The Multiple Dimensions of Tunnel Vision - Findley e Scott

Legal Studies Research Paper Series
Paper No. 1023
June 2006

The Multiple Dimensions of Tunnel Vision

In Criminal Cases

Keith A. Findley & Michael S. Scott

This paper can be downloaded without charge from the
Social Science Research Network Electronic Paper Collection at:
http://ssrn.com/abstract=911240

Reprinted with permission of the Wisconsin Law Review, further reproduction forbidden without permission.
THE MULTIPLE DIMENSIONS OF TUNNEL VISION IN

CRIMINAL CASES
KEITH A. FINDLEY* AND MICHAEL S. SCOTT**
INTRODUCTION
The discovery of hundreds of wrongful convictions in the last

fifteen years has shaken up the criminal justice world. Since the advent
of postconviction DNA testing around 1990, more than 170 people
convicted of serious crimes have been exonerated by DNA, a number
off of death row, and most after serving many years in prison.1
Literally hundreds of additional exonerations in the last fifteen years
alone have been based on evidence other than DNA.2 Because DNA
evidence exists in only a small minority of all cases—and is preserved
and available for postconviction testing in an even smaller proportion of
cases—and because innocence is so very difficult to prove
postconviction without DNA, these known exonerations almost surely
reflect only the tip of a very large iceberg.3 These exonerations have
challenged the traditional assumption that the criminal justice system
does all it can to accurately determine guilt, and that erroneous
conviction of the innocent is, as the Supreme Court has assumed,
* Clinical Professor, University of Wisconsin Law School; Co-Director,

Wisconsin Innocence Project. J.D., Yale Law School 1985; B.A., Indiana University
1981. I am grateful to D. Michael Risinger, Richard A. Leo, Meredith Ross, John
Pray, Byron Lichstein, and Frances Reynolds, as well as Ken Hammond and Dennis
Hanson, both of the Wisconsin Department of Justice Division of Law Enforcement
Services, Training & Standards Bureau, for their valuable feedback on drafts of this
Article.
** Clinical Assistant Professor, University of Wisconsin Law School;
Director, Center for Problem-Oriented Policing; former police executive. J.D.,
Harvard Law School 1987; B.A. University of Wisconsin-Madison 1980. I wish to
acknowledge the valuable insights offered by several veteran police investigators and
supervisors, including Deputy Chief Ron Glensor and Commander Steve Pitts, Reno
(Nev.) Police Department; Chief Dan Reynolds, Greer (S.C.) Police Department; Chief
Richard Thomas, Port Washington (Wis.) Police Department; Chief R. Gil
Kerlikowske, Seattle Police Department; Ken Hammond, Wisconsin Department of
Justice Training & Standards Bureau; and Assistant United States Attorney Rita
Rumbelow, Western District of Wisconsin.
1. Innocence Project, www.innocenceproject.org (last visited Feb. 22,
2006).
2. Samuel R. Gross et al., Exonerations in the United States, 1989 Through
2003, 95 J. CRIM. L. & CRIMINOLOGY 523, 523-24 (2005).
3. Id. at 529.
292 WISCONSIN LAW REVIEW
“extremely rare.”4 Further, they have opened a window for scholarly

and institutional inquiry into the causes of wrongful convictions and the
reforms that might prevent such miscarriages of justice in the future.
This burgeoning inquiry has identified many of the recurrent
causes of error, including fallible eyewitness identification evidence and
flawed eyewitness identification procedures, false confessions, jailhouse
snitch testimony, police and prosecutorial misconduct, forensic science
error or fraud, and inadequate defense counsel.5 A theme running
through almost every case, that touches each of these individual causes,
is the problem of tunnel vision.
Tunnel vision is a natural human tendency that has particularly
pernicious effects in the criminal justice system. By tunnel vision, we
mean that “compendium of common heuristics and logical fallacies,” to
which we are all susceptible, that lead actors in the criminal justice
system to “focus on a suspect, select and filter the evidence that will
‘build a case’ for conviction, while ignoring or suppressing evidence
that points away from guilt.”6 This process leads investigators,
prosecutors, judges, and defense lawyers alike to focus on a particular
conclusion and then filter all evidence in a case through the lens
provided by that conclusion.7 Through that filter, all information
supporting the adopted conclusion is elevated in significance, viewed as
consistent with the other evidence, and deemed relevant and probative.8
Evidence inconsistent with the chosen theory is easily overlooked or
dismissed as irrelevant, incredible, or unreliable.9 Properly
understood, tunnel vision is more often the product of the human
condition as well as institutional and cultural pressures, than of
maliciousness or indifference.
Tunnel vision both affects, and is affected by, other flawed
procedures in the criminal justice system. For example, mistaken
eyewitness identifications—the most frequent single cause of wrongful
convictions10—can convince investigators early in a case that a
4. Schlup v. Delo, 513 U.S. 298, 321 (1995).

5. BARRY SCHECK ET AL., ACTUAL INNOCENCE: FIVE DAYS TO EXECUTION
AND OTHER DISPATCHES FROM THE WRONGLY CONVICTED 246 (2000).
6. Dianne L. Martin, Lessons About Justice from the “Laboratory” of
Wrongful Convictions: Tunnel Vision, the Construction of Guilt and Informer
Evidence, 70 UMKC L. REV. 847, 848 (2002).
7. See, e.g., Myrna Raeder, What Does Innocence Have to Do With It?: A
Commentary on Wrongful Convictions and Rationality, 2003 MICH. ST. L. REV. 1315,
1327-28.
8. See, e.g., Martin, supra note 6, at 848.
9. See id.
10. In various studies of wrongful convictions, eyewitness error has been cited
as a contributing factor in anywhere from 60 to 85 percent of all wrongful convictions.
2006:291 Tunnel Vision in Criminal Cases 293
particular individual is the perpetrator. Convinced of guilt,

investigators might then set out to obtain a confession from that
suspect,11 producing apparently inculpatory reactions or statements
from the suspect, or leading investigators to interpret the suspect’s
innocent responses as inculpatory. The process of interrogating an
innocent suspect might even produce a false confession. Police and
prosecutors, convinced of guilt, might recruit or encourage testimony
from unreliable jailhouse snitches, who fabricate stories that the
defendant confessed to them, in hopes that they will benefit in their
own cases from cooperation with authorities.12 Forensic scientists,
aware of the desired result of their analyses, might be influenced—even
unwittingly—to interpret ambiguous data or fabricate results to support
the police theory.13 All of this additional evidence then enters a
feedback loop that bolsters the witnesses’ confidence in the reliability
and accuracy of their incriminating testimony and reinforces the
original assessment of guilt held by police, and ultimately by
prosecutors, courts, and even defense counsel.14
Tunnel vision, in a general sense at least, is a well-recognized
phenomenon in the criminal justice system. Most official inquiries into
specific wrongful convictions have noted the role that tunnel vision
played in those individual cases of injustice.15 For example, former
See SCHECK ET AL., supra note 5, at 246 (finding eyewitness error in 84 percent of the
first sixty-two postconviction DNA exonerations); Gross et al., supra note 2, at 542
(finding eyewitness error in 64 percent of the cases identified in their study of 340
wrongful convictions between 1989 and 2003).
11. When investigators believe a suspect is the perpetrator, their inquiry shifts
from a fact-gathering “interview” to a confession-seeking “interrogation.” In many
departments, police are taught to “interrogate” suspects only when they are satisfied the
suspect is guilty; at that point the objective is obtaining a confession. Various
stratagems are then employed to break the suspect down psychologically and to induce
a confession. See infra Part II.C.1.
12. Martin, supra note 6, at 861.
13. See Peter J. Neufeld, The (Near) Irrelevance of Daubert to Criminal
Justice and Some Suggestions for Reform, 95 AM. J. PUB. HEALTH S107, S111 (2005)
(noting that “examiner bias” produces skewed results in forensic laboratories where, as
is common, “police . . . offer a detailed narrative of the crime and an inventory of
whatever other inculpatory evidence they have against the suspect on the request form
used to order a particular scientific test”); see generally D. Michael Risinger et al., The
Daubert/Kumho Implications of Observer Effects in Forensic Science: Hidden
Problems of Expectation and Suggestion, 90 CAL. L. REV. 1 (2002).
14. See Martin, supra note 6, at 848; George Castelle & Elizabeth F. Loftus,
Misinformation and Wrongful Convictions, in WRONGLY CONVICTED 17, 18-19, 24,
29-30 (Saundra D. Westervelt & John A. Humphrey eds., 2001).
15. Both scholarly and popular accounts of wrongful convictions have also
observed the problem of tunnel vision: “Perhaps the most common fault with criminal
investigations is their failure to explore all the possible suspects. When attention begins
to focus on a single individual, too often the detectives are called off the general hunt to
Illinois Governor George Ryan’s Commission on Capital Punishment

concluded that tunnel vision played a significant role in most of the
thirteen Illinois cases studied in which an innocent person was
sentenced to death before being exonerated and released from death
row.16 The official investigation of the wrongful convictions in
Chicago’s “Ford Heights Four” case also concluded that tunnel vision
was largely to blame.17 Official Canadian governmental inquiries, held
after high-profile exonerations,18 have repeatedly identified tunnel
vision as a significant problem in those cases.19 And the Innocence
go after the single target. Tunnel vision sets in.” BILL KURTIS, THE DEATH PENALTY
ON TRIAL: CRISIS IN AMERICAN JUSTICE 33 (2004); see also Martin, supra note 6, at
849; James McCloskey, Convicting the Innocent, 8 CRIM. JUST. ETHICS 2, 56 (1989).
Even before the problem of wrongful convictions was widely recognized, the American
Bar Association (ABA) and the Association of American Law Schools (AALS)
described the process that can lead to tunnel vision. In a 1966 joint report, the two
organizations observed:
What generally occurs in practice is that at some early point a familiar
pattern will seem to emerge from the evidence; an accustomed label is
waiting for the case and, without awaiting further proofs, this label is
promptly assigned to it. It is a mistake to suppose that this premature
cataloguing must necessarily result from impatience, prejudice or mental
sloth. Often it proceeds from a very understandable desire to bring the
hearing into some order and coherence, for without some tentative theory of
the case there is no standard of relevancy by which testimony may be
measured. But what starts as a preliminary diagnosis designed to direct the
inquiry tends, quickly and imperceptibly, to become a fixed conclusion, as
all that confirms the diagnosis makes a strong imprint on the mind, while all
that runs counter to it is received with diverted attention.
AM. BAR ASS’N & ASS’N OF AM. LAW SCH., Report of the Joint Conference of the
American Bar Association and the Association of American Law Schools on
Professional Responsibility, 44 A.B.A. J. 1159, 1160 (1958) reprinted in THE LAWYER
IN MODERN SOCIETY 188, 189 (V. Countryman & T. Finman eds., 1966).
16. See STATE OF ILL., REPORT OF THE GOVERNOR’S COMMISSION ON CAPITAL
PUNISHMENT 20 (2002), available at http://www.idoc.state.il.us/ccp/ccp/reports/
commission_report/complete_report.pdf.
17. Steve Mills & John Biemer, Ford Heights 4 Inquiry Clears Cops,
Prosecutors, CHI. TRIB., Aug. 22, 2003, at 1.
18. In Canada, unlike most jurisdictions in the United States, the government
has responded to exonerations by holding extensive inquiries into what went wrong and
what might prevent such errors in the future. For a discussion contrasting that response
to the typical response in the United States, in which the exonerated are released
without official comment or inquiry, see Keith A. Findley, Learning from Our
Mistakes: A Criminal Justice Study Commission to Study Wrongful Convictions, 38
CAL. W. L. REV. 333, 338-39, 342-44 (2002).
19. See FPT HEADS OF PROSECUTION COMM. WORKING GROUP, REPORT ON
THE PREVENTION OF MISCARRIAGES OF JUSTICE 35 (2004), available at
http://canada.justice.gc.ca/en/dept/pub/hop/; Province of Manitoba, The Inquiry
Regarding Thomas Sophonow, http://www.gov.mb.ca/justice/publications/
sophonow/arnold/recommend.html (last visited Feb. 25, 2006).
Commission for Virginia issued a report finding that tunnel vision

played a significant role in many of Virginia’s thirteen proven wrongful
convictions.20
Most discussions of tunnel vision have focused on its effects in the
initial stages of criminal cases—during the police investigation.21 That
is indeed where tunnel vision begins, and in many respects where it can
be most damaging, because all later stages of the process feed off the
information generated in the police investigation.22 But tunnel vision in
the criminal justice system is more pervasive than that. Considerable
literature also examines various pressures on prosecutors that can cause
them to act in ways that subvert justice, whether intentionally or, as is
more often the case, unintentionally.23 That literature also depicts a
form of tunnel vision. But the problem is more pervasive than even
that literature suggests. In this Article, we explore the ways in which
tunnel vision infects all phases of criminal proceedings, beginning with
the investigation of cases and then proceeding through the prosecution,
trial or plea-bargaining, appeal, and postconviction stages. We seek to
expose some of the myriad expressions of this tunnel vision, and to
come to some understanding of its multiple causes. We examine the
roots of the problem in cognitive biases, institutional pressures, and
deliberate policies reflected in rules and training throughout the system.
In the end, we attempt to draw from this inquiry some understanding of
the measures that might be taken to mitigate the harmful effects of
tunnel vision.
Part I begins with a discussion of several case studies in wrongful
convictions that help demonstrate how tunnel vision can derail the
search for the truth. Part II seeks to identify sources of tunnel vision in
three domains. First, it draws on the cognitive sciences to seek an
understanding of the cognitive biases that can produce tunnel vision,
even in well-meaning participants in the process. Second, it turns to an
analysis of other institutional pressures, many of which are products of
the adversary system and the feedback loops inherent in that system,
that magnify the natural, cognitively based tendency toward tunnel
vision. Third, it examines normative features of the criminal justice
system that exacerbate the problem of tunnel vision—rules and
20. INNOCENCE COMM’N FOR VA., A VISION FOR JUSTICE: REPORT AND
RECOMMENDATIONS REGARDING WRONGFUL CONVICTIONS IN THE COMMONWEALTH OF
VIRGINIA 10 (2005), available at http://www.wcl.american.edu/innocenceproject/
ICVA/full_r.pdf?rd=1.
21. See Martin, supra note 6, at 850 (describing an example of tunnel vision
during the police investigation stage).
22. Id. at 849.
23. See infra Part II.B.2.
deliberate practices that reinforce the natural cognitive biases and

institutional pressures. Finally, Part III discusses possible reforms that
might counter the tendencies toward tunnel vision, and that might
thereby help the system perform more accurately and reliably.
I. CASE STUDIES IN TUNNEL VISION
A. Marvin Anderson
After a trial that lasted less than five hours, Marvin Anderson was
convicted of robbery, forcible sodomy, abduction, and two counts of
rape of a twenty-four-year-old woman in Hanover, Virginia, in 1982.24
In 2002, DNA testing proved that he did not commit the crime.25
Police investigators had focused on Anderson because the rapist, who
was African American, had mentioned to the victim that he had a white
girlfriend, and Anderson was the only black man police knew of who
was living with a white woman.26
Anderson did not fit the victim’s description of her attacker in
several respects; Anderson was taller than the man the victim described
and, unlike the attacker, Anderson had a dark complexion, no
mustache, and no scratches on his face.27 Nonetheless, investigators
obtained a photo of Anderson from his employer (he had no prior
record and hence no mug photo) and presented it to the victim in an
array of six to ten photos. Anderson’s photo was the only one in color,
and the only one with his social security number printed on it.28 The
victim selected Anderson’s photograph. Thirty minutes later, police
put together a live-person lineup that again included Anderson.29
Anderson was apparently the only person in the lineup whose photo had
24. Innocence Project, Case Profiles: Marvin Anderson,

http://www.innocenceproject.org/case/display_profile.php?id=99 (last visited Mar. 28,
2006). Anderson was sentenced to 210 years in prison, was paroled after fifteen years
in prison, and was serving lifetime parole at the time of his exoneration. Id.
25. Id.; see also Demme Doufekias Joannou & W. Hunter Winstead, A
Report on the Case of Marvin Anderson 8-9, 15 (unpublished report prepared for the
Innocence Commission of Virginia, on file with authors).
26. INNOCENCE COMM’N FOR VA., supra note 20, at 13; Joannou & Winstead,
supra note 25, at 4, 6.
27. INNOCENCE COMM’N FOR VA., supra note 20, at 13, 70; Joannou &
Winstead, supra note 25, at 6.
28. INNOCENCE COMM’N FOR VA., supra note 20, at 13; Joannou & Winstead,
supra note 25, at 5.
29. It is unclear whether the true perpetrator was included in either the photo
array or the lineup because police did not keep track of the names of the individuals
included. Joannou & Winstead, supra note 25, at 8.
also been included in the photo array.30 Police told the victim to “go in
and look at the people in the line up to see if she could pick out the
suspect,” and she again picked Anderson.31 Many of the procedures
used in Anderson’s identification process are now widely recognized as
suggestive or flawed in ways that can lead an eyewitness to mistakenly
identify an innocent person.32
There were other reasons to doubt the identification as well. DNA
testing was not yet available at the time, but a forensic scientist testified
that she had performed blood typing on swabs from both Anderson and
the victim and was unable to identify Anderson as the source of semen
samples collected in the rape kit.33 In addition, Anderson presented
four alibi witnesses, including his mother, his girlfriend, and two
neighbors, who all testified that they saw him outside his mother’s
house washing his car at the time of the attack.34 None of this
evidence, however, was enough to overcome the eyewitness
identification.35
Tunnel vision infected Anderson’s case from the beginning,
leading police, prosecutors, defense counsel, and eventually the jury
30. Id. at 20-21.

31. Id. at 7.
32. The flawed procedures used in this case included using a photograph of
the suspect that stood out as distinctive; showing the photographs and individuals
simultaneously rather than sequentially; leading the victim to believe that the suspect
was included among the photographs and individuals presented and that her task was
“to see if she could pick out the suspect”; using officers who knew that Anderson was
the suspect to conduct the identification procedure; and showing the suspect to the
victim in multiple proceedings, especially when he was the only one included in each of
those proceedings. See, e.g., John Turtle, R.C.L. Lindsay & Gary L. Wells, Best
Practice Recommendations for Eyewitness Evidence Procedures: New Ideas for the
Oldest Way to Solve a Case, 1 CAN. J. POLICE & SECURITY SERVICES 5 (Spring 2003)
(explaining “recommended” policies and procedures for eyewitness identification),
available at http://www.psychology.iastate.edu/faculty/gwells/CJPSSarticle.pdf; WIS.
DEP’T OF JUSTICE, OFFICE OF ATTORNEY GEN., MODEL POLICY & PROCEDURE FOR
EYEWITNESS IDENTIFICATION (2005), available at http://www.doj.state.
wi.us/dles/tns/eyewitness.asp.
33. INNOCENCE COMM’N FOR VA., supra note 20, at 13.
34. Joannou & Winstead, supra note 25, at 10-11.
35. It is not uncommon for juries to reject alibi evidence—even true alibi
evidence—particularly when the alibi witnesses are perceived as motivated to protect
the defendant. See Elizabeth A. Olson & Gary L. Wells, What Makes a Good Alibi?
A Proposed Taxonomy, LAW & HUM. BEHAV. 157, 157-58 (2004) (noting that, even for
individuals later exonerated by DNA testing, alibi evidence is often ineffectual and that
indeed “‘weak alibis’ [are] often exploited by prosecutors and used as incriminating
evidence”); R.C.L. Lindsay et al., Mock-Juror Evaluations of Eyewitness Testimony:
A Test of Metamemory Hypotheses, 15 J. APP. SOC. PSYCHOL. 447 (1986) (finding that
only alibi witnesses who were not relatives of the defendant were effective at reducing
convictions in cases where an eyewitness identified the defendant as the perpetrator).
and reviewing courts, to minimize and discredit the alibi evidence, the
mismatch between the victim’s description of the perpetrator and
Anderson’s appearance, and the absence of physical evidence. Even
more significantly, the premature focus on Anderson meant that no one
pursued evidence that was available before trial that pointed toward the
true perpetrator.36 As the Virginia Innocence Commission concluded,
“[o]nce the victim identified Anderson, . . . the police did not pursue
additional leads.”37
The DNA testing that exonerated Anderson in 2002 identified the
true perpetrator—a man named Otis “Pop” Lincoln.38 The match to
Lincoln should not have come as a surprise. Lincoln’s name had been
circulating in the community as a likely suspect for some time prior to
Anderson’s conviction, but no one investigated him.39 Two friends of
the Anderson family said before trial that just before the rape they saw
Lincoln riding a bicycle toward the shopping center where the attack
occurred—a fact of particular significance because the attacker rode a
bicycle.40 Moreover, these witnesses heard Lincoln make sexually
suggestive comments to two young white girls, and then boast as he
rode past that he would force himself onto a woman if she refused his
advances.41 The owner of the bicycle that was used by the assailant
also said that Lincoln had stolen it from him approximately thirty
minutes before the rape.42 After Anderson was arrested, others in the
community reported to Anderson’s mother that Lincoln drove by her
house one day because he wanted to see “the young boy who was
taking his rap.”43 Moreover, unlike Anderson, Lincoln had a criminal
record for sexual assault and was awaiting trial for another sexual
attack at the time.44 Nonetheless, even Anderson’s defense lawyer
declined to investigate or call any witnesses who could have linked
Lincoln to the crime at trial.45
Eventually, six years later, at proceedings on Anderson’s
application for habeas corpus, Lincoln confessed fully to the crime in
court under oath and provided details of the attack.46 Nevertheless, the
36. INNOCENCE COMM’N FOR VA., supra note 20, at 13.

37. Id.
38. Id. at 14.
39. Id. at 70.
40. Id.
41. Id.
42. Id.
43. Id.
44. Id. at 13.
45. Innocence Project, supra note 24.
46. Id.; Joannou & Winstead, supra note 25, at 13.
same judge who presided over the original trial refused to credit
Lincoln’s confession, finding that it was untruthful.47 The Governor
subsequently refused to intervene and denied clemency.48 Anderson
remained in prison, and then on parole, for several more years until
DNA testing confirmed that Lincoln, not Anderson, was the attacker.49
Other aspects of the case also reveal just how stubborn erroneous
beliefs in guilt can be. Despite the weakness of the case against
Anderson, and the abundance of evidence that should have alerted
authorities to investigate Lincoln, the original prosecutor in the case
claimed that, from his perspective and until the exoneration, the
Anderson case was “the clearest case he had ever had.”50 Although
Anderson’s trial lawyer made numerous egregious errors, the trial court
was unwilling to grant a new trial on a claim of ineffective assistance of
counsel. The court concluded that it made no difference that: (1)
counsel had a conflict of interest because he had previously represented
Lincoln on a previous attempted rape charge; (2) although the lawyer
knew there was evidence against Lincoln, and admitted that he
suspected Lincoln, he failed to disclose his prior representation of
Lincoln, his suspicions about Lincoln, and his conflict of interest to
Anderson; (3) despite Anderson’s mother’s repeated pleas, the lawyer
failed to call Lincoln or the other witnesses who had watched Lincoln
harass the young women, make threats, and ride off on a bicycle
toward the crime scene just before the attack in this case; and (4) the
lawyer failed to ask that the bicycle ridden by the attacker on the day of
the rape be fingerprinted or introduced into evidence, even though the
bicycle was in police custody. The trial court found that all of this was
insufficient to meet the two-pronged test for ineffective assistance of
counsel.51
B. Steven Avery
Like Marvin Anderson, Steven Avery was convicted of a brutal

rape primarily on the strength of the victim’s eyewitness
identification.52 Like Anderson, Avery was convicted despite strong
alibi evidence, and even though the true perpetrator was well known to
47. Innocence Project, supra note 24.

48. Id.
49. Id.
50. Joannou & Winstead, supra note 25, at 18.
51. See Strickland v. Washington, 466 U.S. 668, 669 (1984).
52. Memorandum from Peggy A. Lautenschlager, Attorney General, State of
Wisconsin, to Mark Rohrer, District Attorney, Manitowoc County, Wisconsin (Dec.
17, 2003), available at http://www.doj.state.wi.us/newsarchive/rep121803_DCI.asp.
police and prosecutors and should have been a prime suspect.53 Also
like Anderson, Avery was wrongly convicted because tunnel vision
prevented system actors from considering alternative theories about the
crime until DNA evidence finally proved in 2003 that Avery was
innocent, and that another man, Gregory Allen, was guilty.54 By then,
Avery had served more than eighteen years in prison.55
The rape and attempted murder in Avery’s case was committed in
broad daylight on a beach in Manitowoc County, Wisconsin, in 1985.56
While being treated in the hospital after the attack, the victim gave
police a description of her attacker and helped create a composite
sketch.57 Based on that description and sketch, local sheriff’s deputies
thought the attacker might be Avery.58 Law enforcement knew Avery
because Manitowoc was a small community, he had relatives who
worked in the sheriff’s department, he had previously been convicted of
two counts of burglary and one count of cruelty to an animal, and he
was being prosecuted at the time for allegedly forcing the wife of a
deputy off the road at gunpoint as part of an ongoing feud.59
The sheriff presented Avery’s photo to the victim as part of a nine-
photo simultaneous array, telling her that “the suspect might be in
there.”60 The victim later said that the sheriff’s statement led her to
“believe[] that the suspect’s photograph was included in the group of
nine photos.”61 However, a photograph of Allen, the true perpetrator,
was not included in the array and the victim instead selected Avery’s
photo.62 Three days later, after the victim had been informed that
police had arrested the man she identified, police conducted a live-
person lineup to confirm her identification.63 Avery was the only
53. Id.
54. Id.
55. Id. Two years later, Avery was charged with a subsequent rape and
murder of a young woman committed in October 2005. As of this writing, Avery has
not yet been tried on those charges. The new charges raise no questions about the
validity of the previous exoneration. Regardless of the outcome of the pending trial,
Avery’s wrongful conviction in 1985 remains an important case study in the problem of
tunnel vision.
56. Id.
57. Id.
58. Id.
59. Id.
60. Id.
61. Hearings of the Wisconsin Assemb. Judiciary Comm. Avery Task Force,
2003-2004 Leg., Reg. Sess. (Wis. 2004) (statement of Penny Beerntsen) [hereinafter
Beerntsen Statement].
62. Id. at 1.
63. Memorandum from Peggy A. Lautenschlager to Mark Rohrer, supra note
52.
person in the lineup whose photo had also been in the previous photo
array.64 Avery was also the shortest, youngest, and fairest person in
the lineup.65 Unlike Avery, a few of the people in the lineup wore
professional attire such as neck ties, and some wore glasses.66 Records
from the lineup indicate that one lineup member looked at Avery during
most of the lineup.67 Again, the victim picked Avery.68
The State bolstered its eyewitness evidence with circumstantial
evidence. Deputies swore that the night of the arrest they told Avery
only that he was being arrested for attempted murder, yet they claimed
Avery told his wife that he was being accused of attempting to murder a
“girl.”69 Despite the ambiguous nature of that evidence, the deputies,
the prosecutor, and, ultimately, the courts thought it was highly
incriminating that Avery seemed to know the gender of the victim.70 In
addition, to rebut Avery’s alibi—his claim that he had spent the day
pouring concrete with his extended family and friends—the State
offered evidence that the State Crime Laboratory could find no traces of
concrete dust on his clothing.71 The State also offered evidence that a
hair found on Avery’s tee shirt was microscopically similar to the
victim’s head hair.72
Avery’s defense was unusually strong. He presented sixteen alibi
witnesses who confirmed that he had been pouring concrete during the
day and then had taken his wife and five young children—including six-
day-old twins—to Green Bay, more than an hour’s drive away, for
64. Id.
65. Id.
66. Id.
67. Id.
68. Id.
69. Id.
70. See State v. Avery, 213 Wis. 2d. 228, 245, 570 N.W.2d 573, 581 (Ct.
App. 1997) (referring to the “powerful” evidence that Avery referred to the victim as a
female prior to being told the gender of the victim by the police).
71. Id.; Memorandum from Peggy A. Lautenschlager to Mark Rohrer, supra
note 52.
72. Microscopic hair analysis has been roundly criticized in recent years as
“junk science.” Postconviction DNA testing has shown that microscopic hair analysis
is frequently misleading or inaccurate. See Neufeld, supra note 13, at S107-8; Clive A.
Stafford Smith & Patrick D. Goodman, Forensic Hair Comparison Analysis:
Nineteenth Century Science or Twentieth Century Snake Oil?, 27 COLUM. HUM. RTS.
L. REV. 227 (1996) (discussing the questionable scientific foundation of microscopic
hair analysis). The Wisconsin State Crime Laboratory no longer performs microscopic
hair analysis, in part because DNA testing is so much more reliable. Telephone
interview by Keith Findley with Jerome Geurts, Director, Wis. State Crime Laboratory
(April 27, 2006).
supper and to shop for paint.73 Instead of taking pause from this
evidence, the State sought a way to minimize its significance. The
prosecutor impeached the testimony of Avery’s family and friends as
biased.74 When Avery presented the testimony of unbiased witnesses—
the clerk and the manager at the Shopko store where Avery purchased
his paint in Green Bay—sheriff’s deputies sought a way around their
testimony. The clerk and the manager, who had not known Avery
previously, remembered him checking out because it was unusual to see
a family with five young children, including twins who were less than a
week old. And they produced the cash register tape showing that
Avery and his family had checked out at 5:13 p.m.—a little over an
hour after the victim claimed the attack had begun.75 Sheriff’s deputies
countered that they had done a timed drive from the location of the
assault to the Green Bay Shopko and had been able to make it to the
checkout line in fifty-seven minutes.76 But, as the Attorney General
concluded after investigating Avery’s wrongful conviction in 2003:
[T]he officers admitted that they went ten miles per hour over
the speed limit to reach those numbers and the officers did not
account for potential delays resulting from the presence of
five children, including six-day old twins, all of whom were
seen with Avery and his wife at the Shopko. Moreover, the
reenactment did not allow any time for picking up Avery’s
family and would therefore assume that Avery’s wife and five
children were at the beach somewhere or in the car while he
committed the assault.77
Simply put, tunnel vision prevented the deputies, the prosecutor, the
judge, and the jury from appreciating the implausibility of that
scenario.
Even more startling, however, the sheriff’s department and
prosecutor refused to consider or investigate the true perpetrator, even
though he was in their sights all along. Allen, who was identified as
the true perpetrator by a cold hit in the DNA database in 2003, was a
known sexual offender in Manitowoc County prior to this offense, and
his offenses were escalating.78 Two years earlier, the same prosecutor

