence seem weaker. They conclude that attorneys presenting video images should recognize that jurors “may evaluate videotaped trial evidence differently as a function of how video evidence is presented.” [W.P. Heath and B.D. Grannemann / Behavioral Sciences & the Law]
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