Seattle University Collaborative Projects - International Academy of ...

Neal Feigenson, Quinnipiac University (neal.feigenson@quinnipiac.edu)Demonstrative evidence is typically offered to represent external reality, but in a handful of caseslitigants have presented visual or auditory exhibits that purport to enable judges and jurors toexperience for themselves what it’s like to have the litigants’ subjective perceptions (such asimpaired vision due to accident or malpractice). These simulations may be derived fromlitigants’ self-reports, clinical testing, or physical measurement of their sensory apparatus. Eachtype of simulation makes a different sort of claim to provide reliable knowledge about thelitigant’s subjective experience. Yet almost all have been readily admitted as mere visual aidsrather than substantive evidence, based on litigants’ testimony that they fairly and accuratelyrepresent what the litigant sees or hears. This paper describes the various types of simulations,analyzes their epistemological bases, and argues that applying the same minimal evidentiarystandard to all, regardless of their provenance, tends to discourage careful inquiry into theirvastly differing probative values and judgmental risks.People Often See What They Want in Visual Evidence – and in “Nonvisual”Evidence, TooDan Kahan, Yale University (dan.kahan@yale.edu)I will review experimental evidence of how cultural cognition – the tendency of individuals toconform perceptions of risk and other legally relevant facts to group commitments – bears on thereliability of “visual evidence,” particularly videotaped encounters between police andpedestrians. This dynamic, the evidence suggests, can certainly distort what jurors of opposingcultural outlooks see when they observe videotape evidence of such encounters. But it can alsodistort what others – including judges and members of the public – expect jurors to see, andaccordingly distort (in the case of judges, in particular) the decisions about whether jurydeliberations are even necessary in particular cases and (particularly in the case of the public)their evaluations of whether jury verdicts that rest on jury assessments of visual evidence arecorrect and legitimate. These things are all true for visual evidence, I will suggest. But they arenot really any less true of any other form of evidence that relates to facts that are suffused withsocial meanings that tend to divide citizens of diverse outlooks.The Hidden Consequences of Racial Salience in Videotaped Interrogations andConfessionsJennifer Ratcliff, State University of New York at Brockport (jratclif@brockport.edu)G. Daniel Lassiter, Ohio University (lassiter@ohio.edu)419