52.
74. See Avery, 213 Wis. 2d. at 245, 570 N.W.2d at 581.
52.
76. Id.
77. Id.
78. Id.
who prosecuted Avery had convicted Allen of a very similar attempted

sexual assault—Allen masturbated while walking behind a woman and
then lunged at her—on the same beach as the site of the attack in
1985.79 At the time of the 1985 offense, Allen was a chief suspect in
the murder of a fifteen-year-old girl in North Carolina, and was
suspected of a series of attempted sexual assaults, attempted burglaries,
window peepings, and acts of exposing himself in Manitowoc County.80
Allen was considered such a threat to commit a sexual assault that
Manitowoc police maintained daily surveillance on him, checking on
his whereabouts as many as fourteen times each day, during the two
weeks prior to the 1985 assault for which Avery was wrongly
convicted.81 The day of the attack, police were called away to other
duties and were only able to check on Allen once.82 In fact, before
Avery was convicted, at least two employees in the district attorney’s
office expressed concern that they believed Allen, not Avery, was
responsible for the assault for which Avery stood charged.83
Nonetheless, the sheriff’s department and prosecutor steadfastly
refused to consider that Avery might not be guilty, or to investigate
Allen. When the police department suggested to the sheriff’s
department that Allen might be the perpetrator, the sheriff simply
responded that Allen had been ruled out as a suspect.84 When the
victim inquired about the police department’s concerns regarding Allen,
the sheriff’s department told her, “Do not talk to the Manitowoc Police
Department. It will only confuse you. We have jurisdiction.”85 and all
“other suspects ha[ve] been looked at and were ruled out . . ..”86
The resilience of the view that Avery was guilty also infected the
postconviction and appellate stages of the case. On direct appeal, the
court of appeals rejected challenges to the out-of-court identifications,
concluding that, despite the now-apparent deficiencies in the
79. Id.
80. Id. Finally, ten years after the 1985 assault, Gregory Allen was convicted
of a subsequent sexual assault of a woman in Green Bay, and was sentenced to sixty
years in prison. Meg Jones, Man Linked to Sexual Assault Transferred to Waupun,
MILWAUKEE J. SENTINEL, Sept. 26, 2003, at 3B, available at
http://www.jsonline.com/news/state/sep03/172525.asp.
81. Tom Kertscher, Police Were Watching Man Now Linked to Avery Case,
MILWAUKEE J. SENTINEL, Oct. 20, 2003, at 1A, available at
http://www.jsonline.com/news/state/oct03/178587.asp.
82. Id.
52.
84. Id.
85. Kertscher, supra note 81.
86. Beerntsen Statement, supra note 61, at 7-8.
identification procedures that were employed, “the photo array

constitute[d] one of the fairest ones this court ha[d] seen.”87
Subsequently, in 1995, Avery obtained postconviction DNA testing in
an attempt to prove his innocence.88 Unfortunately, the technology was
not advanced enough at that time to produce dispositive results.89 The
DNA taken from the victim’s fingernail scrapings (she said she had
scratched at her attacker) showed the presence of DNA from the victim
and an unknown third person, but could not conclusively exclude (or
include) Avery.90 Avery argued that the third-party DNA had to be the
real attacker’s, but the courts denied relief, concluding that the foreign
DNA could have gotten under the victim’s fingernails innocently.91
Despite the now-apparent weaknesses in the State’s case, including
Avery’s sixteen alibi witnesses, the court of appeals asserted that it did
not “view this case as ‘extremely close,’” and accordingly concluded
that the new DNA evidence was not enough to warrant a new trial.92
In September 2003, the Wisconsin State Crime Laboratory was
able to use previously unavailable technologies to extract a DNA profile
from the victim’s pubic hair combings.93 That DNA profile
94
conclusively excluded Avery. Moreover, when laboratory analysts
ran that profile through the State DNA Databank, they obtained a cold
hit on Allen, whose profile was in the databank because he had
subsequently committed another sexual assault, for which he was by
then serving sixty years in prison.95 By stipulation of the parties and
order of the court, Avery was exonerated and released the following
day.96
87. State v. Avery, No. 86-1831-CR, 1987 WL 267394, *5 (Wis. Ct. App.
Aug. 5, 1987) (unpublished opinion).
88. Wisconsin Innocence Project, Case Profiles: Steven Avery,
http://www.law.wisc.edu/fjr/innocence/avery_Summary2.htm (last visited Mar. 28,
2006).
89. Id.
90. The tests done at that time could not exclude or include Avery because
they revealed genetic markers consistent with both the victim and Avery. See id.
91. State v. Avery, 213 Wis. 2d 228, 243, 570 N.W.2d 573, 580 (Ct. App.
1997).
92. Id. at 245, 570 N.W.2d at 581.
93. Tom Kertscher & Jesse Garza, DNA Clears Prisoner 17 Years Into His
Term, MILWAUKEE J. SENTINEL, Sept. 11, 2003, at 1A, available at
http://www.jsonline.com/news/racine/sep03/168842.asp.
94. Id.
52.
96. See Kertscher & Garza, supra note 93.
C. The Central Park Jogger Case
To say that tunnel vision has affected the investigation and

prosecution of a case is not necessarily to say that police were
motivated improperly, or that their initial suspicions about the
defendant were unfounded. Rather, it is simply to observe that police
(and eventually prosecutors and courts) might have focused too quickly
or exclusively on a suspect or suspects. It is to caution everyone in the
criminal justice system to be receptive to, and make inquiry into,
alternative possibilities, even when the evidence against a given suspect
looks powerful.
The Central Park Jogger case serves as an example. On an April
evening in 1989, around 9:15 p.m., a young woman was attacked,
beaten, sexually assaulted, and left nearly dead in New York City’s
Central Park.97 Remarkably, she survived despite the loss of nearly 80
percent of her blood.98 But she retained no memory of the attack.99
Quickly, and with good reason, police and prosecutors focused
their attention on a group of youths who had been “wilding” in the park
that night. This group of teenage boys, estimated at up to forty or fifty
in number, spent the evening roaming the park, harassing, physically
beating, and attempting to rob joggers, cyclists, and others in the
park.100 Responding to complaints about these attacks, several police
officers spotted fifteen to twenty boys in the park around 10:15 p.m.
and caught several of them as they fled.101
Later that night, around 1:00 a.m., two men discovered the female
jogger’s nearly lifeless body in the park.102 Because she was found near
the location where several other victims had been attacked that night,
police suspected the boys were also responsible for the attack on the
female jogger.103 Throughout the rest of that night and the next day,
police and prosecutors interrogated the fourteen- to sixteen-year-old
suspects (including several who were arrested the next day).104
Ultimately, after interrogations that ranged from fourteen to thirty
hours,105 police and prosecutors succeeded in obtaining confessions
97. Steven A. Drizin & Richard A. Leo, The Problem of False Confessions in
the Post-DNA World, 82 N.C. L. REV. 891, 894 (2004).
98. Id.
99 . Saul M. Kassin & Gisli H. Gudjonsson, The Psychology of Confessions:
A Review of the Literature and Issues, 5 PSYCHOL. SCI. IN THE PUB. INT. 33, 34 (2004).
100. Drizin & Leo, supra note 97, at 894-95.
101. Id. at 895.
102. Id.
103. Id. at 895-96.
104. Id. at 896.
105. Kassin & Gudjonsson, supra note 99, at 60.
from five boys to the rape of the Central Park Jogger.106 Four of those
five confessions were videotaped.107 But only the confessions were
recorded; the hours of interrogations that led up to the confessions were
not.108
Precisely what happened during the hours of unrecorded
interrogations was a matter of contention both before and at trial. The
boys and their parents claimed coercion, alleging that the police
slapped, yelled, and cursed at the boys, called them liars, and suggested
they would be released if they confessed.109 Police admitted lying to
the boys about fingerprint evidence, but denied any coercive tactics.110
The trial court credited the police version and held that the boys’
confessions were admissible at trial.111 Regardless of where the truth
about those interrogations lay, two things are clear: police and
prosecutors were focused on the boys as suspects, and they succeeded
in getting the boys to confess.
At trial, prosecutors also introduced evidence that hair consistent
with the victim’s hair was found on one of the boys’ clothing, along
with a bloody rock that prosecutors claimed the boys used to bludgeon
the jogger.112 All five boys were convicted of participating in the rape
of the jogger and other attacks committed in the park that night.113
In 2002, evidence began to emerge that the boys were innocent.114
In January of that year, a man named Matias Reyes confessed to
authorities that he raped the Central Park Jogger, and that he had acted
alone.115 It turned out that Reyes “was one of New York City’s most
notorious serial rapists.”116 In the months following the Central Park
attack, until his apprehension in August 1989, he had “terrorized the
Upper East Side, raping four women, one of whom, a pregnant
woman, he killed after raping her in front of her children.”117 DNA
subsequently confirmed the confession: Reyes’s DNA matched semen
on the jogger’s sock.118 Mitochondrial DNA testing of the hair found
on one of the boys’ clothing also showed that it probably was not the
106. Drizin & Leo, supra note 97, at 896.

107. Id.
108. Id.
109. Id. at 896-97.
110. Id. at 897.
111. Id.
112. Id.
113. Id.
114. Id. at 898.
115. Id.
116. Id.
117. Id.
118. Id.
jogger’s, and additional testing on the bloody rock showed the blood
and hair on the rock were not hers either.119 A subsequent investigation
by the district attorney’s office found no link between Reyes and any of
the five defendants.120 Moreover, the district attorney’s office
concluded that the confessions from the five boys were inconsistent
with one another on “virtually every major aspect of the crime,”121
were inconsistent with the objectively verifiable evidence, and were
demonstrably false in significant respects.122 Accordingly, the district
attorney’s office joined in a motion to vacate the convictions and the
court set aside all five convictions in December 2002.123
Despite this new evidence, former prosecutors and police involved
in the case sharply criticized the district attorney’s office for joining in
the motion to vacate the convictions.124 The police department
conducted its own investigation and issued a report that ultimately
supported the decision to vacate the convictions, but disputed many of
the district attorney’s conclusions, sought to discredit Reyes’s detailed
confession, and offered several theories to explain how the boys might
have committed the crime with Reyes.125
II. THE SOURCES OF TUNNEL VISION
A. Tunnel Vision as a Function of Cognitive Biases
The tendency toward tunnel vision is partly innate; it is part of our

psychological makeup. Tunnel vision is the product of a variety of
cognitive distortions that can impede accuracy in what we perceive and
in how we interpret what we perceive. Psychologists analyze tunnel
vision as the product of various cognitive “biases,”126 such as
119. Id. at 899.

120. Affirmation in Response to Motion to Vacate Judgment of Conviction ¶
46, New York v. Wise, No. 4762/89 (N.Y. Sup. Ct. Dec. 5, 2002), available at
http://files.findlaw.com/news.findlaw.com/hdocs/crim/nywiseetal120502aff.pdf.
121. Id. ¶ 86.
122. Id. ¶¶ 91-93.
123. Drizin & Leo, supra note 97, at 899.
124. Id.
125. Id. at 899-900; see also NEW YORK POLICE DEP’T, CENTRAL PARK JOGGER
CASE PANEL REPORT (2003), available at http://www.nyc.gov/html/nypd/html/dcpi/
executivesumm_cpjc.html.
126. It should be kept in mind that in the social sciences the term “bias” is
value neutral. It merely describes a situation in which any errors that might be made
are skewed in one direction or another, as opposed to a situation of random error,
where errors have no directionality. In some contexts, biases may be desirable when
they run in the direction of errors that are less costly than their opposites.
confirmation bias, hindsight bias, and outcome bias. These cognitive

biases help explain how and why tunnel vision is so ubiquitous, even
among well-meaning actors in the criminal justice system.
Understanding these biases offers some insight into the reforms or
remedies that might be implemented to try to counteract tunnel vision,
as well as insight into reforms that are likely to be futile.
The cognitive biases to which we refer have been the subject of
substantial study by experimental psychologists over the course of many
decades,127 but the tendency of humans toward such biases has been
obvious to careful observers since time immemorial.128 What has not
been so obvious prior to the investigation of modern science is the
extent to which such biases can operate without conscious recognition,
and the variety of circumstances that can intensify the effects of the
underlying biases.
Different researchers use slightly different labels for related and
sometimes overlapping conditions and effects. The foundational
tendency is probably best understood as an expectancy bias, which is a
form of confirmation bias.129 When people are led by circumstances to
expect some fact or condition (as people commonly are), they tend to
perceive that fact or condition in informationally ambiguous
situations.130 This can lead to error biased in the direction of the
expectation.131 When what a person expects to see is the result of the
person’s own generation of hypotheses, theories, or scenarios about
what must be the case, the personal investment in those hypotheses will
reinforce the tendency to perceive or overvalue confirming information
127. See THOMAS GILOVICH, HOW WE KNOW WHAT ISN’T SO: THE FALLIBILITY
OF HUMAN REASON IN EVERYDAY LIFE 33 (1991); RICHARD NISBETT & LEE ROSS,
HUMAN INFERENCE: STRATEGIES AND SHORTCOMINGS OF SOCIAL JUDGMENT (James J.
Jenkins et al. eds., 1980); Alafair S. Burke, Improving Prosecutorial Decision Making:
Some Lessons of Cognitive Science, 47 WM. & MARY L. REV. 8 (2006); Charles G.
Lord et al., Biased Assimilation and Attitude Polarization: The Effects of Prior
Theories on Subsequently Considered Evidence, 37 J. PERSONALITY & SOC. PSYCHOL.
2098 (1979); Raymond S. Nickerson, Confirmation Bias: A Ubiquitous Phenomenon in
Many Guises, 2 REV. GEN. PSYCHOL. 175, 175 (1998); Yaacov Trope & Akiva
Liberman, Social Hypothesis Testing: Cognitive and Motivational Mechanisms, in
SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY: HANDBOOK OF BASIC PRINCIPLES 239, 239-70 (E. Tory Higgins
& Arie W. Kruglanski eds., 1996).
128. Julius Caesar, for example, observed that “people easily believe that
which they want to be true.” Risinger et al., supra note 13, at 6 (quoting G. JULIUS
CAESAR, CAESAR’S COMMENTARIES ON THE GALLIC WAR 155 (Frederick Holland
Dewey ed., Translation Publishing Co. 1918) (51 B.C.E.) (“[H]omines fere credunt
libentur id quod volunt.”)).
129. Risinger et al., supra note 13, at 12-26.
130. Id.
131. Id.
and to miss or irrationally undervalue disconfirming information.132

Similarly, when such hypotheses are provided by a person of superior
status in a team effort, or when self-worth and role-success contribute
to emotional investment, the confirmation bias can be amplified, so that
even the most obvious and unambiguous “disconfirming” information
may remain undiscovered, or be dismissed.133
In a sense, cognitive biases are a byproduct of our need to process
efficiently the flood of sensory information coming from the outside
world. Without some system of categories or “schemata” to organize
that information, it would remain, in the imagery of noted psychologist
and philosopher William James, a “blooming, buzzing confusion.”134 It
is likely that most of the cognitive biases and heuristics that appear to
be wired into us were adaptive to the conditions under which we
evolved as a species. But as a result of this necessary system of
categorization, interpretation, and selective attention, we can be subject
to error. The effects can be pernicious, whether the investigators
involved are scientists or homicide detectives, unless the biasing
tendencies are recognized and steps are taken to control or correct for
them.
1. CONFIRMATION BIAS
Confirmation bias, as the term is used in psychological literature,

typically connotes the tendency to seek or interpret evidence in ways
that support existing beliefs, expectations, or hypotheses.135 The bias
has several expressions. In part, the bias reflects that, when testing a
hypothesis or conclusion, people tend to seek information that confirms
their hypothesis and to avoid information that would disconfirm their
hypothesis.136
For example, a classic study asked people to find the rule that was
used to generate a series of triplets of numbers (that is, a series such as
4-6-8).137 The experimenter presented the triplet and asked the subjects
132. Id.
133. Id.
134. Id. at 14 (quoting WILLIAM JAMES, THE PRINCIPLES OF PSYCHOLOGY,
1890, ch. 13, reprinted in 53 GREAT BOOKS OF THE WESTERN WORLD 318 (Robert
Maynard Hutchins ed., 1952)).
135. NISBETT & ROSS, supra note 127, at 169-71; Nickerson, supra note 127, at
175; Trope & Liberman, supra note 127, at 239-70.
136. GILOVICH, supra note 127, at 33; Burke, supra note 127, at 8; Lord et al.,
supra note 127, at 2098; Nickerson, supra note 127, at 177.
137. CATHERINE FITZMAURICE & KEN PEASE, THE PSYCHOLOGY OF JUDICIAL
SENTENCING 30 (1986); Nickerson, supra note 127, at 179.
to hypothesize a rule that explained the sequence.138 The subjects then

tested their hypotheses by proposing additional triplets; the
experimenter then told them whether the proposed sequences fit the
rule.139 The subjects typically tested their hypotheses only by proposing
triplets that fit their hypotheses.140 Because the subjects rarely proposed
triplets that did not fit their hypotheses, they were precluded from ever
discovering that their hypotheses were wrong and that they had merely
proposed triplets that also fit the actual rule.141 In essence, subjects
showed a preference for evidence that would confirm their hypothesis
over evidence that would disconfirm it, even though the latter would
have been more probative.142
In another experiment, subjects were given four cards, each with a
different letter or number—an A, B, 2, or 3—on the side facing up.143
They were then given a hypothesis, that any card with a vowel facing
up had an even number on the reverse side, and were asked which card
or cards they would turn over first to test that hypothesis.144 The most
common response was to turn over the A and 2 cards—cards that could
offer evidence consistent with the hypothesis.145 Turning over the 2
card, however, was actually uninformative because it could only
confirm the hypothesis—a vowel on the other side would be consistent
with the hypothesis, but a consonant would neither confirm nor
disprove the hypothesis.146 Turning over the 3 card potentially could
have been very informative because a vowel on the other side would
have disproved the hypothesis.147 But subjects rarely turned over the 3
card because they naturally sought confirming, not disconfirming,
evidence.148
Studies show that this preference for confirming information
prevails in a social context as well.149 For example, in a study that has
been repeated numerous times in different ways, subjects were asked to
138. Nickerson, supra note 127, at 179.

139. Id.
140. Id.
141. Id.
142. Burke, supra note 127, at 7.
143. GILOVICH, supra note 127, at 33.
144. Id.
145. Id.
146. Id.
147. Id.
148. See id.; P.C. Wason, Reasoning, in NEW HORIZONS IN PSYCHOLOGY 135,
139-41 (B.M. Foss ed. 1966).
149. Mark Snyder & William B. Swann, Jr., Behavioral Confirmation in Social
Interaction: From Social Perception to Social Reality, 14 J. EXPERIMENTAL SOC.
PSYCHOL. 148, 156 (1978).
interview a target person to determine whether that person was an

introvert or an extrovert.150 In one study, the interviewers were given a
list of questions to select from to probe the target’s personality.151 Half
of the interviewers were told to choose questions that would test
whether the person was an extrovert, and the other half were told to
choose questions that would test whether the person was an introvert.152
Consistently, interviewers chose questions that would prove, but never
disprove, the implicit hypothesis.153 Hence, subjects told to ask
questions to test for extroversion chose questions like, “What would
you do if you wanted to liven things up at a party?” while subjects
testing for introversion asked questions like, “What is it about large
groups that make you feel uncomfortable?”154
Numerous studies have repeatedly shown this confirmation bias,
and have found that people seek information in ways that increase their
confidence in prior beliefs or hypotheses—as in the studies cited here—
even when they have no vested interest in those hypotheses.155
Consistently, studies also confirm that people prefer to test a hypothesis
or rule “by choosing only examples that would be classified as
instances of the sought-for concept if the hypothesis were correct.”156
People disfavor choices that would disprove the hypothesis.157
Ironically, this confirmation preference not only inhibits discovering the
incorrectness of a particular hypothesis, but “this strategy would not
yield as strongly confirmatory evidence, logically, as would that of
deliberately selecting tests that would show the hypothesis to be wrong,
150. See id. at 151-52.

151. Miriam Bassok & Yaacov Trope, People’s Strategies for Testing
Hypotheses About Another’s Personality: Confirmatory or Diagnostic?, 2 SOC.
COGNITION 199, 202 (1984).
152. Id.
153. Id. at 210.
154. Burke, supra note 127, at 9; Mark Snyder & William B. Swann, Jr.,
Hypothesis-Testing Processes in Social Interaction, 36 J. PERSONALITY & SOC.
PSYCHOL. 1202, 1202-12 (1978); GILOVICH, supra note 127, at 34-35.
155. Nickerson, supra note 127, at 178; GILOVICH, supra note 127, at 33.
157. In part, we have a natural preference for confirmatory information
because “it is easier to deal with cognitively.” GILOVICH, supra note 127, at 31.
Confirming information tends to be directly relevant to the proposition at issue,
whereas information that fails to confirm a proposition can be only indirectly relevant,
and accordingly requires additional cognitive steps “to put the information to use.” Id.
at 31-32. In addition, nonconfirmatory information is typically framed as a negative,
“and we sometimes have trouble conceptualizing negative assertions.” Id. at 32. To
illustrate, Gilovich has noted how much easier it is to conceptualize the statement, “All
Greeks are mortals,” than the negative of that statement, “All non-mortals are non-
Greeks.” Id.
if it is wrong, and failing in the attempt.”158 Although such

confirmation-biased information is often less probative than
disconfirming information might be, people fail to recognize the
weakness of the confirming feedback they receive or recall.159 In this
sense, the data “suggest that feedback that is typically interpreted by
participants to be strongly confirmatory often is not logically
confirmatory, or at least not strongly so. The ‘confirmation’ the
participant receives in this situation is, to some degree, illusory.”160
Empirical research also demonstrates that people not only seek
confirming information, they also tend to recall information in a biased
manner. Experiments show that, when revisiting information
previously obtained, people search their memories in biased ways,
preferring information that tends to confirm a presented hypothesis or
belief.161 For example, in one study participants were read a story
about a woman who behaved in a number of both introverted and
extroverted ways.162 Two days later, half the participants were asked to
assess the woman’s suitability for a job that obviously required
extroversion; the other half were asked to assess the woman’s
suitability for a job that would presumably demand introversion.163
Those asked to assess the woman’s suitability for the extroverted job
recalled more examples of the woman’s extroversion, and those asked
to assess her suitability for the introverted job recalled more instances
of her introversion.164 The hypothesis at issue—the woman’s suitability
for the particular job—biased the way participants searched their
memories for confirming evidence.165
In addition to seeking and recalling confirming information, people
also tend to give greater weight to information that supports existing
beliefs than to information that runs counter to them;166 that is to say,
158. Nickerson, supra note 127, at 179. All writers on the general theory of
investigation appear to agree that looking for disconfirming evidence is the preferable
way to structure an investigation if the goal is to maximize accuracy. See Risinger et
al., supra note 13, at 6. As Sir Frances Bacon wrote in 1620, “it is the peculiar and
perpetual error of the human understanding to be more moved and excited by
affirmatives than negatives, whereas it ought duly to be impartial; nay, in establishing
any true axiom, the negative instance is the most powerful.” Id. (quoting FRANCIS
BACON, NOVUM ORGANUM, BOOK I, 109, point 46 (1620), reprinted in 30 GREAT
BOOKS OF THE WESTERN WORLD 110 (Robert M. Hutchins ed., 1952)).
159. See id.
160. See Nickerson, supra note 127, at 179.
161. Burke, supra note 127, at 9-10.
162. GILOVICH, supra note 127, at 36.
163. Id.
164. Id.
165. See id.
people tend to interpret data in ways that support their prior beliefs.167
Empirical research demonstrates that people are “incapable of
evaluating the strength of evidence independently of their prior
beliefs.”168 This process of selective information processing has been
studied extensively, and the findings have been replicated in many
contexts.169 In part, the research shows a general tendency to
“overweight positive confirmatory evidence” and “underweight
negative discomfirmatory evidence.”170 In other words, “people
generally require less hypothesis-consistent evidence to accept a
hypothesis than hypothesis-inconsistent evidence to reject a
hypothesis.”171
Social scientists have attributed this phenomenon, at least in part,
to motivational factors.172 When presented with information that
challenges their beliefs, people are motivated to defend those beliefs in
a way that reinforces their initial viewpoint.
[People] will search internally for material that refutes the

disconfirming evidence, and, once that material is retrieved
from memory, there will be a bias to judge the disconfirming
evidence as weak. In contrast, when presented with
information that supports prior beliefs, people allocate fewer
resources to scrutinizing the information and are more
inclined to accept the information at face value.173
Indeed, studies show that, in some circumstances, people do not

respond to information at variance with their beliefs by simply ignoring
it, but rather by working hard to examine it critically so as to
undermine it.174 “The end product of this intense scrutiny is that the
contradictory information is either considered too flawed to be relevant,
or is redefined into a less damaging category.”175 Moreover, people
tend to use different criteria when they evaluate data or conclusions that
they desire than when they evaluate conclusions they disfavor.176 For
preferred conclusions, “we ask only that the evidence not force us to
167. See id.

169. Id. at 11.
171. Id.
173. Id. at 12 (footnotes omitted).
174. GILOVICH, supra note 127, at 55-56.
175. Id.
176. Id. at 83.
believe otherwise . . . .”177 For disfavored conclusions, however, “we

ask whether the evidence compels such a distasteful conclusion—a
much more difficult standard to achieve.”178 Thus, “[f]or desired
conclusions . . . it is as if we ask, ‘Can I believe this?’ but for
unpalatable conclusions we ask, ‘Must I believe this?’”179
Accordingly, when considering data, people sometimes see
patterns they are looking for even when those patterns are not really
there.180 On a social level, numerous studies have shown that
descriptions provided in advance (expectations) about a person’s
qualities can affect how others assess that person.181 For example,
observers who were told in advance that a person had particular
personality characteristics tended to see those qualities in that person,
whether or not those characteristics were objectively present.182 This
phenomenon can be particularly significant in criminal cases, where an
individual is being judged—by police, prosecutors, defense lawyers,
judges, and jurors—and where the initial working hypothesis presented
to each actor in the system is that the defendant is guilty (despite the
theoretical presumption of innocence).
While biases thus affect the acquisition and interpretation of
information, and thereby impede rational or logical adjustment of
hypotheses or conclusions to reflect new information, natural tendencies
also make people resistant to change even in the face of new evidence
that wholly undermines their initial hypotheses.183 This phenomenon,
known as belief perseverance or belief persistence, can render a belief
or opinion very intractable.184 People are naturally disinclined to
relinquish initial conclusions or beliefs, even when the bases for those
initial beliefs are undermined.185 Thus, people are more likely to
question information that conflicts with preexisting beliefs, and are
more likely to interpret ambiguous information as supporting rather
than disconfirming their original beliefs.186 People “can be quite facile
177. Id.
178. Id. at 84.
179. Id.
180. Nickerson, supra note 127, at 181; see GILOVICH, supra note 127, at 15-
18.
182. Id.
183. Id. at 187.
184. Id.; Burke, supra note 127, at 13; Joel D. Lieberman & Jamie Arndt,
Understanding the Limits of Limiting Instructions: Social Psychological Explanations
for the Failures of Instructions to Disregard Pretrial Publicity and Other Inadmissible
Evidence, 6 PSYCHOL. PUB. POL’Y & L. 677, 691 (2000).
186. Id.
at explaining away events that are inconsistent with their established

beliefs.”187
For example, empirical research has shown that people find it
quite easy to form beliefs that generally explain an individual’s
behavior, and to persevere with those beliefs even after the premise for
the initial belief is shown to be fictitious.188 In a classic study, subjects
were asked to distinguish between authentic and fake suicide notes.189
At various points, subjects were given feedback about how they were
performing.190 The feedback was in fact independent of the choices
they made; researchers randomly informed the participants that they
were performing far above average or far below average.191
Researchers then debriefed the participants, explicitly revealing to them
that the feedback had been false, predetermined, and independent of
their choices.192 Yet, when later asked to rate their ability to make such
judgments, those who had received positive feedback rated their ability
much higher than those who had received negative feedback, even
though they had all been told that their feedback was arbitrary.193
A follow-up experiment found similar perseverance effects for
people who did not perform the tasks themselves, but who observed
others performing the tasks as well as the debriefing sessions.194 In
other words, observers also maintained their beliefs about the subject’s
ability to perform the assigned task, even after learning that the bases
for their beliefs were false.195
The belief perseverance phenomenon is apparent in many of the
wrongful conviction cases.196 For example, even when presented with
DNA evidence proving that semen taken from a sexual assault victim
could not have come from the defendant, prosecutors sometimes persist
in their guilt judgments and resist relief for the defendant.197 As
187. Id.
188. Id. at 188.
189. Id. at 187-88.
190. Id. at 188.
191. Id.
192. Id.
193. Id. at 181; Burke, supra note 127, at 13; Lee Ross, Mark R. Lepper &
Michael Hubbard, Perseverance in Self-Perception and Social Perception: Biased
Attributional Processes in the Debriefing Paradigm, 32 J. PERSONALITY & SOC.
PSYCHOL. 880, 882 (1975).
195. See id.; Burke, supra note 127, at 14.
196. See Daniel S. Medwed, The Zeal Deal: Prosecutorial Resistance to Post-
Conviction Claims of Innocence, 84 B.U. L. REV. 125, 129 (2004).
197. See id. According to Medwed, empirical evidence shows that prosecutors
have consented to DNA tests in less than 50 percent of the cases in which testing later
proved innocence. Id. Medwed has expressed alarm at the “qualitative evidence of
Professor James Liebman has observed, “prosecutors have become . . .

sophisticated about hypothesizing the existence of ‘unindicted co-
ejaculators’ (to borrow Peter Neufeld’s phrase) to explain how the
defendant can still be guilty, though another man’s semen is found on
the rape-murder victim.”198
Thus, these cognitive biases help explain what went wrong in
many wrongful conviction cases, including the cases of Anderson,
Avery, and the Central Park Jogger defendants. Convinced by an
early—although plainly flawed—eyewitness identification, police and
prosecutors in the Anderson and Avery cases sought evidence that
would confirm guilt, not disconfirm it. They searched for
incriminating evidence against their suspects, but never looked at viable
alternative perpetrators. When confronted with ambiguous or
inherently weak evidence—such as the microscopic hair “matches” and
Avery’s statement that police had accused him of killing a “girl”—
police and prosecutors interpreted it as powerfully incriminating.
When confronted with contrary evidence—such as the many alibi
witnesses in Avery and Anderson’s cases, the inconsistencies and
inaccuracies in the confessions in the Central Park Jogger case, and the
perpetrator’s confessions in Anderson’s case and the Central Park
Jogger case—they sought to discredit or minimize that evidence. In
Avery’s case, for example, the prosecution even hypothesized that
Avery committed the rape while his wife and five children waited for
him in the car; that Avery then collected his family and made a mad
dash to the Shopko store in Green Bay, exceeding the speed limit the
entire way; toted his children, including two infants, through the store;
and raced to the checkout line with paint in time to checkout within the
time frame permitted by the evidence. The stubborn assessment of
guilt in these cases persisted on appeal and through postconviction
proceedings, tainting perspectives on the relative strength of the States’
and defendants’ cases and even leading authorities to reject a full
confession by the true perpetrator in Anderson’s case.199
prosecutorial indifference and, on occasion, hostility to even the most meritorious of

post-conviction innocence claims.” Id.
198. James S. Liebman, The New Death Penalty Debate: What’s DNA Got to
Do with It?, 33 COLUM. HUM. RTS. L. REV. 527, 543 (2002).
199. While confirmation bias is typically associated with the investigation
stages of cases, the same phenomenon is present throughout the criminal justice system,
and is even encouraged as a matter of policy. See infra Part II.C.
2. HINDSIGHT BIAS AND OUTCOME BIAS
Tunnel vision is reinforced by other cognitive distortions as well,

including hindsight bias, or the “knew-it-all-along effect.”200 Cognitive
research has repeatedly shown that, in hindsight, people tend to think
that an eventual outcome was inevitable, or more likely or predictable,
than originally expected.201 Hindsight bias essentially operates as a
means through which people project new knowledge—outcomes—into
the past, without any awareness that the perception of the past has been
tainted by the subsequent information.202
Hindsight bias is a product of the fact that memory is a dynamic
process of reconstruction.203 Memories are not drawn from our brains
fully formed, but are assembled from little bits and pieces of
information as we recall an event.204 Those little pieces of information
about an event or situation are constantly being updated and replaced in
our brains by new information.205 The updated information is then used
each time we reconstruct a relevant memory, making the ultimate
conclusion appear preordained, or more likely than we could have
known at the outset.206 Understood another way, the process is one in
which an individual reanalyzes an event so that the early stages of the
process connect causally to the end.207 “During this process, evidence
200. Scott A. Hawkins & Reid Hastie, Hindsight: Biased Judgments of Past
Events After the Outcomes Are Known, 107 PSYCHOL. BULL. 311, 311 (1990); Ulrich
Hoffrage, Ralph Hertwig & Gerd Gigerenzer, Hindsight Bias: A By-Product of
Knowledge Updating?, 26 J. EXPERIMENTAL PSYCHOL.: LEARNING, MEMORY &
COGNITION 566, 566 (2000); Erin M. Harley, Keri A. Carlsen & Geoffrey R. Loftus,
The “Saw-It-All-Along” Effect: Demonstrations of Visual Hindsight Bias, 30 J.
EXPERIMENTAL PSYCHOL.: LEARNING, MEMORY & COGNITION 960, 960 (2004);
FITZMAURICE & PEASE, supra note 137, at 32.
A host of other psychological phenomena are also at work in ways that interfere
with rational assessment of data. Those phenomena include “anchoring effects”
(referring to the fact that estimates people make of points along a continuum are
influenced by preexisting or predetermined but task-irrelevant data); “role effects”
(referring to the fact that asking people to adopt a particular function or perspective
affects the way they seek and perceive information); “conformity effects” (reflecting
that people tend to conform to the perceptions, beliefs, and behavior of others); and
“experimenter effects” (referring to the tendency of subjects in an experiment to alter
their behavior in response to an experimenter’s behavior). For a discussion of these
and related phenomena, see Risinger et al., supra note 13, at 12-21.
201. Harley, Carlsen & Loftus, supra note 200, at 960.
202. Hawkins & Hastie, supra note 200, at 311.
203. Ian Weinstein, Don’t Believe Everything You Think: Cognitive Bias in
Legal Decision Making, 9 CLINICAL L. REV. 783, 800 (2003).
204. Id.
205. Id.
206. Id. at 800-01.
consistent with the reported outcome is elaborated, and evidence

inconsistent with the outcome is minimized or discounted. The result
of this rejudgment process is that the given outcome seems inevitable
or, at least, more plausible than alternative outcomes.” 208
Hindsight bias might reinforce premature or unwarranted focus on
an innocent suspect in several ways. First, once a suspect becomes the
focus of an investigation or prosecution—that is, once police or
prosecutors arrive at an outcome in their own quest to determine who
they believe is guilty—the hindsight bias would suggest that, upon
reflection, the suspect would appear to have been the inevitable and
likely suspect from the beginning.209 Moreover, events supporting a
given outcome are typically better remembered than events that do not
support that outcome.210 Hence, once police and prosecutors conclude
that a particular person is guilty, not only might they overestimate the
degree to which that suspect appeared guilty from the beginning, but
they will likely best remember those facts that are incriminating
(thereby reinforcing their commitment to focus on that person as the
culprit). 211
Second, hindsight bias has implications for the quality of the
evidence used to convict.212 For example, hindsight bias helps explain
one way that eyewitness identification errors can contribute to tunnel
vision, and ultimately to conviction of the innocent.213 It is well
recognized that eyewitness confidence is highly malleable.214
Confirming feedback offered after an eyewitness identification can
dramatically inflate not only the witness’s confidence in the ultimate
identification, but also the witness’s assessment of the conditions
surrounding the identification.215 For example, if an eyewitness had a
poor view of a perpetrator or paid little attention to the incident at the
time, the witness likely had a poor memory of the perpetrator.216 But if
the witness nonetheless were to attempt an identification by examining a
clear picture of a suspect in a photo spread, or a good view of the
208. Id.
209. See Lieberman & Arndt, supra note 184, at 692.
210. Id.
211. See Harley, Carlsen & Loftus, supra note 200, at 960.
212. See Amy L. Bradfield, Gary L. Wells & Elizabeth A. Olson, The
Damaging Effect of Confirming Feedback on the Relation Between Eyewitness
Certainty and Identification Accuracy, 87 J. APPLIED PSYCHOL. 112, 112-13 (2002).
213. Id. at 113.
214. Id.
215. See id. at 112-13; Gary L. Wells & Amy L. Bradfield, “Good, You
Identified the Suspect”: Feedback to Eyewitnesses Distorts Their Reports of the
Witnessing Experience, 83 J. APPLIED PSYCHOL. 360, 360-62 (1998).
suspect in a live lineup, the witness would likely replace the original,
low-quality memory of the suspect with a clearer image from the
identification procedure.217 Given that the witness really had a very
poor memory of the perpetrator, the witness very well could be
mistaken in the identification.218 But, especially if given confirming
feedback, the witness might then draw on the cleaned-up memory of the
perpetrator together with the confirming feedback to overstate both the
quality of the original viewing conditions and the confidence—the
inevitability—of the ultimate identification.219 In hindsight, the
identification will appear as if it was always inevitable and was based
upon clear memories and an excellent opportunity to view the
suspect.220
Third, a reiteration effect is also linked to hindsight bias.221
Studies have established that confidence in the truth of an assertion
naturally increases if the assertion is repeated.222 This increase in
confidence from repetition is independent of the truth or falsity of the
assertion.223 Accordingly, the longer that police and prosecutors (and
witnesses) live with a conclusion of guilt, repeating the conclusion and
its bases, the more entrenched their conclusion becomes, and the more
obvious it appears that all evidence pointed to that conclusion from the
very beginning.224 As a result, the reiteration effect makes it
increasingly difficult for police and prosecutors to consider alternative
perpetrators or theories of a crime.225
Closely related to hindsight bias is outcome bias.226 Like hindsight
bias, outcome bias involves a process in which people project new
knowledge—outcomes—into the past without any awareness that the
outcome information has influenced their perception of the past.227 But
outcome bias differs from hindsight bias in that outcome bias does not
refer to the effect of outcome information on the judged probability of
an outcome, but to its effect on the evaluations of decision quality.228
217. Id. at 966-67.

218. Id.
219. See id. at 967.
220. See id. at 966-67.
221. Ralph Hertwig, Gerd Gigerenzer & Ulrich Hoffrage, The Reiteration
Effect in Hindsight Bias, 104 PSYCHOL. REV. 194, 194 (1997).
222. Id.
223. Id.
224. See id.
225. See id.
226. Jonathan Baron & John C. Hershey, Outcome Bias in Decision
Evaluation, 54 J. PERSONALITY & SOC. PSYCHOL. 569, 570 (1988).
227. See id.
228. Id.
In other words, outcome bias does not reflect hindsight judgments about
how likely an event appears to have been, but hindsight judgments
about whether a decision was a good or bad one.229 For example, in a
medical context, subjects are more likely to judge the decision to
perform surgery as a bad decision when they are told that the patient
died during surgery than when told that the same patient survived the
surgery.230 While at a naïve level this might seem intuitively
reasonable, decision analysts teach that, rationally,
[i]nformation that is available only after a decision is made is

irrelevant to the quality of the decision. Such information
plays no direct role in the advice we may give decision
makers ex ante or in the lessons they may learn. The
outcome of a decision, by itself, cannot be used to improve a
decision unless the decision maker is clairvoyant.231
Even when people understand that outcome bias is inappropriate, it is

difficult to overcome; as with hindsight bias, people tend to show an
outcome bias “even when they think they should not, and . . . even
though they think they do not.”232
Hindsight bias and outcome bias have particularly serious
implications for appellate and postconviction review by judges,
especially in the application of harmless error and related doctrines
such as the prejudice prong of the ineffective assistance of counsel
analysis and the materiality prong of Brady v. Maryland.233 Hindsight
bias and outcome bias, together, should be expected to have an
affirmance-biasing effect in postconviction and appellate review
because the outcome of the case—conviction234—tends to appear, in
hindsight, to have been both inevitable and a “good” decision.
Empirical data appear to support that conclusion, as reversals in
229. See id.

230. Id. at 571.
231. Id. at 569.
232. Id. at 572.
233. 373 U.S. 83 (1963). Brady and its progeny hold that a prosecutor violates
due process by failing to disclose to the defense exculpatory evidence if that evidence is
material—that is, if disclosure of the evidence would have created a reasonable
probability of a different outcome. Id. at 87.
234. In criminal cases, the appellate review almost always focuses on
challenges to convictions brought by criminal defendants because the double jeopardy
clause prohibits government appeals of acquittals. United States v. Sanges, 144 U.S.
310, 312-13 (1892). States’ appeals are typically limited to interlocutory appeals of
evidentiary rulings or a limited range of sentencing issues. URSULA BENTELE & EVE
CARY, APPELLATE ADVOCACY: PRINCIPLES AND PRACTICE 63, 69, 76 (4th ed. 2004).
criminal cases are quite rare.235 Even where courts find error, they
frequently forgive the error under the harmless error doctrine.236 With
hindsight knowledge that a jury found the defendant guilty beyond a
reasonable doubt, judges are likely to be predisposed to view the
conviction as both inevitable and a sound decision, despite a procedural
or constitutional error in the proceedings.237 To some extent, placing
the burden of proving the harmless nature of an error on the beneficiary
of the error—in criminal cases, requiring the government to prove
harmless error beyond a reasonable doubt238—might be intended to
mitigate the effects of hindsight and outcome biases. Nonetheless,
courts routinely find significant errors harmless,239 and that is partly
because hindsight bias and outcome bias work in tandem with other
values, such as a desire to respect finality and avoid wasteful retrials of
obviously guilty defendants.
All of these cognitive distortions help to explain the reluctance of
the appellate courts in Avery’s case to recognize the flaws in the
eyewitness identification procedures used in his case, or even to
recognize that the evidence against him was weak and his alibi defense
was unusually strong.240 Now, in hindsight, with the benefit of both
greater understanding of the nature of eyewitness identification error
and the knowledge from DNA testing that Avery was actually innocent,
it seems apparent that the eyewitness procedure was flawed, that the
conviction was suspect, and that the case was close from the beginning.
(Of course, in fairness, we cannot overlook the fact that hindsight bias
likely makes Avery’s innocence look all the more apparent to us now
than it might have at the time. But that does not negate the fact that
hindsight bias appeared to impair the judgment of the courts that
reviewed Avery’s case before his exoneration.)
235. See infra notes 353-60, 428-31 and accompanying text.

236. See infra notes 358-60 and accompanying text.
237. The harmless error doctrine has received considerable scholarly attention,
including significant criticism that it unduly focuses on the guilt of a defendant. See,
e.g., Brandon L. Garrett, Innocence, Harmless Error, and Federal Wrongful
Conviction Law, 2005 WIS. L. REV. 35, 58-61; Harry T. Edwards, To Err Is Human,
But Not Always Harmless: When Should Legal Error Be Tolerated?, 70 N.Y.U. L.
REV. 1167, 1170 (1995). Hindsight and outcome bias provide another basis for
questioning the wisdom of a doctrine that turns on after-the-fact, guilt-based
assessments of the effects of an error on the outcome of a case.
238. Chapman v. California, 386 U.S. 18, 24 (1967).
239. See Garrett, supra note 237, at 38 (stating that harmless error analysis “all
but bar[s] relief in criminal appeals”).
240. See supra notes 87-92 and accompanying text (noting that the court
believed the photo array used in Avery’s case to be one of the fairest the court had
seen, and subsequently denied postconviction relief, in part upon the conclusion that the
case against Avery had not been close).
The effect of hindsight bias on appellate and postconviction review

is likely to be even more pronounced in situations where the burden of
persuasion is placed on the defendant. Yet many of the innocence-
based challenges to convictions do just that. Claims that the
government withheld exculpatory evidence, or that trial counsel
provided ineffective assistance, require the defendant to show
affirmatively that those errors might have made a difference in the
outcome of the proceedings.241 Given the combination of those burdens
of persuasion and the cognitive biases that affect hindsight review, it is
not at all surprising that ineffective assistance of counsel claims were
denied in cases like Anderson’s and Avery’s. We consider these
burden-shifting doctrines in greater detail later in this Article when we
address rulebound dimensions of the tunnel vision problem.242
In sum, with an understanding of the natural cognitive biases and
distortions that we are all susceptible to as human beings, it becomes
clear that tunnel vision in criminal investigations and prosecutions is to
an extent inevitable. To suggest that tunnel vision infects police
investigations, prosecutions, and judicial proceedings is not necessarily
to make a value judgment about the nature or qualities of police and
prosecutors and judges, but, to some degree at least, merely to
acknowledge the natural tendencies that can and do influence anyone’s
access to and interpretation of data. In this sense, police, prosecutors,
and judges are not bad people because they are affected by tunnel
vision; they are merely human. But the innateness of these cognitive
biases and distortions does not absolve actors in the criminal justice
system from responsibility to try to overcome tunnel vision; to the
contrary, it demands that we become aware of these cognitive processes
and the tunnel vision they produce, and that we search for ways to
neutralize them. Unfortunately, the criminal justice system fails to do
that. Rather, both institutional pressures inherent in the adversary
system and explicit policy choices reinforce and exacerbate the natural
tendencies toward tunnel vision.
B. Institutional Pressures that Reinforce Tunnel Vision
The adversary system has many virtues, but one byproduct of an

adversary model is that it polarizes the participants, imposing pressures
241. See Strickland v. Washington, 466 U.S. 668, 686-87 (1984) (holding that
errors by defense counsel that constitute both deficient performance and prejudice to the
defense violate the Sixth Amendment right to counsel); Brady v. Maryland, 373 U.S.
83, 86-87 (1963) (holding that due process is violated when the government withholds
exculpatory, material evidence).
242. See infra Part II.C.3.b.
on them to dogmatically pursue their own perceived interests or their

own assessments of the proper outcome of a case. In contrast,
advocates of an inquisitorial system maintain that one advantage of that
model is that, because it posits neutrality and a search for the truth
rather than advocacy and a quest for victory, it avoids many of these
biasing pressures.243 Whether that is true or not, one thing is clear:
biasing pressures that exacerbate our natural cognitive biases do exist in
our adversarial system. Tunnel vision is a product not just of the
psychological tendencies discussed above, but also of multiple external
forces imposed by the adversary system at various stages of the
process.
1. INSTITUTIONAL PRESSURES ON POLICE
As noted above, tunnel vision in criminal investigations typically

originates during the initial police investigation of a crime.244 When
police investigators are under pressure—from victims, the community,
the media, elected officials, and their supervisors—to solve cases
quickly, the resulting stress may contribute to investigative tunnel
vision.245 That is, investigators’ thought processes may become
distorted by the desire to alleviate the pressure that comes from not
being able to assure the public that the offender has been caught and the
community is safe. Highly publicized unsolved crimes foster public
243. See, e.g., Franklin Strier, Making Jury Trials More Truthful, 30 U.C.
DAVIS L. REV. 95, 142-51 (1996) (comparing the truth-seeking strengths of the
adversarial and inquisitorial models). Others have also observed that adversarial
adjudication places a high priority on dispute resolution and party participation, while
inquisitorial systems place a higher priority on accuracy. See Darryl K. Brown, The
Decline of Counsel and the Rise of Accuracy in Criminal Adjudication, 93 CAL. L.
REV. 1585 (2005); Daniel Givelber, The Adversary System and Historical Accuracy:
Can We Do Better? in WRONGLY CONVICTED 253, 253-54 (Saundra D. Westervelt &
John A. Humphrey eds., 2001).
244. Police are also concerned with a more literal form of tunnel vision: in
officer-involved shootings, officers commonly experience a sort of tunnel vision that
manifests itself by blocking out of the officer’s sensory realm some sights and sounds
other than those immediately surrounding the threat, usually a weapon. See WILLIAM
A. GELLER & MICHAEL S. SCOTT, DEADLY FORCE: WHAT WE KNOW 325 (1992). The
officer’s mind concentrates its attention on the immediate threat, to the exclusion of any
possible distractions. Id. This may or may not work to the officer’s advantage,
depending on what else is occurring outside the “tunnel.” Id. This sort of tunnel
vision is an intense and immediate psychological reaction to life-threatening stress. Id.
Accordingly, when discussing tunnel vision with police or reviewing the police
literature on tunnel vision, it is important that one recognize the distinction between the
figurative form with which this Article concerns itself and the literal form associated
with police use of force.
245. See NAT’L RESEARCH COUNCIL, FAIRNESS & EFFECTIVENESS IN POLICING:
THE EVIDENCE 227-28 (2004).
fear of crime, which in turn undermines public confidence in and

support for police, thereby generating significant pressure on police to
solve high-profile cases quickly. Contrary to popular impressions that
are often reinforced by police, their capacity to solve crimes is more
limited than is commonly understood. Most property crimes, and even
a large proportion of violent crimes, that are reported to police are
never solved.246 Police find it difficult to live up to their nearly
mythical image as highly competent crime solvers.247 Unrealistic public
and media expectations can and have resulted in police administrators
pressuring police investigators to solve (or in the technical parlance of
police, to “clear”) as many cases as possible so that the case clearance
rates that are ultimately reported to the Federal Bureau of Investigation
and the public are not so low as to erode public confidence in police.
Police bear multiple, and at times competing, obligations in a
criminal investigation: to care for the victim (part of which might mean
not traumatizing the victim by expressing disbelief in the victim’s
account of the crime), to identify and apprehend the offender, and to
safeguard suspects’ constitutional rights. Indeed, police and
prosecutors have devoted increasing resources to assisting crime
victims, often establishing special units for just this purpose. While
much good has come of the victims’ rights movement, it also
constitutes another source of pressure on police that can contribute to
tunnel vision if left unchecked. Investigators can become too willing to
take at face value all of a victim’s statements—even those statements
that are distorted by the sorts of psychological biases at issue in this
Article—if they worry excessively that disbelieving a crime victim will
reflect poorly on the police. It is understandably difficult for
investigators to appear to accuse a purported crime victim—particularly
a violent-crime victim—of lying, even when police have some
reasonable doubts about the accuracy of the victim’s statement.248
246. See id.; Andrew D. Leipold, How the Pretrial Process Contributes to
Wrongful Convictions, 42 AM. CRIM. L. REV. 1123, 1159 (2005).
247. See Kenneth Dowler, Media Consumption and Public Attitudes Toward
Crime and Justice: The Relationship Between Fear of Crime, Punitive Attitudes, and
Perceived Police Effectiveness 10 J. CRIM. JUST. & POPULAR CULTURE 109, 111 (2003).
For a broader exploration of the nature and consequences of the police-media
relationship, see JARRET S. LOVELL, GOOD COP/BAD COP: MASS MEDIA AND THE CYCLE
OF POLICE REFORM (2003); Jerome H. Skolnick & Candace McCoy, Police
Accountability and the Media, 1984 AM. B. FOUND. RES. J. 521, 522.
248. By way of example, Madison (Wis.) Police Department detectives were
widely criticized for disbelieving a rape victim whose account ultimately proved likely
to be truthful. See Patricia Simms & Barry Adams, Abduction Story a Fake, WIS. ST.
J., Apr. 3, 2004, at A4. That criticism reportedly influenced police decisions in a
subsequent missing person case in which police detained a suspect in spite of reasons to
In particularly heinous and harmful crimes, police investigators

can naturally become emotionally affected by the crime in spite of their
best efforts to remain dispassionate. Police are particularly vulnerable
because they often witness the most viscerally disturbing aspects of
crime. Emotion serves a productive purpose in that it can give
investigators greater resolve to solve the case, but it also constitutes
another source of psychological pressure that can foster tunnel vision.
The sheer volume of reported crimes begging for police
investigation constitutes yet another source of pressure on police
investigators that reinforces tunnel vision. Police investigators are
often under constant pressure to complete their assigned cases by
solving the case and arresting an offender or determining that there is
insufficient evidence to warrant further investigation. Investigative
supervisors must constantly make judgments about how much time and
investigative resources each case deserves.249 Newly occurring crimes
awaiting investigation perpetually pressure investigators to dispose of
older cases. Moreover, in many jurisdictions where the volume of
serious crime investigations is high and many cases compete for limited
resources, police investigators might be reluctant to request time-
consuming and expensive forensic testing of evidence, particularly in
cases where police already believe they have sufficient testimonial
evidence (eyewitness identification or suspect confession) to establish
probable cause against a particular suspect.
The standards of performance by which police investigators are
measured, most significantly by their supervisors and administrators,
also significantly influence investigative practices and can potentially
reinforce tunnel vision. The most common measure of investigator
performance—at both the organizational and the individual level—is the
so-called “clearance rate,” the rate at which crimes reported to the
police are deemed satisfactorily closed.
The rules for calculating clearance rates are set by the Federal
Bureau of Investigation through its Uniform Crime Reporting
program.250 According to the FBI rules, cases can be cleared either by
arresting an offender and turning the case file over to prosecutors for
prosecution251 or by so-called “exceptional means” (a variety of
believe that the purported victim had concocted the crime, a belief ultimately proven to
be true. Id.
249. See JOHN E. ECK, MANAGING CASE ASSIGNMENTS: THE BURGLARY
INVESTIGATION DECISION MODEL REPLICATION 71-72 (1979).
250. FED. BUREAU OF INVESTIGATION, UNIFORM CRIME REPORTING HANDBOOK
78-81 (2004). Although participation in the Uniform Crime Reporting program is
voluntary, most police agencies do participate and, consequently, are held publicly
accountable to its figures.
251. Id. at 79.
circumstances under which police can be deemed to have identified the

offender, but through no fault of their own are unable to take the
offender into custody).252 The not-unreasonable assumption that the
police can only be held accountable for so much is built into this
performance measurement system; police investigators and police
agencies should not be penalized for circumstances beyond their
control, including the case filing decisions of prosecutors.253
Where this principle is applied loosely, the net effect can lead
police to conclude that their responsibility ends with the arrest of an
offender, after only meeting the threshold probable cause standard. To
the extent that a police agency measures its investigators’ performances
by such minimal standards (many police agencies apply more stringent
standards), investigators might conclude that arresting a plausible
offender constitutes the beginning and the end of their responsibility.
Where that occurs, concern for other performance standards—such as
whether the case was subsequently dismissed by prosecutors or courts
for insufficiency of evidence or violation of evidence-collection rules,
or more to the point of this Article, that a different offender was
ultimately determined to be the true perpetrator—assume a lesser
significance than the fact that a legally plausible arrest was made. The
performance standards to which individual police investigators and
investigative units are held—beyond the minimal legal standards—are
largely a matter of administrative policy and practice. The
performance standards to which an entire police agency is held are
largely a matter of political judgment and public expectations.
Accordingly, the stringency of performance measurement standards for
police investigations constitutes a potential source of institutional
pressure contributing to tunnel vision.
Police investigators can become emotionally attached to their
preferred theory of the case, including which suspect is the most likely
offender. Under such conditions, the criminal investigation objective
shifts, perhaps subtly, from an open search for evidence to proving that
the preferred theory of the case is correct.254
Moreover, some have argued that “tunnel vision” can be self-
reinforcing: police, once persuaded that an individual is the offender,
employ questionable investigative methods to further substantiate their
252. Id. at 80-81.

253. See id.
254. See C. RONALD HUFF, ARYE RATTNER & EDWARD SAGARIN, CONVICTED
BUT INNOCENT: WRONGFUL CONVICTION AND PUBLIC POLICY 111 (1996).
belief.255 They might even rationalize doing so as merely helping the

truth along.256
A detective’s preferred theory of the case might also influence the
collection of physical evidence: deciding where and what type of
evidence to look for is significantly influenced by the theory of how the
crime unfolded, including the sequence of actions taken by the
offender. Important physical evidence, either confirmatory or
exculpatory, might also be overlooked if the theory of the case
prevailing at the time of evidence collection later proves wrong.257
In addition, empirical research shows that the pressures and culture
that bear upon police officers can increase investigator bias: in clinical
studies, investigator biases in “judgments of truth and deception [are]
positively correlated with [police] experience and training. It is also
important to realize that these biases are unlikely to self-correct as a
result of feedback, which is seldom available to permit a diagnostic
evaluation of their beliefs.”258
2. INSTITUTIONAL PRESSURES ON PROSECUTORS
While police bear institutional pressure to solve crimes, the

adversary process imposes pressure on prosecutors to ensure conviction
of the suspects apprehended by police. The public pressure on
prosecutors to convict may even be more acute than the public pressure
on police to arrest because the prosecutor’s role in society is widely
perceived even more narrowly than is the police role in society. While
broad-minded prosecutors and legal scholars might envision the proper
prosecutorial role to be something like “to do justice on behalf of the
people,” it is more likely that prosecutors, and citizens alike, perceive
the prosecutor’s role more narrowly as limited to prosecuting offenders
via the criminal law.259 Although arresting offenders is widely
255. See id.

256. This phenomenon is part of the larger phenomenon of “ratification of
error” in which subsequent phases of a criminal investigation and prosecution serve not
to detect and correct prior errors, but rather to reinforce the correctness of the prior
errors. See id.
257. See Robert B. Bates, Curing Investigative Tunnel Vision, 54 POLICE
CHIEF 41, 41-43 (1987), for a discussion of the risks of tunnel vision in physical
evidence collection.
258. Richard A. Leo, The Third Degree and the Origins of Psychological
Interrogation in the United States, in INTERROGATIONS, CONFESSIONS, AND
ENTRAPMENT 37, 99 (G. Daniel Lassiter ed., 2004).
259. See Catherine M. Coles, Community Prosecution, Problem Solving, and
Public Accountability: The Evolving Strategy of the American Prosecutor (Harvard
Univ. Program in Criminal Justice Policy & Mgmt., Working Paper No. 00-02-04,
perceived as the dominant police role, the broader functions of police

also include such tasks as maintaining order, controlling traffic,
assisting persons in danger, and so forth.260
Extensive scholarly work has focused on the role of prosecutors
and the pressures that induce them to seek convictions, even when
doing so may subvert justice. While the role of a prosecutor is often
described as that of “minister of justice,”261 in reality that idealized role
often conflicts with the prosecutor’s rough-and-tumble role in the
adversarial process.262 Others have noted, for example, that
prosecutors’ offices often place an emphasis on conviction rates, as a
matter of pride, as confirmation of the justness of their work, and as a
“quantifiable method for superiors in the office to measure that
prosecutor’s success in an occupation where job performance, aside
from anecdotal evidence, is otherwise difficult to gauge.”263 This
emphasis, combined with public pressure to convict the guilty,264 can
engender what has been called a “conviction psychology”—an emphasis
on obtaining convictions over “doing justice.”265 Evidence that
institutional and cultural pressures in prosecutors’ offices contribute to
2000), available at http://www.ksg.harvard.edu/criminaljustice/publications/

community_prosecution.pdf.
260. See HERMAN GOLDSTEIN, POLICING A FREE SOCIETY 24-25 (1977).
261. MODEL RULES OF PROF’L CONDUCT R. 3.8 cmt. 1 (2001) (“A prosecutor
has the responsibility of a minister of justice and not simply that of an advocate.”);
Kenneth Bresler, Pretty Phrases: The Prosecutor as Minister of Justice and
Administrator of Justice, 9 GEO. J. LEGAL ETHICS 1301, 1301-02 (1996); Medwed,
262. See Stanley Z. Fisher, In Search of the Virtuous Prosecutor: A
Conceptual Framework, 15 AM. J. CRIM. L. 197, 198-99 (1988). As one former
prosecutor noted of his own office, in which prosecutors took pride in “doing justice,”
“there have always been cross-cutting themes in the prosecutor’s office. Most
significantly, there was a tradition of machismo, of the prosecutor as aggressive trial
lawyer facing down the lawbreaking adversary.” Bruce A. Green, Why Should
Prosecutors “Seek Justice”?, 26 FORDHAM URB. L.J. 607, 609 (1999).
263. Medwed, supra note 196, at 134; see also George T. Felkenes, The
Prosecutor: A Look at Reality, 7 SW. U. L. REV. 98, 99, 114 (1975).
264. Prosecutors also feel pressure to convict from the relationships they
develop with crime victims and with law enforcement colleagues who have invested in
developing the case against a defendant. See Medwed, supra note 196, at 145.
265. See Fisher, supra note 262, at 198; Felkenes, supra note 263, at 108-12.
According to Felkenes,
[t]he prosecutor who displays ‘conviction psychology’ thinks of the
defendant as guilty, and reasons that an innocent person would not be
introduced into the system. He sees the judicial system as the means
through which he must work in order that the guilty might receive their
proper punishment. . . . The result of these attitudes is a deterioration of
the ideal purpose of the prosecutor—to seek justice.
Id. at 110.
conviction psychology can be seen in empirical data showing that it

increases over time; the more experience a prosecutor has, the more
likely he or she is to express an interest in obtaining convictions over
an interest in doing justice.266
Ironically, even for the most ethical prosecutors, those most
committed to the ideal of doing justice, the prosecutorial role inevitably
fosters tunnel vision. Unlike a defense attorney, an ethical and
honorable prosecutor must be convinced of the righteousness of his
position; “[t]he honorable prosecutor simply cannot believe that he is
prosecuting the blameless.”267 Indeed, prosecutors motivated to do
justice “must satisfy themselves of an individual’s guilt as a
precondition to determining that the conviction of an individual is an
end to be sought on behalf of the state or the federal government.”268
But prosecutors’ assessments of guilt can be flawed both by the
information provided to them and the feedback they receive.
Prosecutors are particularly vulnerable to distortions based on the types
of information to which they have access. The problem of absent or
hidden data, which is recognized in studies of cognitive error,269 can
lead actors in the criminal justice system astray. As we have seen,
various cognitive biases impede a person’s ability to rationally and
accurately assess the significance of information, or to use all available
information. This tendency is worsened in situations where important
information is unavailable—where it is hidden or absent for various
reasons. For example, company personnel directors might conclude
that their hiring criteria are highly effective because the people they
hire perform well on the job. But, because they do not have a control
group to study—they do not have access to data on how well people
who do not meet their criteria might perform because those people are
never given a job—their conclusions might be flawed. The same
process applies to the criminal justice system.
First, prosecutors receive only incomplete pictures of their cases.
Tunnel vision that might have led police investigators to focus on a
266. Id. at 111 (reporting survey data revealing that “[t]hose district attorneys
expressing a concern for conviction had, on the average, about twice as much
experience on the job as those who mentioned a concern for justice”).
267. Randolph N. Jonakait, The Ethical Prosecutor’s Misconduct, 23 CRIM. L.
BULL. 550, 551 (1997).
268. Green, supra note 262, at 641; see also Felkenes, supra note 263, at 113
(noting that most prosecutors cannot presume innocence because they believe it is
morally wrong to prosecute a person unless they are personally convinced of guilt);
Bennett L. Gershman, A Moral Standard for the Prosecutor’s Exercise of the Charging
Discretion, 20 FORDHAM URB. L.J. 513, 530 (1993) (arguing that prosecutors must be
morally certain of the defendant’s guilt).
269. See GILOVICH, supra note 127, at 37-44.
suspect, and to develop evidence against that suspect and disregard

inconsistent or disconfirming evidence, shapes the information upon
which prosecutors base their judgments. Prosecutors see the evidence
generated by the police investigation, but often do not see the evidence
about alternative suspects who were rejected too quickly, about
eyewitnesses who failed to identify the defendant, or about other
disconfirming evidence that police dismissed as insignificant. As
Professor Randolph Jonakait has observed, “Not surprisingly, the
picture presented to the prosecutor almost always shows a guilty
defendant.”270
Second, like the personnel director who only sees evidence that
confirms the wisdom of the company’s hiring criteria, prosecutors very
rarely receive feedback inconsistent with their assessments of guilt.
Most people whom the prosecutor charges admit guilt and plead
guilty.271 Even where the prosecutor has a weak case, the prosecutor
can usually induce a plea by offering the defendant a generous deal.
Hence, plea-bargaining teaches prosecutors that the defendants they
prosecute are guilty, even if the evidence is weak.272 Trials confirm
those judgments about guilt because the vast majority of trials result in
convictions.273 And, in most cases, there is no way to obtain data
proving the opposite—that an innocent person was wrongly
convicted.274 The problem of hidden or absent data thus amplifies in
significant ways the cognitive biases that contribute to tunnel vision.
In those rare cases where a defendant is acquitted, the conclusion
that ethical prosecutors, convinced that they would only prosecute a
guilty person, must reach is not that the defendant was truly innocent,
but that the system failed, that the truth did not prevail, that justice
miscarried.275 Jonakait has argued that, under these circumstances,
270. Jonakait, supra note 267, at 553; see also Medwed, supra note 196, at
142.
271. Ninety-five percent of all convictions in both state and federal court are
obtained by way of a guilty or no contest plea. U.S. DEP’T OF JUSTICE, STATE COURT
SENTENCING OF CONVICTED FELONS, 2000: STATISTICAL TABLES tbls.4.1 & 4.2 (2003);
U.S. DEP’T OF JUSTICE, FEDERAL CRIMINAL CASE PROCESSING, 2001 tbl.5 (2003). The
trend toward resolving cases through guilty pleas is increasing. Ronald F. Wright,
Trial Distortion and the End of Innocence in Federal Criminal Justice, 154 U. PA. L.
REV. 79, 90 (2005).
272. See Jonakait, supra note 267, at 553.
273. Recent data indicates that 84 percent of federal criminal trials result in
guilty verdicts. See infra note 329.
274. Even with the advent of postconviction DNA testing, the vast majority of
innocent people go undetected, if for no other reason than the simple reality that most
criminal cases have no biological evidence that can yield dispositive DNA test results.
See Gross et al., supra note 2, at 531.
275. See Jonakait, supra note 267, at 554-55.
even ethical prosecutors feel a pressure to push hard to obtain

convictions, because only a conviction serves the interest of justice.276
Thus, role pressures naturally incline prosecutors to investigate in ways
that confirm guilt, to fail to recognize and hence fail to disclose to the
defense exculpatory evidence, to coach and prepare witnesses in ways
that make their testimony more compelling or consistent with the theory
of guilt,277 or to discourage witnesses from talking to defense counsel or
investigators.278 The result is an even stronger picture of guilt, whether
accurate or not. The process of being a prosecutor, even an ethical
prosecutor, thus exacerbates general cognitive biases and contributes to
tunnel vision.
3. INSTITUTIONAL PRESSURES ON DEFENSE LAWYERS
Defense lawyers are also susceptible to institutional pressures that

contribute to tunnel vision. Defense lawyers, like prosecutors, quickly
learn that most people charged with crimes are guilty.279 They see that
most of their clients plead guilty, and most of the remainder who go to
trial are convicted. Defense lawyers learn that, more often than not,
their clients fare much better in the criminal justice system if they plea-
bargain rather than go to trial. To take an adversarial posture in a
case—to investigate aggressively, file discovery motions for access to
evidence from police and prosecutor’s files, and file motions to
suppress—not only requires an investment of scarce resources, but also
often comes at a cost in terms of the ultimate resolution of the case.
Experienced defense lawyers learn that better deals can be obtained by
being cooperative: “Prosecutors and judges alike thus indoctrinate
defense attorneys into the plea bargain process by communicating to
attorneys that time-consuming motions should be forsaken in favor of
plea negotiation.”280
276. Id. at 556 (“Since the prosecutor ‘knows’ that the right result is a
conviction, conduct that helps the jury reach a guilty verdict is appropriate.”). Defense
attorneys are in a different position; defense attorneys also know that most of their
clients are guilty, so for them a conviction is not always, or even frequently, viewed as
a miscarriage of justice. Id. at 555.
277. Id. at 559-62.
278. David S. Caudill, Professional Deregulation of Prosecutors: Defense
Contact with Victims, Survivors, and Witnesses in the Era of Victims’ Rights, 17 GEO.
J. LEGAL ETHICS 103, 105 (2003).
279. See F. Andrew Hessick III & Reshma M. Saujani, Plea Bargaining and
Convicting the Innocent: The Role of the Prosecutor, the Defense Counsel, and the
Judge, 16 B.Y.U. J. PUB. L. 189, 211 (2002).
280. Id. at 213.
The case of a Texas man, Christopher Ochoa, reveals just how

much even defense counsel can be compromised by tunnel vision, and
how disastrous the consequences can be. Ochoa and his codefendant,
Richard Danziger, were convicted of a brutal rape and murder of a
young Pizza Hut employee committed in 1988 in Austin, Texas.281
After observing Ochoa and Danziger asking questions about the murder
at the restaurant where the murder occurred, detectives picked up the
men for questioning. After two twelve-hour interrogation sessions,
detectives broke Ochoa down by threatening him with physical harm,
fabricating evidence against him, convincing him he would be
convicted, and threatening him that he would be executed if he did not
confess. Ochoa, who was twenty-two at the time and had never before
been in trouble with the law, was coerced into signing a lengthy
confession filled with details of the crime that detectives wrote for
him.282
Despite Ochoa’s subsequent protestations to his attorney that he
was innocent and that the confession was false, his attorney refused to
investigate and counseled him that his only option to avoid execution
was to accept the State’s plea offer. Under that offer, not only would
Ochoa have to plead guilty to the rape and murder, but he would have
to testify against Danziger as well. Seeing no options, Ochoa did just
that and both men were convicted and sentenced to life in prison. Both
served over twelve years in prison before DNA testing in 2000 proved
that another man, who by then was confessing to the crime, was in fact
the source of DNA found in the dead woman.283 Defense counsel was
so convinced of his own innocent client’s guilt that not only did he
refuse to investigate and present a defense, but when postconviction
counsel contacted him to inquire about obtaining postconviction DNA
testing, he told counsel not to waste time on this case because there was
“‘not a chance’ that Ochoa [was] innocent.”284 Defense counsel went
so far as to either concoct or misremember facts that would support his
judgment of guilt: he asserted erroneously that there had been an
eyewitness who saw Ochoa at the scene and that Ochoa’s fingerprints
had been found on the murder weapon.285
281. Keith A. Findley & John Pray, Lessons from the Innocent, WIS. ACAD.
REV., Fall 2001, at 33, 33.
282. Id. at 34; Ronald Earle & Carl Bryan Case, Jr., The Prosecutorial
Mandate: See That Justice Is Done, JUDICATURE, Sept.-Oct. 2002, at 69, 72.
283. Id.
284. Memorandum from Wendy Seffrood to John Pray, Wisconsin Innocence
Project (Nov. 9, 1999) (on file with authors).
285. Id. After his exoneration and release from prison, Ochoa completed his
undergraduate education, and then enrolled at the University of Wisconsin Law School,
where he worked for a year with the Wisconsin Innocence Project, the project that
Unfortunately, Ochoa’s experience is not unique.286 Empirical

evidence indicates that meaningful investigation by defense counsel is
rare. One study found that appointed defense attorneys in New York
City conducted an investigation in only 27 percent of all homicide
cases, 12 percent of all felonies, and less than 8 percent of all
misdemeanors.287 Appointed counsel interviewed witnesses in only 4
percent of nonhomicide cases and 21 percent of homicides.288 And
defense counsel employed experts in only 2 percent of felony cases (17
percent of homicides).289
C. Prescribed Tunnel Vision
To a surprisingly large extent, tunnel vision in the criminal justice

system exists not despite our best efforts to overcome these cognitive
biases and institutional pressures, but because of our deliberate
systemic choices. Those choices are reflected in training that is
provided to police officers and express rules of law that limit the
inquiry, both in trial and on appeal, to considerations that will confirm
guilt. Some of these rules reflect service to other values, such as
finality and efficiency. But, to the extent that they institutionalize
tunnel vision and impede the search for the truth, such rules and their
effects should be exposed and understood so that the adequacy of the
justifications can be measured. Examples of a few of these normative
dimensions of the phenomenon follow.
1. PRESCRIBED INVESTIGATIVE TUNNEL VISION: POLICE

INTERROGATION TRAINING AND TECHNIQUES
Law enforcement training rarely includes any instruction on

recognizing or overcoming tunnel vision, or on the dangers of tunnel
vision. Worse, in some significant respects, law enforcement training
affirmatively teaches police investigators to engage in practices that
encourage tunnel vision. Most dramatically, this troubling message is
prevalent in law enforcement training on interrogation tactics.
helped secure his freedom. He graduated in May 2006. See Diane Molvig, Chris
Ochoa, 1L, WIS. LAW., May 2004, at 12.
286. See Stephen B. Bright, Counsel for the Poor: The Death Sentence Not for
the Worst Crime but for the Worst Lawyer, 103 YALE L.J. 1835 (1994) (recounting
recurrent inadequacies in attorneys provided for the indigent).
287. Michael McConville & Chester L. Mirsky, Criminal Defense of the Poor
in New York City, 15 N.Y.U. REV. L. & SOC. CHANGE 581, 762 (1986-1987).
288. Id.
289. Id. at 764.
Most police in the United States are trained in what is known as

the “Reid Technique” of interrogation. The most influential of the
police training manuals that teach this method is Inbau, Reid, Buckley,
and Jayne’s Criminal Interrogation and Confessions290—“the bible of
the American interrogator”291—which was first published in 1962 and is
now in its fourth edition.292 Under what is known as the Reid
Technique, law enforcement investigators are taught to distinguish
between “interviews” and “interrogations.” An interview is designed
to elicit information, to learn what the interviewee knows about the
crime. An interrogation, on the other hand, is designed to elicit a
confession. As the Inbau manual puts it, “an interrogation is conducted
only when the investigator is reasonably certain of the suspect’s
guilt.”293
Once police commit to an interrogation as opposed to an interview,
the Reid Technique advocates a nine-step interrogation process
designed to break suspects down, convince them that they are doomed,
and then make a confession appear to be a rational or risk-reducing
choice.294 The first steps of the process are designed to overcome
resistance by isolating the suspect and confronting him or her with
assertions of guilt; in these stages, officers are taught to interrupt any
denials of guilt, and to convince the suspect both that police know he or
she is guilty and that they have the evidence to prove it.295 Often, this
process involves confronting suspects with false evidence of guilt, such
as false claims that police have an eyewitness, the suspect’s DNA, or a
290. FRED E. INBAU ET AL., CRIMINAL INTERROGATION AND CONFESSIONS

(2001).
291. AMINA MEMON, ALDERT VRIJ & RAY BULL, PSYCHOLOGY AND LAW:
TRUTHFULNESS, ACCURACY AND CREDIBILITY 63 n.4 (2d ed. 2003) (quoting K.
McKenzie, Regulating Custodial Interviews: A Comparative Study, 22 INT’L J. SOC. L.
239, 249 (1994)).
292. Fred Inbau first published an interrogation manual—the first sophisticated
interrogation manual for police in this country—in 1942. That manual, entitled Lie
Detection and Criminal Interrogation, was eventually rewritten into two series—Truth
and Deception, and the more recently updated Criminal Interrogation and Confessions.
Leo, supra note 258, at 63-64; see also GISLI H. GUDJONSSON, THE PSYCHOLOGY OF
INTERROGATIONS AND CONFESSIONS: A HANDBOOK 7 (2003).
293. INBAU ET AL., supra note 290, at 8.
294. For summaries and critiques of the Reid Technique’s nine-step process,
see MEMON, VRIJ & BULL, supra note 290, at 58-65; Leo, supra note 258, at 72-73;
Gudjonsson, supra note 292, at 10-21. While most police in the United States profess
to follow this technique, there are indeed multiple manuals, and various interpretations
of the general technique, which vary the specific techniques and the degree of
persuasion recommended. See, e.g., Gudjonsson, supra note 292, at 7.
295. See Saul M. Kassin, On the Psychology of Confessions, 60 AM. PSYCHOL.
215, 220 (2005); Leo, supra note 258, at 72-73.
surveillance video catching the suspect in the act.296 These stages of the
process are then followed by offers of sympathy, understanding, and an
alternative “theme” that minimizes the moral seriousness of the act, and
that are designed to make the “doomed” suspect believe that confessing
is the most attractive option.297
The very notion of a Reid “interrogation,” therefore, expressly
embraces the foundational problems with tunnel vision—a premature
conclusion of guilt, and an unwillingness to consider alternatives.298 In
this context, however, the tunnel vision is not inadvertent, but
deliberate; police are taught that this is the way to advance their
investigation. Cognitive biases are openly encouraged.
This approach is problematic on multiple levels.299 To start, the
conclusion of guilt at this stage is necessarily tentative, and hence
potentially inaccurate. Police typically attempt to obtain confessions
because a confession is powerful evidence,300 and police are most
motivated to seek confessions in cases where they lack other sufficient
296. One study that examined 182 actual police interrogations concluded that
police used trickery involving false evidence roughly 30 percent of the time. See
Elizabeth F. Loftus, Editorial: The Devil in Confessions, 5 PSYCHOL. SCI. IN THE PUB.
INT., at i, i (2004).
297. See Saul M. Kassin, Christine C. Goldstein & Kenneth Savitsky,
Behavioral Confirmation in the Interrogation Room: On the Dangers of Presuming
Guilt, 27 LAW & HUM. BEHAV. 187, 188 (2003).
298. As one experienced police interrogator has put it, “When an interrogator
becomes married to a theory, he risks ignoring all contrary evidence or indications that
he could be wrong.” WARREN D. HOLMES, CRIMINAL INTERROGATION: A MODERN
FORMAT FOR INTERROGATING CRIMINAL SUSPECTS BASED ON THE INTELLECTUAL
APPROACH 4 (2002).
299. In addition to the problems discussed here, critics of the Reid Technique
have identified numerous other concerns, including that it encourages trickery and
deceit, which are illegal in many Western European countries and considered unethical
(even if justified) elsewhere; the tricks and deceit and high-pressure approach can cause
innocent as well as guilty people to confess; pressing suspects to confess may create a
“boomerang effect,” in which suspects who might otherwise confess might become
resistant if they feel they are being rushed or treated unfairly; bluffing can backfire
when police are caught fabricating evidence by a suspect who knows the purported
evidence cannot be true; by cutting off denials and explanations and asking questions
that can be answered in a few words, police risk that the confession reflects more what
they believe has happened than what actually has happened; and suspects who have
been pressured to confess may retain strong feelings of resentment towards police, even
afterwards. MEMON, VRIJ & BULL, supra note 291, at 63-64.
300. Mock jury studies show that confessions are among the most powerful
types of evidence, more persuasive to jurors than other evidence, including such potent
evidence as eyewitness identifications. Kassin, Goldstein & Savitsky, supra note 297,
at 187; Saul M. Kassin & Holly Sukel, Coerced Confessions and the Jury: An
Experimental Test of the “Harmless Error” Rule, 21 LAW & HUM. BEHAV. 27, 27
(1997).
evidence to ensure a conviction.301 Police therefore have the strongest

incentives to push hard for a confession where, based on the other
evidence, the confession is least likely to be truthful.
Moreover, the process of assessing an interview is likely to
produce misjudgments about the suspect’s veracity and guilt. Police
are trained to look for signs of deceit in the interview process to help
them determine whether to shift from an interview to an interrogation.
Police also use their interpretations of guilty responses to help them
shape the remainder of their interrogation, and the content of their
testimony at trial. Yet, considerable research indicates that people are
poor intuitive judges of truth and deception.302 In clinical studies,
people consistently perform at only slightly better than chance levels
(with typical accuracy rates of about 45 to 60 percent, when chance is
50 percent) at distinguishing lies from truth.303 Some studies suggest
that some professionals, including secret service agents, CIA agents,
sheriffs, and police officers, perform somewhat better than other
people.304 But even in those studies these professionals made significant
and frequent errors.305 Indeed, most studies indicate that trained
detectives and others with relevant on-the-job experience “perform only
slightly better than chance, if at all,”306 and do not perform more
301. In addition to relying on traditional interrogation techniques, police also

turn to polygraph examinations before evidence sufficient to convict has been
developed. This, in turn, can lead to what has been termed “Othello Error.” MEMON,
VRIJ & BULL, supra note 291, at 29-30. Polygraph examinations (and other purported
lie detectors, like voice stress analyzers) do not measure veracity directly, but rather
physiological responses to the fear engendered by lying. Leo, supra note 258, at 61.
But, “both guilty and innocent suspects might be afraid during police interviews: guilty
suspects because they are afraid of getting caught, and innocent suspects because they
are afraid that they will not be believed. Therefore, because of that fear, guilty and
innocent suspects may show the same nervous behaviours.” MEMON, VRIJ & BULL,
supra note 291, at 29. Thus, innocent people subject to polygraph examinations can be
like Desdemona in Shakespeare’s Othello, whose emotional response upon realizing
that she could not prove her innocence to false accusations of infidelity led Othello to
misinterpret her reaction as a sign of guilt—the “Othello Error.” Consistent with this
theory, a recent literature review of polygraph field studies “revealed that 21 percent of
innocent suspects failed the polygraph test and were wrongly accused.” Id. at 30.
302. Kassin, Goldstein & Savitsky, supra note 297, at 188.
303. Samantha Mann, Aldert Vrij & Ray Bull, Detecting True Lies: Police
Officers’ Ability to Detect Suspects’ Lies, 89 J. APPLIED PSYCHOL. 137, 137 (2004).
304. Id.
305. “‘[E]xperts’ who make [lie detection] judgments for a living—such as
psychiatrists, police investigators, judges, customs inspectors, and polygraphers for the
FBI, CIA, and military—are highly prone to error.” Kassin, Goldstein & Savitsky,
306. Leo, supra note 258, at 90.
reliably than untrained individuals.307 Research also suggests that

neither prosecutors nor judges are any more adept than police in
detecting lies or in understanding the science of lie detection.308
Additionally, the signs that police officers are trained to believe
indicate lies are not empirically related to lie detection. Police
manuals, including the Inbau book, teach police to look for deception
cues; according to interrogation dogma, liars show gaze aversion,
display unnatural posture changes, exhibit physical self-manipulations,
and cover their mouths or eyes with their hands while speaking.309
Research confirms that most police officers rely on such indicators.310
But research also convincingly shows that such cues are not indicative
of fabrication,311 and can actually reduce accuracy.312 Indeed, research
suggests that “looking at Inbau et al.’s . . . cues is
counterproductive.”313
To compound these lie-detection errors, trained detectives and
interrogators tend to be more confident in their judgments than
untrained individuals, and tend to have a deception bias such that their
errors in judging veracity are biased towards finding deception.314
More precisely, trained investigators tend to err by accepting false
confessions, not by rejecting true confessions. “Hence, the bias is not
to see lies per se, but to presume guilt.”315 As a consequence, “the
307. Kassin, Goldstein & Savitsky, supra note 297, at 189; Christian A.
Meissner & Saul M. Kassin, “He’s Guilty!”: Investigator Bias in Judgments of Truth
and Deception, 26 LAW & HUM. BEHAV. 469 (2002).
308. Leif A. Strömwall & Pär Anders Granhag, How to Detect Deception:
Arresting the Beliefs of Police Officers, Prosecutors and Judges, 9 PSYCHOL. CRIME &
LAW 1, 19-36 (2003).
309. Mann, Vrij & Bull, supra note 303, at 144; INBAU ET AL., supra note 290,
at 143-53.
310. Mann, Vrij & Bull, supra note 303, at 142, 144.
311. Id. at 144; DePaulo et al., Cues to Deception, 129 PSYCHOL. BULL. 74
(2003); MEMON, VRIJ & BULL, supra note 291, at 30-31 (stating that a review of more
than 100 studies reveals that “a typical nonverbal response during deception does not
exist”).
312. Mann, Vrij, & Bull, supra note 303, at 139; Saul M. Kassin & C.T.
Fong, “I’m Innocent!”: Effects of Training on Judgments of Truth and Deception in the
Interrogation Room, 23 LAW & HUM. BEHAV. 499, 499 (1999).
313. Mann, Vrij, & Bull, supra note 303, at 144.
314. Kassin, Goldstein & Savitsky, supra note 297, at 189; Meissner & Kassin,
315. Saul M. Kassin, Christian A. Meissner & Rebecca J. Norwick, “I’d Know
a False Confession if I Saw One”: A Comparative Study of College Students and Police
Investigators, 29 LAW & HUM. BEHAV. 211, 222 (2005).
pivotal decision to interrogate a suspect may well be based on

prejudgments of guilt confidently made but frequently in error.”316
For example, a common questioning technique is to employ
hypotheticals, asking an alcoholic, for instance, if it was possible to
have committed the crime during a blackout that left the suspect with no
memory of the crime.317 Such questioning puts the suspect in a box:
virtually any answer is susceptible to being viewed as incriminating.
Denying the possibility of a blackout is implausible and could be
viewed as defensiveness that indicates a guilty conscience. At the same
time, admitting the possibility of a blackout is viewed as an admission
that the suspect might have committed the crime. Confirmation bias
would likely lead the interrogator to see either response as confirming
his or her operative theory that the defendant was guilty.318
316. Kassin, Goldstein & Savitsky, supra note 297, at 189; see also Leo, supra
note 258, at 91.
317. The case of Evan Zimmerman, a former client of the Wisconsin Innocence
Project, offers an example of questioning of this type that contributed to the murder
conviction of an individual whose conviction was subsequently reversed, and against
whom all charges were eventually dismissed at the prosecutor’s request. State v.
Zimmerman, 2003 WI App 196, ¶¶ 11-20, 266 Wis. 2d. 1003, ¶¶ 11-20, 669 N.W.2d
762, ¶¶ 11-20. In another case, Gary Gauger was convicted of murdering his parents
and sentenced to death based in part on evidence gathered after police persuaded him
that it was hypothetically possible he had committed the double murder during an
alcoholic blackout. See Center on Wrongful Convictions at Northwestern University
School of Law, http://www.law.northwestern.edu/depts/clinic/wrongful/exonerations/
gauger.htm. Gauger was subsequently exonerated after a federal grand jury in
Milwaukee indicted two members of a Wisconsin motorcycle gang known as the
Outlaws for thirty-four acts of racketeering, including the murder of Gauger’s parents.
One of the Outlaws, James Schneider, was caught in a secretly recorded conversation
admitting to the murder of the Gaugers. Id.
318. Other types of responses to questioning are similarly likely to be
interpreted by police as inculpatory if police begin with a presumption of guilt. In the
Zimmerman case, for example, police told Zimmerman (falsely) that they had an
eyewitness who saw him with the victim on the night of her murder. Zimmerman, 2003
WI App 196, ¶ 11. According to one detective, Zimmerman responded by saying:
“Nobody saw us.” Transcript of Trial at 166, State v. Zimmerman, No. 2001CF63
(Circuit Court Branch 2, Eau Claire County, May 16, 2001). A second detective
remembered Zimmerman as saying, “Who saw me?” Id. at 70. The detectives
interpreted Zimmerman’s response as an incriminating admission. On cross-
examination, the detectives conceded that, in fact, Zimmerman actually said, “Nobody
saw us because we weren’t together.” Id. at 172. They nonetheless minimized the
significance of the latter part of that statement, because they insisted that there was a
suspicious “pause” between the third and fourth words of that sentence. Id. at 173.
The detectives’ testimony raises significant questions about what in fact Zimmerman
said, and whether there was any real pause, or what any such pause, if it existed, might
have signified. To officers who presumed guilt, confirmation bias inevitably led them
to see a facially exculpatory statement as an incriminating response.
Other forms of too-readily embraced evidence can also lead police

astray. Warren D. Holmes, a former investigator in the Miami Police
Department’s Lie Detection Bureau and an experienced interrogator,
has observed that police can be misled into believing a suspect is guilty
by relying too readily on “witness identification, forensic lab reports
and expert testimony.”319 He explains:
I once interrogated a murder suspect for more hours than I

should have. I was convinced of his guilt based on the
ballistics report. The exasperated suspect finally looked at me
and said, “Tell me what you want me to say and I’ll say it.”
I knew then that something was wrong. I suggested that the
investigator take the suspect’s gun and have it tested in
another department. Their report indicated that the suspect’s
gun was not the murder weapon. I had placed so much faith
in the initial ballistics report, that I had ignored my own
polygraph test results.320
When interrogators approach an interrogation with a firmly held

presumption of guilt, confirmation biases can be particularly
pronounced. Clinical studies show that interrogators who approach an
interrogation with a perception or presumption of guilt typically choose
guilt-presumptive questions and use high-pressure tactics (such as
presentation of false evidence and promises of leniency), even when not
trained in the Reid Technique.321 Presumably, training in the Reid
Technique would only amplify this natural tendency. At the same time,
guilt-presuming interrogators are significantly more likely than those
with innocent expectations to perceive suspect responses in
incriminating terms.322 Paradoxically, and troublingly, interrogators in
one study employed the most aggressive interrogation behavior when
they were questioning actually innocent suspects, even when the
innocent suspects told denial stories judged plausible by neutral
observers.323 The researchers in this study concluded:
319. HOLMES, supra note 298, at 4.

320. Id.
321. Kassin, Goldstein & Savitsky, supra note 297, at 199. This inclination
reflects what researchers have referred to variously as the self-fulfilling prophecy,
interpersonal expectancy effect, and behavioral conformation—the tendency people
have, once they form a belief, to “unwittingly create behavioral information that
verifies that belief.” Leo, supra note 258, at 94.
322. Kassin, Goldstein & Savitsky, supra note 297, at 199.
323. Id. at 200.
Interrogators who approached the task with a guilty base-rate

expectation never stopped to reevaluate this belief—even
when paired with innocent suspects who issued plausible
denials. Rather, it appears that they interpreted the denials as
proof of a guilty person’s resistance—and redoubled their
efforts to elicit a confession.324
The investigator bias infects neutral observers of such interrogation

sessions as well. In studies, observers who listened to tapes of
interrogations by guilt-presuming interrogators perceived the suspects
in that condition as more defensive and somewhat guiltier than suspects
interrogated by innocence-presuming interrogators.325 In other words,
“the presumption of guilt, which underlies all interrogation, sets in
motion a process of behavioral confirmation by which expectations
influence an interrogator’s behavior, and ultimately the judgments of
judges, juries, and other neutral observers.”326
Through this process, therefore, police training that encourages
guilt-presumptive interrogation tactics contributes to tunnel vision.
2. PRESCRIBED TUNNEL VISION AT TRIAL
Normative dimensions of tunnel vision are not limited to the

investigation stages. In some respects, trials also institutionalize the
tendency toward tunnel vision. In an idealized sense, trials seek to
neutralize guilt-presumptive cognitive biases by bringing in neutral
decision-makers (jurors) and instructing them that the defendant is
presumed innocent and that the state must prove guilt beyond a
reasonable doubt. There are reasons to doubt the efficacy of these
measures, however. Despite the formal constitutional demand for a
presumption of innocence, many observers have noted that there in fact
appears to be a “presumption of guilt.”327 After all, it is neither
324. Id.
325. Leo, supra note 258, at 96; see also Kassin & Gudjonsson, supra note
100, at 42 (noting that “laboratory experiments have . . . shown that behavioral
confirmation is the outcome of a three-step chain of events in which (a) a perceiver
forms a belief about a target person; (b) the perceiver unwittingly behaves toward that
person in a manner that conforms to that belief; and (c) the target responds in turn,
often behaving in ways that support the perceivers belief . . ..”).
326. Leo, supra note 258, at 96. For a discussion of how this “interviewer
bias” can distort the results of an interview or interrogation, see STEPHEN J. CECI &
MAGGIE BRUCK, JEOPARDY IN THE COURTROOM: A SCIENTIFIC ANALYSIS OF CHILDREN’S
TESTIMONY 79-80, 87-92 (1995).
327. See Michael J. Saks & D. Michael Risinger, Baserates, the Presumption
of Guilt, Admissibility Rulings, and Erroneous Convictions, 2003 MICH. ST. L. REV.
1051, 1056; see also HERBERT L. PACKER, THE LIMITS OF THE CRIMINAL SANCTION 160
irrational nor unusual to believe that the defendant is likely guilty, or at

least that there is significant evidence of guilt; otherwise, why was the
defendant charged? Empirical research reveals that prior to trial mock
jurors predict a 50 percent chance of voting to convict—a probability
significantly higher than if jurors took the presumption of innocence
seriously.328 The outcomes of most cases—that is, the feedback the
system provides—confirm the assumption that most defendants are
guilty; recent data show that federal juries return guilty verdicts in 84
percent of the cases that go to trial,329 and, in total, defendants are
acquitted in less than 1 percent of all cases.330 Moreover, others have
argued that the reasonable doubt instruction, as currently formulated in
most jurisdictions, is significantly weaker than as first developed at
common law331 and is sometimes misunderstood by juries as weaker
than the law requires.332
(1968) (“The presumption of guilt is what makes it possible for the system to deal
efficiently with large numbers, as the Crime Control Model demands.”); Felkenes,
supra note 263, at 112 (noting that surveys of prosecutors reveal that more than half do
not presume that a person is innocent until proven guilty, and that “[m]any believe that
once an accused reaches the trial stage, his guilt has been determined by the screening
processes of the police and prosecutor”); Daniel Givelber, Meaningless Acquittals,
Meaningful Convictions: Do We Reliably Acquit the Innocent?, 49 RUTGERS L. REV.
1317, 1326 (1997) (“The presumption of guilt, not the presumption of innocence,
permeates the criminal adjudicatory system.”).
328. Saks & Risinger, supra note 327, at 1062 (citing Thomas M. Ostrom,
Carol Werner & Michael J. Saks, An Integration Theory Analysis of Jurors’
Presumptions of Guilt or Innocence, 36 J. PERSONALITY & SOC. PSYCHOL. 436 (1978)).
Risinger and Saks have gone on to observe that “[s]ome evidence exists to suggest that
jurors set their probabilities lower than they think they do,” and that jurors might
actually start with “assumptions close to zero (innocence), but to which they attach[]
very little weight, so that the presumption of innocence [is] abandoned as soon as the
first piece of inculpatory evidence [is] presented.” Id. As Professor Daniel Givelber
has explained, “Jurors apparently do not listen, evaluate and deliberate on the
assumption that the defendant is innocent unless the government proves otherwise.
Rather, jurors take the logical position that they are in equipoise concerning the
defendant’s guilt and will await the presentation of evidence before reaching a verdict.”
Givelber, supra note 327, at 1372.
329. Saks & Risinger, supra note 327, at 1060 n.33 (citing U.S. DEP’T OF
JUSTICE, SOURCEBOOK OF CRIMINAL JUSTICE STATISTICS 2001 tbl.5.17 (2002) (showing
the disposition of cases terminated in U.S. District Courts in the fiscal year 2000)).
330. Ronald F. Wright, Trial Distortion and the End of Innocence in Federal
Criminal Justice, 154 U. PA. L. REV. 79, 103 (2005).
331. See Steve Sheppard, The Metamorphoses of Reasonable Doubt: How
Changes in the Burden of Proof Have Weakened the Presumption of Innocence, 78
NOTRE DAME L. REV. 1165, 1170 (2003) (arguing that the proof required to convict has
shifted from a “certainty” standard to a much weaker one, in which juries are
instructed to acquit only if they can identify reasonable doubts, defined as specific and
articulable doubts).
332. See Lawrence M. Solan, Refocusing the Burden of Proof in Criminal
Cases: Some Doubt About Reasonable Doubt, 78 TEX. L. REV. 105 (1999) (finding
Aside from the possibility that these features of the trial process
are ineffectual at neutralizing tunnel vision, other features of the trial
experience expressly limit the ability to consider the possibility that
anyone other than the accused might have committed the crime, thereby
making some aspects of tunnel vision prescriptive. Regardless of how
or whether this is justified by other values (such as interests in
convicting the guilty or in efficiency and conservation of judicial
resources), rules that limit the availability or admissibility of
exculpatory evidence inevitably increase the risk of convicting the
innocent.333 A few examples of rules that directly limit the ability to
explore alternative case theories follow.
a. Limited Admissibility of Evidence Suggesting an Alternative

Perpetrator
I. THE “DIRECT CONNECTION” DOCTRINE
Evidentiary rules in most jurisdictions impose significant

limitations on the ability of defendants to introduce evidence of
inconsistency and confusion among jurors, including that some jurors understand the
reasonable doubt standard to be less rigorous than civil standards, depending on the
wording of the instruction); Elisabeth Stoffelmayr & Shari Seidman Diamond, The
Conflict Between Precision and Flexibility in Explaining “Beyond a Reasonable
Doubt,” 6 PSYCHOL. PUB. POL’Y & L. 769, 774-78 (2000) (discussing empirical studies
on the effect of the “beyond a reasonable doubt” standard).
333. For example, Professor Andrew Leipold has noted that rules that limit
pretrial release on bail, tolerate precharging delay, or minimize government disclosure
obligations, among others, limit the ability of criminal defendants to develop
exonerating evidence and hence contribute to wrongful convictions. Leipold, supra
note 246, at 1163. Leipold acknowledges that the “policy considerations that lead
courts and legislatures to accept the risks” of some of these procedures “are
legitimate,” but argues that the cost in terms of wrongful convictions must be
considered in assessing the value of such rules. Id. at 1163. Some evidence-limiting
rules are derived from a concern for reliability. Excluding “unreliable” defense
evidence (hearsay, for example) can indeed be justified by concern about the reliability
of the outcome of a trial. But it can be justified only if one is willing to accept that,
while excluding such evidence will on balance enhance the odds of finding the “truth,”
it will do so at the cost of prohibiting some innocent people from proving their
innocence. In a system where the risks of error are apportioned roughly equally
between the two opposing parties in a case (as in our civil system), such rules that
enhance “truth” in the aggregate make perfect sense. But in a system that ostensibly
places all of the risk of error on the government (as does the criminal justice system),
rules that limit evidence that in some cases might prove innocence are more
problematic. See Katherine Goldwasser, Vindicating the Right to Trial by Jury and the
Requirement of Proof Beyond a Reasonable Doubt: A Critique of the Conventional
Wisdom About Excluding Defense Evidence, 86 GEO. L.J. 621 (1998).
alternate or third-party suspects. At trial, evidence is generally

admissible if merely relevant (unless excludable for some other specific
evidentiary reason, such as hearsay, privilege, or other such
exceptions). Relevancy is an exceedingly broad standard. The Federal
Rules of Evidence, which are extensively replicated in most state
evidentiary codes, define relevant evidence as “evidence having any
tendency to make the existence of any fact that is of consequence to the
determination of the action more probable or less probable than it
would be without the evidence.”334 Evidence—even relatively weak
evidence—suggesting that someone other than the defendant committed
the crime seems to fit a common sense understanding of relevance
under this standard; it surely has a “tendency to make” the defendant’s
guilt “less probable than it would be without the evidence.” Indeed,
given that criminal defendants have a constitutional right to present a
defense,335 it would seem that relevancy might be construed particularly
liberally when a defendant seeks to offer evidence that someone else
might have committed the crime. It is, after all, the stuff of Perry
Mason.336
But, to the contrary, courts apply a particularly restrictive view of
relevance when considering the admissibility of evidence about
alternative perpetrators. The “direct connection” doctrine limits
admissibility to evidence that not only has a “tendency” to make the
defendant’s guilt “less probable,” but that also has a “direct
connection” to the crime.337 As a leading case explained the rule,
evidence of an alternative perpetrator
334. FED. R. EVID. 401.

335. See Crane v. Kentucky, 476 U.S. 683, 690 (1986); United States v.
Nixon, 418 U.S. 683, 711 (1974); Davis v. Alaska, 415 U.S. 308, 319-20 (1974);
Chambers v. Mississippi, 410 U.S. 284, 295-303 (1973); Washington v. Texas, 388
U.S. 14, 18 (1967).
336. See David McCord, “But Perry Mason Made It Look So Easy!”: The
Admissibility of Evidence Offered by a Criminal Defendant to Suggest That Someone
Else Is Guilty, 63 TENN. L. REV. 917 (1996).
337. Various jurisdictions employ different phraseology to refer to the direct
connection requirement, including “clearly link,” “point directly,” “point unerringly,”
or “inherent tendency,” but all such terms are employed in essentially the same fashion
and to essentially the same effect. Id. at 921, 928, 938. In Wisconsin, the doctrine is
generally referred to as the “legitimate tendency” doctrine. See State v. Denny, 120
Wis. 2d. 614, 623-24, 357 N.W.2d 12, 17 (Ct. App. 1984). In a few other
jurisdictions, including Texas, Alabama, and Kansas, the rule is even more draconian.
“In those three states, a defendant could offer [third-party suspect] evidence only if the
prosecution’s case was entirely circumstantial. Thus, if the prosecution had even one
eyewitness, no matter how weak, the defendant was completely disabled from offering
[third-party suspect] evidence.” McCord, supra note 336, at 927 (citing Dubose v.
State, 10 Tex. Crim. 230, 251 (1881); Tatum v. State, 31 So. 369 (Ala. 1902); and
State v. Neff, 218 P.2d 248, 256 (Kan. 1950)). According to McCord, “this
is inadmissible if it simply affords a possible ground of

suspicion against such person; rather, it must be coupled with
substantial evidence tending to directly connect that person
with the actual commission of the offense. . . . The rule is
designed to place reasonable limits on the trial of collateral
issues . . . and to avoid undue prejudice to the People from
unsupported jury speculation as to the guilt of other suspects
. . . .338
As another court put it, the alternative-perpetrator evidence must

not only raise a reasonable inference of the defendant’s innocence, but
must also “directly connect the other person with the corpus delicti.”339
The rule frequently excludes evidence of strong motive or opportunity
because courts often require “direct evidence placing the third party at
the scene.”340
At times, defense evidence of an alternate suspect is excluded at
trial even when that evidence is arguably of the same nature and quality
as the circumstantial evidence offered by the State to support its charges
against the defendant. While the State is permitted to build its case
entirely on circumstantial evidence, the direct connection doctrine
suggests that wholly circumstantial evidence offered by the defense is
not admissible in many courts unless it is particularly powerful
circumstantial evidence.341 Professor Ellen Suni has noted that,
the fact that the alternative perpetrator may have made threats
against the victim, or was seen with blood on his hands in the
vicinity of the crime, or had assaulted the victim two weeks
before the crime, have been deemed insufficient in the
aberrant . . . doctrine is probably still good law in Texas, Alabama and Kansas.”
McCord, supra note 336, at 927 (citing Erwin v. State, 729 S.W.2d 709, 714-15 (Tex.
Crim. App. 1987); Coral v. State, 628 So. 2d 954, 983 (Ala. Crim. App. 1992); and
State v. Peckham, 875 P.2d 257, 266 (Kan. 1994) (footnotes omitted)).
338. People v. Green, 609 P.2d 468, 480 (Cal. 1980) (citations omitted).
339. Santana v. State, 510 S.E.2d 916, 917 (Ga. Ct. App. 1999) (quoting
Klinect v. State, 501 S.E.2d 810, 814 (Ga. Ct. App. 1998)).
340. State v. Williams, 593 N.W.2d 227, 234 (Minn. 1999).
341. Some courts permit alternative perpetrator evidence where there is “direct
or circumstantial evidence linking the third person to the actual perpetration of the
crime.” Pyles v. State, 947 S.W.2d 754, 757 (Ark. 1997) (quoting People v. Kaurish,
802 P.2d 278, 295-96 (Cal. 1990)). Even in those cases, however, the circumstantial
evidence must directly link the alternative suspect to the offense.
absence of evidence clearly linking the alternative perpetrator

to the actual crime itself.342
To the extent that the direct connection doctrine serves to choke

off inquiry into possible alternate suspects at trial, it enforces a kind of
tunnel vision as a normative matter. Thus, not only do cognitive biases
and institutional pressures disincline police and prosecutors to consider
alternatives to the defendant’s guilt, the rules of evidence reinforce
those biases by preventing the trier of fact from having access to
alternate theories of the case.
II. STATEMENTS AGAINST PENAL INTEREST
In a similar and related way, most evidentiary codes expressly

limit the ability of criminal defendants to offer hearsay evidence that a
third party confessed to the crime. Federal Rule of Evidence 804
creates a hearsay exception for statements against the penal interest of a
declarant if the declarant was unavailable at the time of trial.343 The
Rule, however, does not apply equally to all litigants, in all types of
cases. Rather, the Rule uniquely disfavors statements against interest
offered by a defendant in a criminal case to show that someone else
might have committed the crime: “A statement tending to expose the
declarant to criminal liability and offered to exculpate the accused is not
admissible unless corroborating circumstances clearly indicate the
trustworthiness of the statement.”344 Like the direct connection
doctrine, this rule reflects a distrust of criminal defense evidence and an
institutionalized unwillingness to consider the possibility that someone
else committed the crime, absent particularly strong showings of that
possibility. As the Advisory Committee to the Federal Rules has noted:
The refusal of the common law to concede the adequacy of a

penal interest was no doubt indefensible in logic. . . . [B]ut
one senses in the decisions a distrust of evidence of
confessions of third persons offered to exculpate the accused
arising from suspicions of fabrication either of the fact of the
making of the confession or in its contents, enhanced in either
instance by the required unavailability of the declarant. . . .
342. Ellen Yankiver Suni, Who Stole the Cookie from the Cookie Jar?: The
Law and Ethics of Shifting Blame in Criminal Cases, 68 FORDHAM L. REV. 1643, 1677
(2000) (citing State v. Robinson, 628 A.3d 664, 667 (Me. 1993); State v. Luna, 378
N.W.2d 229, 232 (S.D. 1985); State v. Stokes, 638 S.W.2d 7151, 723 (Mo. 1982)
(footnotes omitted)).
343. FED. R. EVID. 804(a) & (b)(3).
344. FED. R. EVID. 804(b)(3).
The requirement of corroboration is included in the rule in

order to effect an accommodation between these competing
considerations.345
This “distrust of evidence of confessions of third persons” also reflects

manifestations of the psychological processes underlying tunnel vision.
And it contributes to tunnel vision by narrowing the focus to the
charged suspect.
To recognize that these rules constitute a form of prescribed tunnel
vision is not necessarily to say that the rules are indefensible, or that
they should be abandoned or modified; it may be that these forms of
tunnel vision are appropriate at this stage of the process. Nonetheless,
it is important to recognize that these rules constitute a form of
prescribed tunnel vision that reinforces natural tendencies. This
understanding is necessary for evaluating the potential that these rules
present to contribute to erroneous convictions, and for assessing
whether the rationale for the rules justifies the risk inherent in any form
of tunnel vision. We consider whether these rules can be justified, or
whether they should be modified or abandoned in light of their effect on
tunnel vision, when we consider reforms designed to overcome tunnel
vision later in this Article.
b. Other Trial-Related Rules that Foster Tunnel Vision

Other legal rules governing the admissibility of evidence also
contribute to tunnel vision, although many do so in less direct ways.
Our purpose is not to catalogue all such rules, but merely to illustrate
the point.
Standards set by the Supreme Court for the admissibility of
eyewitness identification evidence are particularly susceptible to the
kinds of cognitive biases that underlie tunnel vision. Justice Brennan,
writing for the Court in 1967, famously observed that “[t]he vagaries of
eyewitness identification are well-known; the annals of criminal law are
rife with instances of mistaken identification.”346 Yet the Court’s
response to the problem has been largely ineffectual. Unreliable
identifications are rarely excluded,347 and mistaken eyewitness
345. FED. R. EVID. 804 advisory committee’s note.

346. United States v. Wade, 288 U.S. 218, 228 (1967).
347. Empirical evidence indicates that motions to exclude eyewitness
identifications are filed in somewhere between 1.2 percent and 4.8 percent of cases,
and, when such motions are filed, they are granted only between 1.6 percent and 5.75
percent of the time. Stephen G. Valdes, Frequency and Success: An Empirical Study
of Criminal Law Defenses, Federal Constitutional Evidentiary Claims, and Plea
Negotiations, 153 U. PA. L. REV. 1709, 1730-31 nn.123, 124 & 125 (basing results on
identification remains the leading cause of wrongful conviction of the

innocent in this country.348
To a great extent, the problem lies in the doctrine developed by the
Supreme Court, which permits—indeed feeds—the kinds of cognitive
biases that foster tunnel vision. The Court has developed a two-step
due process analysis for determining admissibility of eyewitness
evidence. First, courts evaluate whether the procedures used by police
to obtain the identification were “impermissibly suggestive.”349
Second, even if the procedures were impermissibly suggestive, due
process does not require suppressing the identification if, considering
the totality of the circumstances, the out-of-court identification was
nonetheless sufficiently reliable.350 But any such postidentification
reliability assessment is bound to be affected by cognitive distortions
that will make the identification appear reliable, accurate, and even
inevitable. Confirmation bias will lead decision-makers to interpret
data to support the reliability of the identification, and hindsight bias
will make the identification appear to have been inevitable.
Moreover, as social science research has shown, many of the
factors that the Supreme Court instructs courts to rely on when
assessing reliability are not well correlated to reliability and are
themselves influenced by the very suggestiveness that the “reliability”
analysis is intended to assess.351 Thus, a few courts, recognizing that
surveys of judges, prosecutors, and defense lawyers); Peter F. Nardulli, The Societal
Cost of the Exclusionary Rule: An Empirical Assessment, 1983 AM. B. FOUND. RES. J.
585, 594, 595 tbl.2, 596, 597 tbl.7 (basing results on analysis of nearly 8000 trial court
files).
348. See supra note 10.
349. Manson v. Brathwaite, 432 U.S. 98, 111 (1977)
350. Id. at 111, 114; Neil v. Biggers, 409 U.S. 188, 199-200 (1972).
351. Those factors, according to the Supreme Court, include
the opportunity of the witness to view the criminal at the time of the crime,
the witness’ degree of attention, the accuracy of the witness’ prior
description of the criminal, the level of certainty demonstrated by the
witness at the confrontation, and the length of time between the crime and
the confrontation.
Biggers, 409 U.S. at 199-200. Most of those factors, however, are subjective and
reported by the witness, and hence subject to influence by the suggestiveness of the
procedure itself. See Benjamin E. Rosenberg, Rethinking the Right to Due Process in
Connection with Pretrial Identification Procedures: An Analysis and a Proposal, 79 KY.
L.J. 259, 275 (1991); Siegfried Ludwig Sporer, Eyewitness Identification Accuracy,
Confidence, and Decision Times in Simultaneous and Sequential Lineups, 78 J.
APPLIED PSYCHOL. 22, 23 (1998); Nancy Steblay et al., Eyewitness Accuracy Rates in
Police Showup and Lineup Presentations: A Meta-Analytic Comparison, 27 L. & HUM.
BEHAV. 523 (2003); Wells & Bradfield, supra note 215, at 360-76; Gary L. Wells &
Donna M. Murray, What Can Psychology Say About the Neil v. Biggers Criteria for
Judging Eyewitness Accuracy?, 68 J. APPLIED PSYCHOL. 347 (1983).
trial courts are virtually doomed to fail in their attempts to assess

reliability under these circumstances, have invoked their state
constitutions to eliminate the reliability assessment. Under those
decisions, due process is violated whenever police employ an
unnecessarily suggestive procedure, without any further attempt to
assess reliability.352
3. PRESCRIBED TUNNEL VISION ON APPEAL AND POSTCONVICTION

REVIEW
Normative tunnel vision does not end after conviction; it intensifies

as cases proceed through appellate and postconviction litigation. Once
again, saying that the rules require tunnel vision on appeal and in
postconviction review is not to say that such rules are necessarily
flawed; good reasons may justify the increasing hostility to claims of
innocence as a case works its way through the system. To evaluate
those rules properly, the effect they have on enforcing tunnel vision—
and hence on sustaining the conviction and imprisonment (or execution)
of innocent persons—must be acknowledged and understood.
a. Deferential Review of Factual Guilt Determinations

One of the most startling revelations to newcomers to the justice
system is that appeals have almost nothing to do with guilt or
innocence. Appellate courts, as a matter of principle, decide legal
questions and focus on process, not the accuracy of factual
determinations. Trial courts, not appellate courts, decide facts.
Indeed, the Supreme Court has notoriously held that the due process
clause is generally not concerned about the accuracy of criminal
proceedings (including whether an innocent person has been condemned
to die) as long as the proceedings themselves were fair.353 Accordingly,
appellate courts are particularly loath to reverse jury verdicts in
criminal cases based on insufficiency of the evidence. While the
Supreme Court established in Jackson v. Virginia354 that due process
requires a sufficient quantum of evidence in criminal cases to protect
the constitutional requirement of proof beyond a reasonable doubt,
352. See, e.g., State v. Dubose, 2005 WI 126, 285 Wis. 2d 143, 699 N.W.2d
582; Commonwealth v. Johnson, 650 N.E.2d 1257, 1260 (Mass. 1995); People v.
Adams, 423 N.E.2d 379 (N.Y. 1981).
353. See Herrera v. Collins, 506 U.S. 390 (1993). In Herrera, the Court held
that, except perhaps in the most extraordinary circumstances, a freestanding claim of
actual innocence, without an accompanying claim of procedural error, does not raise a
constitutional due process issue. Id. at 399.
354. 443 U.S. 307 (1979).
appellate review of the sufficiency of the evidence is expressly very

limited. Under Jackson, courts consider only whether the evidence,
viewed in the light most favorable to the verdict, could reasonably
support a finding of guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.355 Under this
standard, almost any evidence suffices, so long as there is some
evidence.356
The deference to trial courts on questions of fact is usually justified
by considerations of institutional competence. According to the
conventional wisdom, appellate courts are comparatively disadvantaged
at fact-finding because, unlike trial judges and juries, they were not
present to observe the witnesses testify.357 With access only to the
“cold record” comprised of written transcripts and documents,
appellate courts miss significant information arguably necessary for
reliable fact determinations.
While there is much to this argument, one effect of such a
deferential standard of review of factual determinations is that appellate
courts, by design, are constrained in their ability to consider seriously
the possibility that someone other than the defendant committed the
crime, or that no crime was committed. This deference to the trial
court, as a matter of rule, effectively prohibits appellate courts from
looking outside the tunnel, except in the most extreme cases. Later in
this Article, we analyze the justifications for this standard when we
consider reforms that might be implemented to overcome tunnel vision.
b. Guilt-Based Harmless Error and Prejudice Assessments

Even when appellate courts do find constitutional or procedural
errors at trial, they are disinclined to grant relief. Increasingly, the
harmless error doctrine enables and encourages appellate courts to
overlook trial error when they are satisfied that the defendant was in
fact guilty.358 The harmless error doctrine has long posed challenges of
definition and application for courts. Increasingly, harmless error
355. Id. at 318.

356. Id. at 335 (Stevens, J., concurring) (noting that “in practice there may be
little or no difference between” the “no evidence” standard and the standard adopted by
the Court in Jackson); see also D. Michael Risinger, Unsafe Verdicts: The Need for
Reformed Standards for the Trial and Review of Factual Innocence Claims, 41 HOUS.
L. REV. 1281, 1314 (2004) (observing that, because the Jackson standard requires
courts to “accept[] at face value all testimonial evidence in favor of the verdict and
assum[e] all testimonial evidence to the contrary to have been rejected on credibility
grounds,” courts rarely find the evidence insufficient).
357. See Chad M. Oldfather, Appellate Courts, Historical Facts, and the Civil-
Criminal Distinction, 57 VAND. L. REV. 435, 439 (2004).
358. See Edwards, supra note 237.
analysis is applied in a way that turns on an appellate court’s

assessment of a defendant’s guilt, as opposed to whether the error
might have had an effect on the verdict.359 Under some current
formulations and typical applications of the doctrine, courts look not
“to whether an error actually ‘contributed’ to the jury’s actual
verdict. . . . [Rather,] courts broadly search the record by asking
whether independent evidence of guilt taken alone could support the
conviction.”360 Under this doctrine, cognitive biases can contribute in
powerful ways to a conclusion that the defendant was indeed guilty, and
that the error was therefore harmless.
Other doctrines that expressly shift the burden to prove that an
alleged error might have affected the outcome of the case to the
defendant are even more likely to reinforce cognitive- and role-based
tunnel vision. For example, ineffective assistance of counsel claims
require a defendant to show both that counsel performed deficiently,
and also that counsel’s errors prejudiced the defense—that is, that there
was a reasonable possibility of a different outcome if counsel had not
made the errors.361 Similarly, to succeed on a claim that the prosecutor
unlawfully withheld exculpatory evidence, the defendant must show that
the withheld evidence was material—which, again, requires a showing
that disclosure of the evidence would have created a reasonable
probability of a different outcome.362
Professor Stephanos Bibas has observed that, because of hindsight
and confirmation biases, “the very enterprise of after-the-fact review
[of ineffective assistance of counsel claims] is doomed to failure.
Judges simply cannot see the errors, because psychological biases make
it hard to imagine that cases could have come out any differently.”363
Existing data suggest that Bibas’s analysis is correct: despite woefully
inadequate funding of services for indigent defendants,364 and despite
abysmal representation in many cases,365 courts almost never grant
relief on ineffective assistance grounds. An analysis of 4,000 reported
359. See id. at 1171 (noting that courts increasingly rely on a “guilt-based
approach” to harmless error, rather than an “effect-on-the-verdict approach”); Garrett,
supra note 237, at 58-60.
360. Garrett, supra note 237, at 59.
361. Strickland v. Washington, 466 U.S. 668, 687 (1984).
362. Brady v. Maryland, 373 U.S. 83, 87 (1963).
363. Stephanos Bibas, The Psychology of Hindsight and After-the-Fact Review
of Ineffective Assistance of Counsel, 2004 UTAH L. REV. 1, 2.
364. See Bright, supra note 286, at 1843-44, 1846.
365. Judge Richard Posner has observed: “I can confirm from my own
experience as a judge that indigent defendants are generally rather poorly represented.”
Richard A. Posner, The Cost of Rights: Implications for Central and Eastern Europe—
and for the United States, 32 TULSA L.J. 1, 14 (1996).
appellate decisions between 1970 and 1983 involving an ineffective

assistance claim showed that only 3.9 percent resulted in a finding of
reversible error.366 Indeed, courts have failed to find ineffective
assistance even where the lawyer was asleep, drunk, or otherwise
nonfunctional during significant portions of a trial.367
The picture is similar—perhaps even bleaker—when one considers
the prosecutor’s duty to disclose exculpatory evidence under Brady v.
Maryland.368 The Supreme Court has held that prosecutors have no
duty to disclose evidence unless the evidence is “material”—that is,
unless disclosure of the evidence presents a reasonable probability of a
different outcome.369 For the same reasons that judges are unlikely to
be able to envision an alternative outcome in ineffective assistance of
counsel cases, prosecutors (and ultimately reviewing judges) are
unlikely to be able to envision a different outcome based on withheld
evidence. Not only do cognitive biases make it unlikely that
prosecutors (and judges) can envision a different outcome or appreciate
the value of the withheld evidence, prosecutors situated as adversaries
are not well-positioned to handle that task.370 Brady demands too much
of prosecutors when it simultaneously asks them to act as advocates
charged with prosecuting a defendant and as neutral observers
responsible for assessing the value of evidence from the defendant’s
perspective.
To make prospects for disclosure even worse, most Brady
violations are never detected because, by definition, the defense does
366. Richard Klein, The Emperor Gideon Has No Clothes: The Empty Promise
of the Constitutional Right to Effective Assistance of Counsel, 13 HASTINGS CONST.
L.Q. 625, 632 (1986).
367. See Jeffrey L. Kirchmeier, Drink, Drugs, and Drowsiness: The
Constitutional Right to Effective Assistance of Counsel and the Strickland Prejudice
Requirement, 75 NEB. L. REV. 425 (1996); Bright, supra note 286, at 1843.
368. 373 U.S. 83, 87 (1963).
369. A “reasonable probability” is a “probability sufficient to undermine
confidence in the outcome.” United States v. Bagley, 473 U.S. 667, 682 (1985)
(quoting Strickland v. Washington, 466 U.S. 668, 694 (1984)).
370. Stephanos Bibas, The Story of Brady v. Maryland: From Adversarial
Gamesmanship Toward The Search for Innocence?, in CRIMINAL PROCEDURE STORIES
(Carol Steiker ed., 2005) (“Adversarial-minded prosecutors are poorly suited to do that
job.”); Givelber, supra note 327, at 1389. Givelber has noted that prosecutors cannot
reasonably be expected to assess materiality because:
[o]nly the unusual prosecutor will believe: (a) the defendant is guilty; (b)
the jury will so find in light of all the evidence in the prosecutor’s
possession; and (c) the potentially exculpatory but undisclosed evidence in
the prosecutor’s possession is material in the sense that there is a reasonable
probability that it will change the outcome of the case.
Id.
not know about them; violations can be litigated only if the defense
learns of the nondisclosed information through some fortuity that
usually occurs sometime after trial.371 Moreover, the Supreme Court
has held that the Brady duty does not apply, at least regarding
exculpatory impeachment evidence, unless the defendant goes to trial.372
Yet 95 percent of all cases are resolved by a guilty or no contest plea.373
And, as the Brady dissenters pointed out, the Brady test oddly imposes
a retrospective analysis on decisions that must be made prospectively,
pretrial.374 Brady asks reviewing courts to determine after trial whether
the withheld evidence might have made a difference to the outcome of
the trial in light of all evidence presented at trial.375 Yet the prosecutor
must determine the materiality of the evidence prior to trial, before
hearing any of the trial evidence or exposure to the defense presented at
trial.376 Not surprisingly, empirical evidence confirms what these
considerations suggest: Brady claims are rarely successful. An analysis
of 210 Brady and related claims in cases decided in 2004 found that 83
percent were unsuccessful.377
For these reasons, Brady and other such burden-shifting doctrines
should be reexamined.378 The dissenters in United States v. Bagley
might have had it right when they insisted that the prosecution should
be required to turn over to the defense all evidence “that might
reasonably be considered favorable to the defendant’s case,” not just
evidence the prosecutor deems “material.”379 Given the pressures of
371. “Commitment to the rhetoric and formalities of the adversary system,

coupled with a refusal to acknowledge the profound inequality between certain
adversaries, means that innocent people will be convicted simply because there is no
meaningful way for them to learn about or present exculpatory evidence.” Givelber,
372. United States v. Ruiz, 536 U.S. 622, 630-31 (2002).
373. Id. at 632.
374. 373 U.S. at 92 (Marshall, J., dissenting).
375. Id.
376. Id.; see also Bibas, supra note 370.
377. Bibas, supra note 370.
378. See Burke, supra note 127, at 39 (“The problem with the Court’s Brady
doctrine is its use of a harmless error standard not just in determining whether the
reversal of a conviction is warranted based on the non-disclosure of exculpatory
evidence, but also in determining whether disclosure is required in the first place.”).
379. United States v. Bagley, 473 U.S. 667, 695-96 (1985) (Marshall, J.,
dissenting); see also Burke, supra note 127, at 40.
Importantly, to mitigate cognitive bias, the standard for disclosure should
require prosecutors to evaluate the potential exculpatory value of evidence
from the perspective of the defense, not through the lens of their existing
theory of guilt. . . . [P]rosecutors should be required to disclose any
evidence “favorable to the defendant’s preparation or presentation of his
defense.”
the adversarial system and the unavoidable cognitive distortions that

skew even the fairest prosecutor’s judgments, the pressures toward
tunnel vision do not need help from doctrines that shift the burden of
proving the significance of evidence to the defense.
c. Limitations on Postconviction Consideration of New Evidence

As grim as the prospects look for obtaining relief based on an
innocence-based claim on direct appeal, the prospects are even grimmer
thereafter. State postconviction procedures limit the range of issues
that can be raised on collateral attack of a conviction, and impose
heightened burdens on the defendants to obtain relief after conviction
and direct appeal, as finality interests are given greater prominence
over concerns about wrongful convictions.380 In many jurisdictions,
strict time limits and onerous burdens of proof make it difficult even for
defendants with powerful new evidence of innocence to find a forum
for presenting that evidence.381 At the federal level, habeas review is
ever more constricting, especially after Congress enacted the
Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996, which imposes
strict time limits and numerous procedural and substantive barriers to
federal court challenges to convictions.382 The details of these
Id. (quoting Daniel J. Capra, Access to Exculpatory Evidence: Avoiding the Agurs
Problems of Prosecutorial Discretion and Retrospective Review, 53 FORDHAM L. REV.
391, 428 (1984)).
380. See INNOCENCE COMM’N FOR VA., supra note 20, at 95 (noting the need to
balance a prisoner’s interest in access to a forum to test the fundamental correctness of
his conviction against the government’s “interest in the finality of its criminal justice
proceedings”).
381. For a thorough summary and analysis of the barriers to obtaining
postconviction relief on a claim of actual innocence, see Daniel S. Medwed, Up the
River without a Procedure: Innocent Prisoners and Newly Discovered Non-DNA
Evidence in State Courts, 47 ARIZ. L. REV. 655 (2005). Medwed has argued that to
protect the rights of innocent defendants to establish their innocence, states should:
(1) refashion their procedures to minimize the chance newly discovered
non-DNA evidence claims will be rejected due solely to procedural default;
(2) construct each remedy so as to enhance the likelihood that viable claims
will be heard in open court in front of an unbiased judge; and (3) utilize a
de novo standard of review for appellate courts in assessing summary
denials of motions for post-trial relief based on newly discovered evidence,
i.e., cases where the trial court declines to hold an evidentiary hearing on
the merits of an innocence claim prior to rejecting it.
Id. at 661.
382. See James S. Liebman, An “Effective Death Penalty”? AEDPA and Error
Detection in Capital Cases, 67 BROOK. L. REV. 411, 416 (2001); Lyn S. Entzeroth,
Struggling for Federal Judicial Review of Successive Claims of Innocence: A Study of
How Federal Courts Wrestled with the AEDPA to Provide Individuals Convicted of
Non-Existent Crimes with Habeas Corpus Review, 60 U. MIAMI L. REV. 75 (2005).
constraints are beyond the scope of this Article. For our purposes, the
point is simple: severe limitations on considering innocence in
postconviction procedures further prescribe tunnel vision. Whether or
not justified by countervailing interests in finality, they impose a cost
on the wrongly convicted that must be included in an assessment of
tunnel vision in the criminal justice system.
4. CONCLUSION
In sum, tunnel vision is the product of innate cognitive biases,

institutional pressures, and normative features of the criminal justice
system. Tunnel vision permeates all levels of the criminal justice
system, and intensifies in response to these three dimensions as criminal
cases pass through each stage of the system—from police investigation,
to prosecution and trial, and to appeal and postconviction review.
III. CORRECTING FOR TUNNEL VISION
Overcoming tunnel vision in these various manifestations is one of

the most intractable problems underlying wrongful convictions of the
innocent. Because it has so many causes that are so deeply rooted in
our psyches, our culture, and our institutions, and because it has such
multivariate expressions, tunnel vision defies simple solutions. It is
surely beyond the scope of this initial inquiry to conceive solutions to
the problem in all its complexities. But we do offer a few preliminary
considerations as a starting point for discussions about what might be
done to minimize tunnel vision in criminal cases.
Reforms can begin along several fronts. First, to the extent that
existing legal rules enforce tunnel vision, doctrinal reform is an obvious
place to begin. Second, education and training must be an important
part of the solution to help system actors understand the nature of the
problem and attempt to overcome the cognitive biases and institutional
pressures that produce tunnel vision. Third, to the extent that tunnel
vision is produced by flawed evidence collection and investigation
techniques and procedures, those techniques and procedures should be
reexamined. Fourth, police and prosecutors can adopt a variety of
management and supervision practices to reduce the risk that tunnel
vision will lead to wrongful arrest, prosecution, and conviction. Fifth,
to the extent that the cognitive biases and institutional pressures are
simply too powerful to overcome from within, greater transparency
throughout the criminal justice system offers a way to provide both
incentives for police and prosecutors to overcome tunnel vision, and,
more importantly, the necessary information to those who already have
an incentive to see outside the tunnel so that they can pursue alternative
theories about a case. Finally, we propose a few major reforms to the

police and prosecution institutions to minimize the effects of tunnel
vision. We consider each of these aspects of the solution in turn.
A. Doctrinal Reform
Thorough review of the rules of the criminal system should be

undertaken to look for those rules that reinforce tunnel vision. We
have identified several in preceding sections of this Article: 1) the
direct connection doctrine; 2) the corroboration requirement for
admissibility of statements against penal interest that exculpate the
accused; 3) admissibility standards for eyewitness identification
evidence; 4) the exceptional deference appellate courts exhibit when
reviewing sufficiency of the evidence to convict; 5) guilt-based
harmless error and prejudice rules such as the Strickland and Brady
doctrines;383 and 6) postconviction rules that limit the ability to present
new evidence of innocence. As implied previously, some of these rules
should be abandoned entirely, while others should be modified.
Regardless, each should be reevaluated with awareness of the cost it
incurs in terms of reinforcing tunnel vision and contributing to the
wrongful conviction of innocent persons. In addition, a searching
inquiry should be made for any and all other rules that reflect a
presumption of guilt and a constraint on introducing evidence of
innocence. Once identified, these rules should be carefully evaluated to
determine if they truly can be justified despite their role in contributing
to tunnel vision. To illustrate, we analyze a few—but not all—of those
rules in greater detail to assess whether they should be reformed in light
of their effect on tunnel vision.
1. THE DIRECT CONNECTION DOCTRINE AND LIMITATIONS ON

ADMISSIBILITY OF STATEMENTS AGAINST PENAL INTEREST
As discussed previously, both the direct connection doctrine and

the exclusion of uncorroborated statements against penal interest
offered to exculpate the accused contribute directly to the problem of
tunnel vision.384 Surprisingly, however, these rules—and particularly
the direct connection doctrine385—have been subjected to very little
judicial analysis, and almost no scholarly attention.386
383. Others have made compelling arguments that the Brady and Strickland
doctrines require repair. See supra notes 370-79 and accompanying text.
384. See supra Part II.C.2.a.
385. “Curiously, although this body of law raises basic issues of both criminal
and evidence law, it has remained virtually unexplored by scholars and has been rarely
Both rules have been defended on the basis that such alternate-
suspect evidence is “too easily fabricated falsely for the purpose of
deceiving.”387 Perhaps more significantly, the direct connection
doctrine in particular is defended by the contention that, unless
alternate-perpetrator evidence is strong and direct, it is likely to distract
and confuse the jury, waste judicial resources, and invite jury
speculation.388 While these are legitimate and weighty concerns as a
general matter, it is far from clear why they should apply with
particular force when the defense offers evidence of an alternate
suspect. Commenting on the special burden imposed by such rules on
the admissibility of exculpatory evidence offered by the accused,
Professor James Joseph Duane has observed: “This asymmetry in favor
of the Government is logically and morally indefensible, and flies in the
face of the constitutional imperative that ‘[i]n the administration of
criminal justice, our society imposes almost the entire risk of error
upon itself.’”389
subjected to any significant scrutiny by the very courts that promulgate and rely upon
it.” McCord, supra note 336, at 919. Indeed, until recently, McCord’s 1996
Tennessee Law Review article stood as one of the only scholarly pieces that analyzed
the direct connection doctrine. Recently, Ellen Suni has added a significant article to
that literature. See Suni, supra note 342.
386. The statement against penal interests exception to the hearsay rule has
received somewhat more scholarly attention, much of it critical of the asymmetry
between evidence offered by a criminal defendant, and evidence offered by the State or
for purposes other than to exculpate the criminally accused. See, e.g., James Joseph
Duane, The Proposed Amendments to Federal Rules of Evidence 608(b) and 804(b)(3):
Two Great Ideas that Don’t Go Far Enough, 209 F.R.D. 235 (2002) (criticizing the
asymmetry); Peter W. Tague, Perils of the Rulemaking Process: The Development,
Application, and Unconstitutionality of Rule 804(b)(3)’s Penal Interest Exception, 69
GEO L. J. 851, 978-1011 (1981) (arguing that the corroboration requirement is
unjustified, unbalanced, and unconstitutional); Glen Weissenberger, Federal Rule of
Evidence 804: Admissible Hearsay from an Unavailable Declarant, 55 U. CIN. L. REV.
1079, 1113-28 (1987). But see John P. Cronan, Do Statements Against Interests Exist?
A Critique of the Reliability of Federal Rule of Evidence 804(b)(3) and a Proposed
Reformulation, 33 SETON HALL L. REV. 1, 14-24 (2002) (employing the “rational actor
theory” to criticize the very notion that people rationally make statements against
interest, and in particular arguing that statements against penal interest are suspect).
387. McCord, supra note 336, at 925, 930 (quoting State v. May, 15 N.C. (1
Dev.) 328, 333 (1833)); see also FED. R. EVID. 804 advisory committee’s note.
388. McCord, supra note 336, at 930
389. Duane, supra note 386, at 244 (quoting Addington v. Texas, 441 U.S.
418, 423-24 (1979)). Duane also points out that, not only is the rule asymmetric in that
it requires corroboration when a defendant offers a statement against penal interest, and
not when the government offers that same statement, but it is also asymmetric in the
sense that no similar corroboration rule exists when either party in a civil law suit
offers that statement, or when anyone offers a statement that might tend to subject the
declarant to only civil liability, but not also criminal liability. Id. at 245-49. In 2003,
after several years of work, the Judicial Conference Advisory Committee on Evidence
Certainly, courts have a legitimate interest in preventing fabricated

testimony. But that does not explain why the rules presuppose that
exonerating evidence—evidence of a third-party perpetrator or of a self-
inculpatory statement made by another person—is uniquely easy to
manufacture. Indeed, although hard data does not exist, most criminal
defense lawyers would likely agree that developing usable alternative-
perpetrator evidence, or obtaining inculpatory statements from third
parties, is exceedingly difficult. Eminent scholars have long derided
this heightened suspicion of statements offered to exculpate the
accused. Wigmore, for example, characterized the rule excluding
statements against penal interest as a “barbarous doctrine,” and
dismissed the contention that such statements are unusually susceptible
to fabrication:
This [fabrication argument] is the ancient rusty weapon that

has always been brandished to oppose any reform in the rules
of evidence, viz., the argument of danger of abuse. This
would be a good argument against admitting any witnesses at
all, for it is notorious that some witnesses will lie and that it is
difficult to avoid being deceived by their lies. The truth is
that any rule which hampers an honest man in exonerating
himself is a bad rule, even if it also hampers a villain in
falsely passing for an innocent.390
Rules proposed amendments to the Federal Rules of Evidence that would have
addressed some of this asymmetry, not by eliminating the corroboration requirement,
but by adding a corresponding requirement that statements against penal interest offered
against the accused (that is, by the Government) must be “supported by particularized
guarantees of trustworthiness.” Daniel J. Capra, Amending the Hearsay Exception for
Declarations Against Penal Interest in the Wake of Crawford, 105 COLUM. L. REV.
2409, 2433 (2005). That language was proposed to satisfy the confrontation clause
requirements imposed by Ohio v. Roberts, 448 U.S. 56 (1980). Capra, supra, at 2439-
40. The amendments were forwarded to the Supreme Court, but before the
amendments were adopted the Court decided Crawford v. Washington, 541 U.S. 36
(2004). Crawford changed the Court’s confrontation clause jurisprudence, and those
changes scuttled the proposed amendments. Capra, supra, at 2426.
390. 5 JOHN H. WIGMORE, EVIDENCE IN TRIALS AT COMMON LAW § 1477, at
358-59 (Chadbourn ed. 1974); see also CHARLES T. MCCORMICK, MCCORMICK ON
EVIDENCE § 278, at 822-23 (Edward W. Cleary ed., 3d ed. 1984) (“Wigmore rejects
the argument of the danger of perjury since the danger is one that attends all human
testimony . . . .”); Donnelly v. United States, 228 U.S. 243, 277-78 (1913) (Holmes,
J., dissenting) (“[N]o other statement is so much against interest as a confession of
murder; it is far more calculated to convince than dying declarations, which would be
let in to hang a man . . . .”). Justice Holmes, however, nonetheless went on to
advocate for a corroboration requirement for statements against penal interest offered
by a criminal defendant. Id. at 278.
Moreover, limiting the admissibility of evidence because of a

concern that the evidence might be false is inconsistent with most rules
that do not require corroboration and do not permit courts to prescreen
otherwise competent testimony to assess its reliability. Outside of the
limited gatekeeping function courts in many jurisdictions perform to
assess the validity of scientific or expert testimony391 (and of course, the
rule against hearsay), our system typically does not prescreen evidence
for reliability, but relies on juries and cross-examination to test the
veracity of evidence.
Indeed, even some of the most notoriously unreliable—and most
frequently fabricated—evidence is typically not subject to any such
prescreening or limitation based upon concerns about easy fabrication
when offered by the State. Jailhouse snitch or informer testimony is
widely recognized as easily and frequently fabricated, because such
witnesses are “incentivized”392—they are frequently offered, or at least
expect, favorable treatment in their own cases in return for evidence
against a defendant.393 Unlike third-party perpetrator evidence or
statements against interest, which might require witnesses to make
statements contrary to their own interests, jailhouse snitches have no
such disincentive to lie; to the contrary, they have an overt incentive to
lie. Not surprisingly, jailhouse snitch testimony has been shown to be a
leading cause of wrongful convictions of the innocent.394 Because it is
so easily concocted, it is also a significant contributor to the problem of
tunnel vision. When police or prosecutors, focused on a suspect, fear
that they have insufficient evidence to convict in a serious case, a
devious inmate can frequently be found to bolster the State’s case with
391. See Daubert v. Merrill Dow Pharms., Inc., 509 U.S. 579, 597 (1993).
392. ROB WARDEN, THE SNITCH SYSTEM: HOW INCENTIVISED WITNESSES PUT
38 INNOCENT AMERICANS ON DEATH ROW (2002), available at
http://www.law.northwestern.edu/depts/clinic/wrongful/documents/Snitch.htm.
393. For a description of how jailhouse snitches manufacture their evidence,
see Steven Mills & Ken Armstrong, The Inside Informant, CHI. TRIB., Nov. 16, 1999,
at A1.
394. Scheck, Neufeld & Dwyer’s analysis of the first sixty-two DNA
exonerations found that jailhouse snitch testimony played a part in 21 percent of the
cases. SCHECK ET AL., supra note 5, at 156. A more recent analysis of the first 111
cases in which a person sentenced to death was released based on evidence of innocence
found that jailhouse snitch testimony was the leading cause of the wrongful convictions
in that category of cases, present in 45.9 percent of the death row exonerations.
NORTHWESTERN UNIV. SCH. OF LAW, CENTER ON WRONGFUL CONVICTIONS, THE
SNITCH SYSTEM: HOW SNITCH TESTIMONY SENT RANDY STEIDL AND OTHER INNOCENT
AMERICANS TO DEATH ROW 3 (2004-2005), available at
http://www.law.northwestern.edu/wrongfulconvictions/documents/SnitchSystemBooklet
.pdf.
claims that the defendant confessed to him or her.395 Yet,

recommendations for special prescreening rules and limitations on
admissibility of this type of evidence have been almost uniformly
rejected by courts and legislatures.396 If concerns about easy and
frequent fabrication of jailhouse snitch testimony do not warrant special
limitations on admissibility, surely those concerns do not warrant
limitations on admissibility of third-party perpetrator evidence or
statements against one’s penal interest.
Preventing jury confusion or distraction, waste of judicial
resources, or jury speculation is also an important goal. But that
concern applies to any evidence, not just third-party-perpetrator
evidence offered by a defendant. Concerns about confusion,
distraction, and waste of resources in other contexts are handled by a
balancing of the probative value of the evidence against the risk of
unfair prejudice, as provided by Federal Rule of Evidence 403.397
395. The case of Wilton Dedge, who spent twenty-two years in prison for a
rape that DNA testing eventually proved he did not commit, is illustrative. See
Editorial, It’s Time to Right the Wrong, THE LEDGER (Lakeland, Fla.), Mar. 29, 2005.
The State’s case against Dedge was suspect from the beginning. Id. The primary
evidence against Dedge included an eyewitness identification and microscopic hair
comparison testimony. Id. But the victim originally said her attacker was about six
feet tall, 160 pounds and had a receding hairline, while Dedge was only five-foot-six,
weighed 125 pounds, and had a full head of hair. Id. Moreover, Dedge, who had no
criminal record, had eight witnesses who placed him at work at the time of the rape.
Id. After Dedge’s first conviction was reversed on appeal, prosecutors responded by
presenting, at his second trial, the testimony of a seven-time convicted felon who said
Dedge confessed to him while the two were locked up together. Id. The snitch
received a significant reduction in his sentence in return for his testimony. Id. Dedge
was convicted again, and remained in prison until DNA testing finally proved his
innocence. Id.; see also Innocence Project, Case Profiles: Wilton Dedge,
http://www.innocenceproject.org/case/display_profile.php?id=149 (last visited Mar.
28, 2006).
396. Numerous studies and governmental inquiries have proposed limitations
on jailhouse snitch or informer testimony. See, e.g., STATE OF ILL., supra note 16, at
119-24; Province of Manitoba, supra note 19, at 6-7. Little has been done, however,
to implement such recommendations. Several courts have also attempted to remedy the
problem, but their attempts have been quickly reversed. See, e.g., Dodd v. State, No.
F-97-26 (Okla. Crim. App. July 22, 1999) (imposing a pretrial “reliability” hearing to
screen out unreliable snitch testimony), reh’g granted vacating and withdrawing
opinion, No. F-97-26 (Okla. Crim. App. Oct. 6, 1999), new opinion issued in 2000
OK CR 2, ¶ 2, 993 P.2d 778, 784 (requiring discovery related to snitches, but no
“reliability hearings”); United States v. Singleton, 144 F.3d 1343, 1346 (10th Cir.
1998) (holding that, under 18 U.S.C. § 201(c)(2), no party, including the government,
can offer incentivized testimony), rev’d en banc, United States v. Singleton, 165 F.2d
1297 (10th Cir. 1999) (holding that the government is exempt from the prohibition
against offering inducements to witnesses).
397. FED. R. EVID. 403 provides that relevant evidence “may be excluded if its
probative value is substantially outweighed by the danger of unfair prejudice, confusion
Indeed, some have suggested that the direct connection doctrine, in

particular, is not really an enhanced relevance standard, but merely “a
specialized application of the balance between probative value and
countervailing considerations.”398
Regardless of whether the doctrine is conceptualized as a
heightened relevancy requirement or an application of the balancing of
probative value versus prejudicial effect, it is clear that the rule reflects
more than an unexceptional expression of the routine weighing of
probative value and unfair prejudice. Under the standard Rule 403
balancing analysis, evidence is presumptively admissible unless its
probative value is substantially outweighed by the danger of unfair
prejudice or other countervailing factor.399 The direct connection
doctrine reverses the Rule 403 burden and presumption. Third-party
perpetrator evidence is, in effect, presumptively inadmissible unless the
defendant can show a direct connection to the charged crime, and that
burden, as we have seen, is not insubstantial. As Professor Ellen Suni
has explained, the direct connection doctrine “substitutes a mechanical
determination of connection for the careful balancing of probative value
and legitimate prejudicial effect that is normally necessary to exclude
relevant evidence.”400 Hence, the Rule 403 analogy does not explain or
justify the direct connection doctrine, but merely leads to the question:
“[W]hy is evidence offered by a criminal defendant that merely casts
suspicion on an [alternate perpetrator] almost invariably excluded,
while evidence offered by the prosecution that merely casts suspicion
on the defendant routinely admitted—and usually without any explicit
effort to balance probative value against countervailing
considerations?”401
of the issues, or misleading the jury, or by considerations of undue delay, waste of

time, or needless presentation of cumulative evidence.”
398. McCord, supra note 336, at 975.
399. FED. R. EVID. 403.
400. Suni, supra note 342, at 1683.
401. McCord, supra note 336, at 975. McCord answers that question by
suggesting that the asymmetry in the probative-prejudice balancing is explained, and
justified, by the asymmetry in the burdens of proof that apply in criminal trials.
Because the prosecution must prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt, he contends, there
is little danger that admitting evidence of the defendant’s opportunity or motive alone
“will result in the prosecution’s suggesting—but not really showing—the defendant’s
guilt.” Id. at 976. If the State’s evidence is insufficient to establish proof beyond a
reasonable doubt, the court must (theoretically) intervene as a matter of law and acquit.
Id. But, McCord says, because the defendant does not have to prove anything—let
alone that a third party committed the crime—admissibility of weak alternative-
perpetrator evidence might indeed lead to an acquittal based on speculation rather than a
reasonable doubt, which a court cannot intervene to prevent. Id. McCord’s analysis on
this point, however, essentially permits the rules of evidence to compensate for, and
The concern regarding speculation is particularly troubling.

Circumstantial evidence (which is what is typically at issue, given that
direct evidence, by definition, should satisfy the direct connection
doctrine) is rarely conclusive, requiring fact finders to make inferential
connections to arrive at a judgment. Yet courts routinely recognize that
circumstantial evidence can support the inferences necessary to
establish proof beyond a reasonable doubt.402 Even when reviewing
whether the State presented evidence sufficient to meet its high burden
of proof beyond a reasonable doubt, which the Supreme Court has held
presents a question of constitutional law,403 courts reject the contention
that the evidence was merely speculative unless the evidence was
virtually absent on an essential element of the crime.404
Even greater deference to the fact finders—which should at least
include permitting the jurors to hear the disputed evidence—should
apply when a criminal defendant offers evidence of a third-party
perpetrator. Unlike the State, the defendant need not meet any burden
of proof whatsoever. Evidence that might require speculation to satisfy
the high burden of proof beyond a reasonable doubt might require no
speculation at all to undermine the State’s proof. To create reasonable
doubt, the jury need not speculate that the third party actually
committed the crime, because the jury need not conclude that the third
party actually committed the crime; the jury must only be sufficiently
and reasonably unsettled about the sufficiency of the State’s proof.405
That determination will be made, as it should be, on an assessment both
of the strength of the evidence against the defendant, and the strength of
the exculpatory evidence presented by the defendant, including any
third-party-perpetrator evidence. The stronger the State’s evidence, the
less likely it is the jury will have its confidence in the defendant’s guilt
undermined by weak evidence that an alternate perpetrator committed
the crime; the weaker the State’s evidence, or the stronger the third-
party evidence, the more likely the jury will entertain reasonable doubt.
therefore dilute, the constitutionally required burden of proof and presumption of

innocence at trial.
402. See, e.g., State v. Poellinger, 153 Wis. 2d 493, 499-500, 451 N.W.2d
752, 755 (1990).
403. Jackson v. Virginia, 443 U.S. 307, 313-14 (1979).
404. See Irene Merker Rosenberg & Yale L. Rosenberg, “Perhaps What Ye
Say Is Based Only on Conjecture”—Circumstantial Evidence Then and Now, 31 HOUS.
L. REV. 1371, 1416 (1995) (stating that, under Jackson, “the appellate court will
disturb a verdict based on circumstantial evidence only when the jury has no justifiable
or rational bases for its inferences, in effect applying the discredited no-evidence test”).
405. In this sense, “[t]he direct connection doctrine improperly shifts the focus
of admissibility from whether the evidence sought to be offered has a tendency to
negate the defendant’s guilt to how effectively it proves the guilt of the alternative
perpetrator.” Suni, supra note 342, at 1683.
Excessive concern about speculation need not interfere with that

balance; to a great extent, the concern about speculation impermissibly
imposes on the defense a burden of proof that it constitutionally cannot
be made to bear.
There is no good reason that anything more than the traditional
balancing of probative value against countervailing factors ought to
apply to third-party-perpetrator evidence offered by the defense.406 All
of the legitimate concerns animating the direct connection doctrine can
be satisfied fully and fairly by evenly applying the Rule 403 balancing
principle. By going beyond that, the direct connection doctrine
institutionalizes tunnel vision, and does so without good reason.
There is little support—in experience or logic—for the fears
expressed by some courts that, without the direct connection doctrine,
defendants would flood their trials with irrelevant and distracting
evidence about the conduct of others.407 Although most jurisdictions
adhere to the direct connection doctrine, there are jurisdictions in the
United States that do not, and there is no evidence that courts in those
jurisdictions are inundated with specious alternative-perpetrator
evidence.408 Even without the direct connection doctrine, courts still
retain discretion to regulate the amount and flow of evidence to prevent
presentation of truly irrelevant or cumulative evidence. In reality, no
reasonable defense attorney would want to engage in such an obvious
act of desperation—piling on patently weak or overly extensive
alternative-perpetrator evidence—given the damage it would do to the
defense’s credibility, and to the jury’s patience.
Efficiency concerns, therefore, should not trump the right to
present relevant evidence of alternative suspects. At a commonsense
level, most people would agree that, in deciding whether someone
committed a wrong, it would be important to consider all of the
406. Indeed, Professor Katherine Goldwasser has argued that, because of our
constitutional preference for erring on the side of acquittal rather than wrongful
conviction, Rule 403 balancing ought not be used to exclude exculpatory defense
evidence, at least without exceptionally powerful factors that overwhelm the probative
value of the evidence. Goldwasser, supra note 333.
407. See, e.g., State v. Denny, 120 Wis. 2d. 614, 623, 357 N.W.2d 12, 17
(1984) (“[E]vidence that simply affords a possible ground of suspicion against another
person should not be admissible. Otherwise, a defendant could conceivably produce
evidence tending to show that hundreds of other persons had some motive or animus
against the deceased—degenerating the proceedings into a trial of collateral issues.”).
408. McCord has identified eight jurisdictions that “seem to rely on the
standard balancing of probative value versus unfair prejudice (or other relevancy
determinations),” three that add a “capable-of-raising-a-reasonable-doubt approach”
without equating it to the direct connection doctrine, and one that directly rejects the
direct connection doctrine “as setting too high a standard.” McCord, supra note 336,
at 937-38.
reasonable alternative suspects. The logic in this approach stems, in

part, from another natural psychological tendency: the preference
people typically exhibit for making relative judgments—comparing one
thing to the next to decide which fits best—as opposed to making
absolute judgments.409 Prosecutors seem to understand this intuitively,
as they frequently present evidence of alternative suspects who were
investigated and excluded. They do this both to rebut any possible
suggestion that the police investigation was not thorough or competent,
and also to demonstrate that, comparatively, the person on trial is the
most likely suspect. Ironically, there are no restrictions on prosecutors’
abilities to use weak and discredited alternative-suspect evidence to
bolster the claim that the defendant must have committed the crime; in
this sense, the direct connection doctrine creates another asymmetry
that favors the prosecution.
From the defendant’s perspective, the relative judgment process
means that a defendant who presents weak alternative-perpetrator
evidence runs the risk of making himself or herself look comparatively
even guiltier. Hence, there is no real risk that defendants will
introduce too much or too weak alternative-perpetrator evidence, or
that use of such evidence will mislead juries into acquitting
inappropriately; the relative judgment process suggests that presenting
marginal alternative-suspect evidence would likely enhance the
likelihood of conviction, not lead to a risk of an “erroneous
acquittal.”410 Conversely, preventing defendants from introducing such
evidence in situations where they deem it helpful to their cause does run
409. The relative judgment process is explored extensively in the context of

explaining how eyewitnesses react to photospreads and lineups. See, e.g., Gary Wells
et al., Eyewitness Identification Procedures: Recommendations for Lineups and
Photospreads, 22 LAW & HUM. BEHAV. 603, 613-17 (1998); Gary Wells & Elizabeth
Olson, Eyewitness Testimony, 54 ANNUAL REV. OF PSYCHOL. 277, 286 (2003); Gary
Wells & Elizabeth Loftus, Eyewitness Memory for People and Events, in 11
HANDBOOK OF PSYCHOLOGY: FORENSIC PSYCHOLOGY 149, 157-58 (Goldstein et al. eds.,
2003).
410. Some courts have suggested that one reason for limiting alternative
perpetrator evidence—a reason related to the concern that juries might speculate—is that
it might produce “erroneous acquittals.” See State v. Scheidell, 227 Wis. 2d. 285,
304, 595 N.W.2d 661, 671 (1999). Such a concern, however, distorts the fundamental
principles that underlie our criminal justice system and “ignores the value our system
places on avoiding conviction of the innocent.” Suni, supra note 342, at 1687.
Through the presumption of innocence and the requirement of proof beyond a
reasonable doubt, our system expresses a preference for allowing acquittal of some
guilty people to minimize the risk of convicting the innocent. If we take the
presumption of innocence and requirement of proof beyond a reasonable doubt
seriously, “to exclude defense evidence (and thereby increase the risk of an erroneous
conviction) solely out of concern about the risk of an erroneous acquittal is flatly
unacceptable.” Goldwasser, supra note 333, at 635-36.
the risk of foreclosing legitimate options, misleading the jury, and

inducing wrongful convictions.411
Moreover, in assessing whether trial considerations justify this
type of prescribed tunnel vision, other effects of this evidence-limiting
doctrine must be considered as well. In addition to directly promoting
this tunnel vision effect at trial, the direct connection doctrine also
might indirectly encourage or reward tunnel vision in law enforcement
at the pretrial investigation stage. The rule might serve as a
disincentive for police to investigate any suspects other than the
defendant they have selected. If police look too hard at alternate
suspects, and develop too much evidence, they might weaken their case
by providing an evidentiary basis for admitting the third-party evidence.
Suni has argued that,
[i]f police and prosecutors know that defendants have limited

resources to investigate other possibilities, and that even if
defendants obtain resources to do so, evidence that they find
will be unusable unless they can establish a direct connection
to the crime, police and prosecutors will have little incentive
to explore alternative theories once they have reached a
preliminary conclusion.412
On the other hand, it might be that the direct connection rule has
the opposite effect on investigator and prosecutor decision-making.
That is, investigators and prosecutors might feel more confident
exploring alternate suspects knowing that the rule makes it unlikely that
defendants will be permitted to introduce third-party perpetrator
evidence detrimental to the case against the primary suspect. Further
research would be useful to better understand the actual effect of the
rule on investigative decision-making.
In either event, there might be “significant systemic benefits” to
eliminating the direct connection doctrine “even in cases of relatively
strong evidence of guilt and weak alternative perpetrator showings.”413
As Suni has explained,
Over time, if alternative perpetrator evidence is admissible at

trial, police may have an incentive to better investigate all
411. The direct connection doctrine “totally prevents a defendant from

introducing evidence to advance an alternative perpetrator theory of defense unless the
defendant can overcome a high preliminary hurdle by showing a direct connection. In
doing so, the doctrine totally excludes relevant defense evidence from consideration by
the jury.” Suni, supra note 342, at 1682 (footnotes omitted).
412. Id. at 1690 (citations omitted).
413. Id. at 1691.
alternatives. Such an expanded investigation may unearth

evidence that clearly demonstrates that the alleged alternative
perpetrator is not guilty of the offense. This will likely
preclude the defendant from advancing the alternative
perpetrator theory and make conviction of a guilty defendant
more likely. Alternatively, the police may find evidence
during their expanded investigation indicating that the
alternative perpetrator, rather than the defendant, is
responsible for the crime.414
At the very minimum, we must at least acknowledge that rules

such as the direct connection doctrine have a tunnel-vision-enhancing
function. If they are to be retained, they must be retained only after
careful consideration of these harmful effects, and critical assessment of
the arguments that purportedly support them. Such careful
consideration powerfully suggests that the direct connection doctrine
cannot be justified. Instead, traditional rules of relevance and balance
between probative value versus prejudicial effect, tempered by
sensitivity to the effects of exclusion on tunnel vision, should govern
this evidence. In determining relevance, “courts should be clear that
the focus is not on whether the evidence establishes the guilt of the
third party, but on what relevance the evidence has to the guilt or
innocence of the defendant on trial.”415 And, when balancing probative
value against prejudice, “the court should ‘ask what rational inferences
of innocence the evidence supports, what risks of improper decision the
evidence poses, and whether any response short of exclusion could
secure the probative value of the evidence without its prejudicial
baggage.’”416 As Suni has concluded, courts should exclude relevant
alternative-perpetrator evidence “only if it can make a finding on the
record ‘that the jury’s consideration of the proffered evidence would
make an irrational acquittal substantially more likely than a rational
conviction.”417 Understood in the framework of this Article,
liberalizing the admissibility rules governing third-party-perpetrator
evidence at trial would serve an important role in combating tunnel
vision at the police investigation level.418
414. Id. (citations omitted).

415. Id. at 1692.
416. Id. at 1693 (quoting Donald A. Dripps, Relevant But Prejudicial
Exculpatory Evidence: Rationality Versus Jury Trial and the Right to Put on a Defense,
69 S. CAL. L. REV. 1389, 1421 (1996)).
417. Id. (quoting Dripps, supra note 416, at 1420).
418. Some movement in that direction may be under way already, in part as a
response to the problem of wrongful convictions. Just before this Article was set to go
to press, the United States Supreme Court decided Holmes v. South Carolina, in which
2. EXPANDED APPELLATE REVIEW OF THE FACTS UNDERLYING GUILT

DETERMINATIONS
As also discussed above, deferential standards of review of factual

guilt determinations constitute a form of prescribed tunnel vision.
Understood in this way, it becomes important to determine whether this
norm is justified.
As we have seen, the deference to trial courts on questions of fact
is usually justified by considerations of institutional competence—
appellate courts are not well situated to make factual determinations
because they do not actually see and hear witnesses testify. Recently,
however, scholars have argued that such deference is not always
warranted, at least not on all factual issues where serious claims of
innocence are at stake in criminal cases.
For example, Professor Chad Oldfather has pointed out that the
conventional wisdom about the institutional inferiority of appellate
courts in deciding factual questions is simply wrong in some respects.419
While certainly appellate courts do lose significant information because
of their inability to watch witnesses testify in person—because much of
the meaning conveyed by oral communication is expressed outside the
actual words spoken—they are actually better situated than juries in
other respects to make factual judgments. Empirical research has
shown that basing fact-finding on nonverbal cues can be misleading.
People are best able to detect lies when they listen without looking at
the speaker.420 And, contrary to the conventional wisdom about the
the Court addressed South Carolina’s particularly draconian version of the direct
connection doctrine. 126 S. Ct. 1727 (2006). In Holmes, the South Carolina Supreme
Court had held that a defendant may not introduce proof of third-party guilt if the
prosecution had introduced forensic evidence that, if believed, strongly supported a
guilty verdict. Id. at 1730. While acknowledging the widely accepted general
limitations on third-party-perpetrator evidence, which the U.S. Supreme Court
characterized as a specific application of the Rule 403 balancing test, the Court held
that South Carolina’s variation of the rule went too far and violated the defendant’s
constitutional right to present a defense. Id. at 1734-35. The Court noted that, under
South Carolina’s rule, if the prosecution appeared to have a strong case, no third-party
guilt evidence, no matter how powerful or direct, was admissible. Id. This, the Court
said, “does not rationally serve the end that the [direct connection doctrine was]
designed to promote, i.e., to focus the trial on the central issues by excluding evidence
that has only a very weak logical connection to the central issues.” Id. at 1734. The
Court was also troubled by the asymmetry created by the South Carolina rule: “The
rule applied in this case is no more logical than its converse would be, i.e., a rule
barring the prosecution from introducing evidence of a defendant’s guilt if the
defendant is able to proffer, at a pretrial hearing, evidence that, if believed, strongly
supports a verdict of not guilty.” Id. at 1734-35.
419. Oldfather, supra note 357, at 439-40, 449-66.
420. Id. at 459.
deficiencies of a “cold record,” people who base their judgments about

veracity on a written transcript “perform[] nearly twice as effectively at
detecting deceit as those exposed to both audio and visual cues.”421
Appellate courts also enjoy other advantages over trial courts and
juries in making some factual determinations. Oldfather has explained
that the complexity of the information presented at trial often makes it
difficult to assimilate all the salient information through such fleeting
presentations as witness testimony.422 Jurors have little opportunity to
reflect on what they just heard, or to organize it into a logical and
coherent scheme. A juror “may fail to connect a piece of information
with the rest of what she has heard, fail to understand it, forget it, or
simply miss it altogether.”423 For an appellate court with access to a
written transcript, by contrast, the evidence is static, not fleeting, and is
available to be read and reread, organized, and analyzed.424 While
evidence presentation at a trial is cumbersome and disjointed, presented
witness-by-witness rather than in some overarching logical order,
appellate courts can reorder the information to make comparisons, note
inconsistencies and gaps, and “test whether the information works as a
syllogism,” and thus whether it is consistent “with logic.”425
Oldfather has therefore contended that, while juries and trial courts
have significant advantages over appellate courts when it comes to
factual determinations that are particularly dependent on observing
witness demeanor, they do not have an advantage with other types of
fact-finding. For example, Oldfather has noted that appellate courts
may have an institutional advantage in deciding factual issues that
require particular experience or knowledge that juries are not likely to
possess, such as factual issues about the reliability of an eyewitness
identification that might require a more general understanding of the
fallibility of eyewitness identifications and the psychological factors that
can influence them.426 In addition, appellate courts would likely have
an institutional advantage in considering circumstantial and
documentary evidence, and some types of hearsay evidence that do not
rely on the jury’s observational powers at trial at all.427
Our point is that, in criminal cases, it might make sense to permit
appellate courts to more aggressively review sufficiency of the evidence
421. Id.
422. Id. at 451.
423. Id.
424. Id. at 454-56.
425. Id. at 457. In this way, Oldfather has argued that a transcript “facilitates
a mode of thinking that is more consistent with the ideal of legal thought.” Id. at 456.
426. Id. at 459-63.
427. Id. at 463-66.
claims in cases where innocence and guilt are the central concern, at
least where the evidence relied upon to convict is a type that appellate
courts are institutionally capable of reviewing. Oldfather has noted
that, while courts “almost never reverse convictions” on sufficiency
grounds in criminal cases,428 they take a much more active role in
reviewing sufficiency of the evidence in civil cases. An analysis of 208
cases in which a court addressed challenges to the sufficiency of the
evidence to support a jury verdict in civil cases revealed that courts
found the evidence insufficient in at least one sense in 102, or 49
percent, of the cases.429 Other empirical data is consistent with that
finding.430 Logically, one would expect to see greater scrutiny of facts
in criminal cases than civil cases. In civil cases, facts are decided by
the preponderance of the evidence, so significantly less evidence should
be required to support a factual determination than in criminal cases,
where proof must be established beyond a reasonable doubt. In
criminal cases, the higher burden of proof places the risk of error on
the government, while in civil cases the preponderance standard
apportions the risk of error roughly equally between the litigants.
While one would therefore expect to see greater involvement in
reviewing sufficiency of the evidence in criminal cases, and less in civil
cases, the data reveal just the opposite: “The problem is that the courts
have their allocation of resources backwards.”431
Appellate standards of review therefore should be reevaluated, at
least concerning issues related to the reliability of the guilt
determination. Oldfather has suggested that appellate review should be
recalibrated to incorporate the notion of institutional competence at the
case-by-case level, so that the degree to which an appellate court
reviews the facts would turn in part in each case on the court’s
assessment of its institutional capacity to review the type of factual
determination or evidence at issue.432 Oldfather has suggested that
courts should have to consider in each case “whether the nature of a
particular sort of evidence in a particular case is such that the appellate
428. Id. at 478.

429. Id. at 497.
430. Id. at 498.
431. Id. at 503. As Oldfather has explained:
Our criminal justice system places an asymmetric premium on factual
accuracy, such that avoidance of wrongful convictions is (at least in most
accounts of the system) of paramount importance. As such, the value that
would flow from effective appellate scrutiny of facts is relatively high. Our
civil justice system, in contrast, places a comparatively low value on factual
accuracy and a relatively high value on the role of the jury.
Id.
432. Id. at 506, 509.
court could do a better job of evaluating it than could the responsible

actor at the trial level.”433
Others also have suggested permitting greater scrutiny of guilt
determinations in criminal cases, at least where the case includes an
“innocence-in-fact” claim.434 For example, Professor Michael Risinger
has suggested that American courts should adopt something similar to
the British “unsafe verdict” standard for reviewing claims of actual
innocence.435 Under Risinger’s standard, when a claim of actual
innocence is raised, a reviewing court would be required to engage in a
probing review of the evidence, including evaluating (instead of
accepting at face value) the strength of the State’s evidence where
appropriate and permitting courts to consider “any relevant fresh
evidence, including research results casting doubt on the kind of
evidence relied upon at trial.”436
Expanding the role of appellate courts would be consistent with
modes of fact-finding in other contexts, where it is not unusual to have
someone who reviews a written record serve as the ultimate fact finder.
For example, in police internal disciplinary cases, a high-level police
official typically makes the determination of factual guilt or innocence
based upon a review of the written investigative file.437 Similarly,
administrative agencies with significant fact-finding responsibilities,
such as the National Traffic Safety Board, make determinations of
historical facts in important matters based upon a written record of the
evidence in a case or incident following a field investigation, or
433. Id. at 509. Appellate courts in some states have historically engaged in
more aggressive review of some sufficiency-of-the-evidence claims in criminal cases,
particularly those related to circumstantial evidence. See, e.g., Stephen L. Richards,
Reasonable Doubt Redux: The Return of Substantive Criminal Appellate Review in
Illinois, 34 J. MARSHALL L. REV. 495, 515-21 (2000-2001) (tracing the historical
practice in Illinois of reviewing sufficiency-of-the-evidence claims in cases that turn on
particular types of evidence, including circumstantial evidence); Elizabeth A. Ryan,
The 13th Juror: Re-evaluating the Need for a Factual Sufficiency Review in Criminal
Cases, 37 TEX. TECH. L. REV. 1291, 1294 (2005) (criticizing a Texas law providing for
more searching review of factual sufficiency claims than required by Jackson v.
Virginia).
434. See Rosenberg & Rosenberg, supra note 404, at 1416 (arguing that
appellate courts should review evidence independently for reasonable hypotheses of
innocence in circumstantial evidence cases, given that in such cases “guilt is
based . . . on inferences from the evidence, and the [appellate] court is in as good, if
not better, position to assess the rationality of these inferences and whether they
establish guilt beyond a reasonable doubt”).
435. Risinger, supra note 356, at 1331-33.
436. Id. at 1332.
437. See JAMES J. FYFE ET AL., POLICE ADMINISTRATION 467-78 (5th ed. 1997).
sometimes following a hearing that produced a written transcript of the

proceedings.438
Whatever its form, more active appellate review of factual
innocence claims in criminal cases would be at least be one step toward
freeing appellate courts from prescribed tunnel vision.
B. Education and Training
Education is an important and frequently suggested part of the

solution to the tunnel vision problem.439 It is obviously important to
sensitize police, prosecutors, defense lawyers, and judges to the
problem, to help them understand its consequences and the nature and
effects of its underlying cognitive biases and institutional pressures.
Beyond helping these individuals understand the nature and effects of
the problem, the more difficult educational challenge is to equip these
actors with the tools to help them overcome the cognitive biases and
institutional pressures that produce tunnel vision.
438. See John F. Easton & Walter Mayer, The Rights of Parties and Civil
Litigants in an NTSB Investigation, 68 J. AIR L. & COM. 205, 214-17 (2003).
439. Most inquiries into to the problem of wrongful convictions, and
specifically to tunnel vision, call for better education of police and prosecutors. The
Illinois Commission on Capital Punishment, for example, specifically recommended
that police investigators should receive periodic training in the following areas: (1) the
risks of false testimony by in-custody informants (“jailhouse snitches”), (2) the risks of
false testimony by accomplice witnesses, (3) the dangers of tunnel vision or
confirmatory bias, (4) the risks of wrongful convictions in homicide cases, (5) police
investigative and interrogation methods, (6) police investigating and reporting of
exculpatory evidence, (7) forensic evidence, and (8) the risks of false confessions.
STATE OF ILL., supra note 16, at 40; see also ABA CRIMINAL JUSTICE SECTION, AD HOC
INNOCENCE COMM. TO ENSURE THE INTEGRITY OF THE CRIMINAL PROCESS, ACHIEVING
JUSTICE: FREEING THE INNOCENT, CONVICTING THE GUILTY 95 (Paul Giannelli &
Myrna Raeder eds., 2006) [hereinafter ABA REPORT] (calling for police training that
includes “presentation and discussion of actual cases where illegal, unethical, or
unprofessional behavior led to the arrest, prosecution, or conviction of an innocent
person, thus compromising public safety”); MINISTRY OF THE ATTORNEY GEN. OF ONT.,
REPORT OF THE KAUFMAN COMMISSION ON PROCEEDINGS INVOLVING GUY PAUL MORIN
26 (2005), available at http://www.attorneygeneral.jus.gov.on.ca/english/about/
pubs/morin/morin_recom.pdf (recommending training about tunnel vision); Burke,
supra note 127 (arguing for increased education for prosecutors about cognitive biases);
Medwed, supra note 196, at 170 (arguing for better education to help prosecutors
“transform[] the theoretical underpinnings of their ethical obligations to do justice in the
postconviction sphere into a reality of everyday practice”); Fisher, supra note 262, at
201-02 (calling for a better definition of and education about prosecutors’ “quasi-
judicial role”); Richard A. Leo, False Confessions: Causes, Consequences, and
Solutions, in WRONGLY CONVICTED 36, 48 (Saundra D. Westervelt & John A.
Humphrey eds., 2001) (calling for better training to help police understand the
psychology of interrogation and suspect decision-making, and improve the ability of
police to recognize and prevent false confessions).
The challenge is difficult because the cognitive biases that

contribute to the problem are not easily suppressed by self-awareness,
training, or practice. Unfortunately, research suggests that merely
informing people about a cognitive bias, or urging a person to
overcome the bias, is to some degree ineffective.440 For example,
research shows that people are incapable of overcoming hindsight bias
even when advised about it and instructed to try to ignore reported
outcomes.441 That is to say, outcome information has a substantial
effect on judgments even when individuals are given unambiguous
instructions to ignore the outcome information.442
Education and training can nonetheless have some beneficial
effect. Asking individuals to consider the opposite of their position,
and to articulate the reasons why the results at issue could have been
different, is somewhat helpful in overcoming hindsight bias.443
Confirmation bias tends to produce, among other things,
overconfidence about the accuracy of one’s own judgments.444
Research suggests that this “illusion of validity”445 also can be reduced
to some degree by forcing people to articulate reasons that counter their
own position.446 Similarly, while belief perseverance is extremely
powerful, it can be mitigated if individuals are compelled to explain
why beliefs contrary to their own might be true.447 But it is difficult to
get people to argue against their own position, and even when they do,
overconfidence in their positions is generally only reduced, not
eliminated.448
To facilitate this process, education must be coupled with other
mechanisms that institutionalize the process, and that make
counterarguing an established part of every investigation and
prosecution. We explore some ideas for facilitating this process in
440. Bibas, supra note 363, at 5; Richard M. Kurtz & Sol L. Garfield, Illusory
Correlation: A Further Exploration of Chapman’s Paradigm, 46 J. CONSULTING &
CLINICAL PSYCHOL. 1009 (1978); Daniel Kahneman & Amos Tversky, Subjective
Probability: A Judgment of Representativeness, in JUDGMENT UNDER UNCERTAINTY:
HEURISTICS AND BIASES 32 (Daniel Kahneman et al. eds., 1982).
441. Hawkins & Hastie, supra note 200, at 312; Harley, Carlsen & Loftus,
supra note 200, at 960, 963.
442. Hawkins & Hastie, supra note 200, at 314.
443. Id. at 318 (citing Hal R. Arkes et al., Eliminating the Hindsight Bias, 73
J. APPLIED PSYCHOL. 305 (1988); Charles G. Lord et al., Considering the Opposite: A
Corrective Strategy for Social Judgment, 47 J. PERSONALITY & SOC. PSYCHOL. 1231
(1984)).
445. Id.
446. Id.
447. Lieberman & Arndt, supra note 184, at 691.
448. Id.
greater detail later in this Article.449 Moreover, because pet theories or

set conclusions about guilt are so difficult to overcome, much of the
training must focus on helping police, prosecutors, defense lawyers,
and judges understand why it is important to suspend judgment as long
as possible, and to resist the impulse to develop conclusions about a
case too soon.450 Once developed, judgments about a case can distort
subsequent perceptions and can be very difficult to dislodge, even with
an awareness of the cognitive biases at play.
A new awareness or understanding of the roles of police and
prosecutors is necessary. Although the adversary system exerts
polarizing pressures that feed the cognitive distortions underlying tunnel
vision, it is possible to layer some features of a more neutral,
inquisitorial system within the adversarial framework.451 The police
investigative function, in particular, can be conceived as an essentially
inquisitorial one.452 In general, police and prosecutor training needs to
place greater value on neutrality, emphasizing the need to postpone
judgment, and to develop all the facts rather than merely building a
case against a suspect.
We offer a few special considerations relating to the education and
training of police, prosecutors, and judges below.
1. POLICE
Once again, police interrogation training serves as an example—

here as an example of the way in which a paradigm shift can be
effected through new training. As discussed in Part II.C.1,
interrogation training that encourages police both to make judgments
about guilt or innocence before the proof is in, and then to interrogate a
suspect for the purpose of obtaining a confession, is a form of
deliberate tunnel vision. Like all forms of tunnel vision, it runs the risk
of obscuring the truth. Defenders of the Reid Technique maintain that
it works because it gets suspects to confess, and that it is necessary in
449. See infra notes Parts III.D.1.c., e. & f., and Parts III.D.2.c. & d.
450. See infra Part III.C.1. & 2.
451. See, e.g., Thomas M. Williamson, From Interrogation to Investigative
Interviewing; Strategic Trends in Police Questioning, 3 J. COMMUNITY & APPLIED SOC.
PSYCHOL. 89, 89 (1993).
452. See id. at 90 (“Within the adversarial system, it is Police questioning
which is the most important inquisitorial element.”). Others have noted that in a
similar way, to some extent innocence projects, with their focus on utilizing DNA to
obtain the truth, whatever it might be, operate as an inquisitorial layer at the conclusion
of the adversarial criminal process. See Ralph-Pierre Grunewald, The Role of
Innocence Projects in American Criminal Procedure (2005) (unpublished LL.M. thesis,
University of Wisconsin-Madison) (on file with authors).
the harsh world of criminal investigations.453 Given the potential for

harm, those claims ought to be carefully scrutinized and must be
balanced against the risk of convicting the innocent (and
correspondingly, failing to convict the truly guilty). In the end, tunnel
vision suggests the need to consider altering the dominant paradigm of
criminal investigations from a focus on making a case against a chosen
suspect to a more objective search for the truth.
Police training is important in other respects as well. Whether any
police officer naturally possesses the mental abilities necessary to guard
against tunnel vision, police agencies should ensure that all officers—
pre-service recruits, patrol officers, detectives, and supervisors—
receive some formalized training about the various psychological
phenomena that contribute to tunnel vision and, ultimately, to erroneous
investigations. Such training should include an understanding of the
fallibility of eyewitnesses’ memories; the memory-distorting effects of
certain eyewitness identification procedures; the reasons why and
conditions under which suspects will falsely confess to the police; the
potential to fixate on one theory of a criminal case to the exclusion of
rival theories; and the tendency to become defensive about one’s
professional decisions, methods, and judgments. Training exercises
might include role-playing scenarios where police trainees witness an
incident and are subsequently asked to describe and identify the
individuals involved in the incident. These sorts of training exercises
can be profoundly influential in helping police officers recognize their
own memory fallibility, and consequently, to better appreciate the
fallibility of other eyewitnesses. Other training exercises might lead
police trainees to draw erroneous conclusions from obvious, but false
or misleading, clues in criminal cases.454 Police trainees should also
have some of their own criminal case investigations subjected to
453. Inbau et al., for example, have argued:

[A] killer would not have been moved one bit toward a confession by being
subjected to a reading or lecture regarding the morality of his conduct. It
would have been futile merely to give him a pencil and paper and trust that
his conscience would impel him to confess. Something more was
required—something that was in its essence an “unethical” practice on the
part of the investigator—but under the circumstances involved in this case,
how else would the murderer’s guilt have been established?
INBAU ET AL., supra note 290, at xv.
454. For example, trainees might read investigative reports that indicate that a
suspect’s DNA was conclusively matched to DNA found at a crime scene, but have it
subsequently revealed that either the suspect’s identical twin was the true perpetrator or
that there was an innocent explanation for the presence of the DNA at the scene. The
purpose of such exercises is to reinforce the notion that even strong direct evidence can
be explained by other than the most apparent explanation, and, therefore, can be
misleading.
critique, partly to improve their investigative techniques and skills, but

partly to gauge how well they handle critiques and to help them be
more comfortable with having their work critiqued. Case studies of
investigations known to have resulted in wrongful arrests, prosecutions,
and convictions might be used to train investigators to recognize the
critical points in the investigation where decisions took the investigation
down the wrong path. Those who train police officers in criminal
investigation would do well to review known cases of tunnel vision and
wrongful arrest to improve training.
There is an abundance of specialized training available for police
investigators, ranging from forensic science to interrogation techniques.
There is less available in the areas pertaining to the tunnel vision
phenomenon. Training programs that serve the police investigation
field should remedy this training gap. The textbooks and training
documents that supplement criminal investigation training programs
should likewise devote greater attention to tunnel vision and its
contribution to wrongful arrest and conviction. Commendably, some
such recent publications already do so.455
2. PROSECUTORS AND JUDGES
Like police officers, prosecutors and judges should be educated

about the causes of, and correctives for, tunnel vision.456 This
education should begin in the juris doctorate programs in law schools
and continue through the various continuing legal education
opportunities afforded to prosecutors and judges by law schools,
national and state judicial and prosecutorial colleges and institutes, state
bar associations, and so forth.457
Professor Alafair Burke has noted that, because established beliefs
in guilt can be so difficult to overcome, “prosecutorial neutrality should
be at its peak prior to the prosecutor’s charging decision, before she has
455. See JAMES W. OSTERBURG & RICHARD H. WARD, CRIMINAL

INVESTIGATION: A METHOD FOR RECONSTRUCTING THE PAST (4th ed. 2004) (addressing
issues relating to sources of investigator bias, eyewitness identification fallibility,
improper interrogation procedures, informant reliability, and wrongful convictions).
456. Fisher, supra note 262, at 258; Burke, supra note 127, at 30 (advocating
training for prosecutors “about the sources of cognitive bias and the potential effects of
cognitive bias upon rational decision making”).
457. Joseph Rand has observed that some movement in this direction is
beginning in law schools: “We are already seeing a dramatic increase in academic
attention to cognitive biases and their effect on legal doctrine, theory, and practice.”
Joseph W. Rand, Understanding Why Good Lawyers Go Bad: Using Case Studies in
Teaching Cognitive Bias in Legal Decision-Making, 9 CLINICAL L. REV. 731, 734
(2003).
formed a theory of guilt that will taint subsequent information

processing.”458 For this reason, it is especially important that
prosecutors be taught to suspend judgment as long as possible—to resist
the temptation to assume that the suspect is guilty, and instead to
engage in an independent analysis of the case before reaching any
assessment.
C. Procedures and Protocols for Collecting and Assessing Evidence
A word of caution about police investigative reform is in order:

police investigative policies, procedures, and practices have, for a
variety of reasons, remained more impervious to change than other
dimensions of police work.459 Although forensic technology has
changed and improved dramatically in recent years, most police
investigative operations are hampered by excessive caseloads,
inadequate case management systems, and insufficient training for
investigators.460 Any effort to significantly reform the police
investigation function, including measures described below to remedy
tunnel vision, must be done with an appreciation of the factors that have
historically inhibited investigative reform.
Improved evidence collection and assessment procedures are
important because they minimize the risks of producing tainted
evidence that can reinforce the erroneous judgments that contribute to
tunnel vision. In this regard, any improvements in the procedures
related to factors that contribute to the problem of wrongful convictions
will help solve the problem of tunnel vision. Such reforms include, but
are not limited to, improving procedures for handling eyewitness
identifications, greater safeguards against unreliable jailhouse snitch
testimony, electronic recording of interrogations, and better oversight
of crime laboratories.461 Reforms in all of these areas are under way,
and each improvement makes an incremental correction to the problem
of tunnel vision.
To counter the natural preference for seeking out confirming
evidence, investigation protocols should require police and prosecutors
to test their theories by searching for facts inconsistent with their early

459. See Frank Horvath, Robert T. Meesig & Yung Hyeock Lee, National
Survey of Police Policies and Practices Regarding the Criminal Investigations Process:
Twenty-Five Years After Rand 110-11 (Nov. 17, 2003) (unpublished report), available
at http://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles1/nij/grants/202902.pdf.
460. Id. at 2-4
461. Improvements in each of these areas are typically recommended following
inquiry into the causes of wrongful convictions. See, e.g., STATE OF ILL., supra note
16, at 19, 31, 40, 51.
assessments of a case—that is, to deliberately seek disconfirming

evidence. For example, when evaluating physical evidence, police and
prosecutors should consider not just the evidence that was found, but
anything that was not found and that one would have expected to find if
the suspect had committed the crime. Similarly, when evaluating a
confession, police and prosecutors should look carefully for any
statements that are not corroborated by other evidence, or that are
inconsistent with known facts of the case.462
To help overcome the tendency to seek only confirming evidence,
former Attorney General Janet Reno, among others, has advocated that
police develop checklists to help guide their investigations.463 Those
checklists could require police to note, for example, all the evidence
expected to be found, all that was found, all that was sought but not
found, all possible suspects and what the investigations into them
produced,464 any inconsistencies in the evidence, and whether nearby
462. Richard Leo has urged that, when evaluating confessions, “police
investigators and prosecutors should routinely review and analyze the statements they
take in a genuine effort at external corroboration.” Leo, supra note 258, at 100. Leo
says that review should include consideration of three factors. Police and prosecutors
should: 1) analyze the conditions under which statement was made and the extent to
which coercive forces were present; 2) analyze the extent to which the statement
contains details that are internally consistent and consistent with known crime facts; and
3) look for the source of details of the confession, that is, examine whether the
statement contains details knowable only by the perpetrator. Id. In their article
published in this symposium issue of the Wisconsin Law Review, Leo and his co-
authors go a step further and argue that admissibility of confession evidence at trial
should turn on weighing three factors: 1) whether the confession contains nonpublic
information that can be independently verified that would only be known by the true
perpetrator or an accomplice and cannot likely be guessed by chance; 2) whether the
suspect’s confession led the police to evidence about the crime that the police did not
already know; and 3) whether the suspect’s postadmission narrative ‘fits’ (or fails to fit)
with the crime facts and existing objective evidence. Richard A. Leo et al., Bringing
Reliability Back In: False Confessions and Legal Safeguards in the Twenty-First
Century, 2006 WIS. L. REV. 479.
463. Tom Kertscher, Reno Advocates for Use of a Judicial Checklist,
MILWAUKEE J. SENTINEL, Apr. 23, 2004, at 7B, available at
http://www.jsonline.com/news/state/apr04/224261.asp; see also Stanley Z. Fisher, The
Prosecutor’s Ethical Duty to Seek Exculpatory Evidence in Police Hands: Lessons
From England, 68 FORDHAM L. REV. 1379, 1435 (2000) (noting that English law
provides “checklists of potentially exculpatory evidence—such as notebook entries, first
descriptions by potential witnesses, information from tapes or telephone records, [and
the] defendant’s explanation of an offense,” which police must keep, turn over to the
prosecutor, and, if appropriate, disclose to the defense).
464. If police had listed all possible suspects and the results of the
investigations into them in the Steven Avery case, for example, and if that information
had then been disclosed to the prosecution and then the defense, the name of Gregory
Allen (the true perpetrator) would have come to light much sooner in the case (because
he was indeed a known suspect early in the investigation, but was never pursued), and
police agencies have been consulted to identify possible alternative

perpetrators.465
1. PHYSICAL EVIDENCE
Collecting physical evidence from a crime scene or other location

can be influenced by the theory of the crime. Where the primary
investigator is also the primary collector of physical evidence, there is a
heightened risk that important physical evidence might be overlooked if
the investigator prematurely settles on one theory of the crime. Even
where separate crime scene technicians collect the physical evidence,
their work can be influenced by learning about the primary
investigator’s preferred theory of the crime. Obviously, we do not
want to preclude primary investigators from communicating with crime
scene technicians, or any investigator from hypothesizing about the
crime to guide the search for physical evidence, but care should be
taken to collect the greatest amount of potential physical evidence at the
crime scene, regardless of the theory of the crime. Crime scene
technicians should be guided by the theories of primary investigators to
the extent that discussion of theories broadens the search for, and
collection and analysis of, evidence, but not to the extent that it limits
it. At least several alternative theories of the crime should be
considered at the time physical evidence is collected.
2. TESTIMONIAL EVIDENCE
Development of testimonial evidence is also influenced by the

theory of the crime. And, as we have discussed, when the theory of
the crime is wrong, the testimonial evidence developed in the
investigation can be misleading or inaccurate. To minimize the risk
that police will inadvertently produce flawed testimonial evidence—for
example, regarding a suspect’s own statements—we have suggested a
shift away from high-pressure, confession-driven interrogation
techniques toward more neutral investigative interviewing techniques.
We recognize, however, that there might be a cost to such a shift,
a cost reflected in the concern that a shift away from high-pressure
interrogation techniques will lead to too many guilty suspects avoiding
conviction. Yet, precisely that kind of shift is occurring in other
countries, and to some extent within some American jurisdictions. The
follow-up investigations by the prosecutor or defense might have prevented Avery’s

wrongful conviction. Allen might have been prosecuted instead, and the crimes he
went on to commit might have been prevented. See supra Part I.B.
465. Kertscher, supra note 463.
experience in those jurisdictions offers an opportunity to examine

whether such a shift does indeed come with unacceptable costs.
In response to a series of high-profile British wrongful convictions,
including the “Guildford Four” and the “Birmingham Six,” Great
Britain adopted the Police and Criminal Evidence Act (PACE) in 1984,
which significantly reformed police practices in that country.466 The
Act includes rules against the use of undue police pressure or
oppression, and a requirement that suspect interviews be audiotaped.467
Police in Great Britain have since shifted to a practice that they call
“investigative interviewing.”468 The product of a collaborative effort
between psychologists, academics, and practitioners to establish best
practices based on findings from empirical studies, investigative
interviewing is designed as an alternative to previous confession-driven
interrogation approaches.469 It is viewed as “a less oppressive approach
to interviewing suspects. The use of trickery, deceit, and other
methods to build up psychological pressure is no longer included, and
nonverbal cues to deception are disregarded.”470 Police in England and
Wales have created a national training course on investigative
interviewing that “encourage[s] a non-oppressive, non-coercive
approach, with an emphasis on information gathering rather than
obtaining a confession per se.”471 The effort was explicitly intended “to
introduce an inquisitorial element into a scenario traditionally
dominated by the adversarial nature of the judicial system.”472
466. MEMON, VRIJ & BULL, supra note 291, at 66-67; John Pearse & Gisli H.
Gudjonsson, Police Interviewing Techniques at Two South London Police Stations, 3
PSYCHOL. CRIME & L. 63, 63 (1996).
467. MEMON, VRIJ & BULL, supra note 291, at 67. To various degrees, other
European countries also encourage nonconfrontational interrogation techniques.
German law, for example, provides that “the accused must be given every opportunity
to remove any suspicion against him and to point to out those circumstances which are
favourable to his defence.” Barbara Huber, Criminal Procedure in Germany, in
COMPARATIVE CRIMINAL PROCEDURE 118 (John Hatchard et al. eds., 1996).
468. Williamson, supra note 451, at 90, 97-98.
469. Id. at 90. Williamson describes the model in this way:
The role of investigative interviewing is to obtain accurate and reliable
information from suspects, witnesses or victims to discover the truth about
matters under Police investigation. Investigative interviewing should be
approached with an open mind. Information obtained from the person who
is being interviewed should always be tested against what the interviewing
Officer already knows or what can reasonably be established.
Id. at 98.
470. Id. at 65.
471. Pearse & Gudjonsson, supra note 466, at 65.
472. Id.
Despite PACE, continuing observation of a number of coercive

interrogations prompted the Royal Commission on Criminal Justice
Report in 1993, which endorsed a new “culture” of interrogation
practices and led to the development of a PEACE model (Preparation
and Planning, Engage and Explain, Account, Closure, and Evaluate).473
As Richard Leo has explained,
[a]t the heart of this approach, and in sharp contrast to the

confrontational Reid Technique, is an ethical and inquisitorial
frame of mind. . . . Overall, PEACE proposes a formal
interrogation in which the purpose is clearly communicated to
the suspect, rights are properly administered, rapport is
established, and a “conversation” is engaged between the lead
investigator and suspect. More an interview than an
interrogation, the primary purpose of this conversation is to
gather information, not to elicit a confession . . . .474
Significantly, research conducted in Great Britain after

implementing PACE and the new interviewing model has suggested
that, although interrogations have become less coercive, the confession
rate has not been affected.475 British police continue to report
interrogations in more than half of all cases.476 Experiences in
jurisdictions like Great Britain, Canada,477 and in some American
jurisdictions where police are experimenting with less confrontational
and judgmental interrogation tactics on a smaller scale,478 suggest that

474. Id. at 101-02.
475. Id. at 101. The research also indicates, however, that, despite significant
changes in the way police in Great Britain conduct interviews, vestiges of the old,
confession-driven interrogation techniques have persisted even after the adoption of
PACE. John Baldwin, Police Interviewing Techniques: Establishing Truth or Proof?,
33 BRIT. J. CRIMINOLOGY 325, 334-44 (1993).
476. Various studies show continuing confession rates in the range of 42 to 76
percent, with most post-PACE studies showing confessions in the 55 to 62 percent
range. Pearse & Gudjonsson, supra note 466, at 72. This confession rate is comparable
to, or even higher than, the confession rate in the United States, which studies suggest
ranges from 42 to 50 percent. Kassin & Gudjonsson, supra note 99, at 44.
477. See Michel St-Yves, The Psychology of Rapport: Five Basic Rules, in
INVESTIGATIVE INTERVIEWING: RIGHTS, RESEARCH, REGULATION 87, 88 (Tom
Williamson ed., 2006) (describing a model for investigative interviewing in Quebec,
Canada, that emphasizes: 1) keeping an open mind, 2) building up rapport, 3) paying
attention, 4) keeping a professional attitude, and 5) knowing how to conclude).
478. See infra notes 515-20 and accompanying text. In Wisconsin, for
example, the attorney general has established an interrogation training model that
encourages a less-aggressive interviewing technique that is closer to the British model
than the Reid Technique. WIS. DEP’T OF JUSTICE, OFFICE OF ATTORNEY GEN.,
such approaches can be employed profitably on a wider scale in the

United States as one response to the problem of tunnel vision.
D. Management and Supervision of Investigations and Cases
1. POLICE
Education and training are necessary, but not sufficient, to guard

against the harmful effects of tunnel vision. Even when detectives and
their supervisors understand the tunnel vision phenomenon and make
their best personal efforts not to succumb to it, investigations can still
focus on the wrong suspect or the wrong theory of the case. Several
investigative management practices can further mitigate the probability
that tunnel vision will lead to an erroneous result in a case.
a. Selection of Police Investigators

Nearly all police officers, regardless of their particular assignment,
are expected to be able to investigate criminal matters. A select few
are given criminal investigation as a full-time, specialized assignment.
In most police agencies the position of criminal investigator (most
commonly referred to as a detective) is filled by police officers who
have demonstrated that they possess a high level of investigative skill.
In most agencies, assignment as a detective is a promotion from the
position of patrol officer; in other agencies, it is a nonpromotional
specialized assignment, which may or may not be permanent. Every
police agency determines for itself what particular knowledge, skills,
and abilities are desired for the detective position, and what criteria and
processes determine which police officers will become detectives. The
knowledge, skills, and abilities that are conventionally prized include:
keen inductive reasoning abilities (the ability to draw logical
conclusions from bits of evidence); the ability to write clear and
comprehensive reports; the ability to organize, analyze, and retrieve
information; the ability to communicate effectively orally (for
courtroom testimony); the ability to persuade others (witnesses and
suspects) to provide information necessary to an investigation; a
comprehensive knowledge of the law and procedures as they relate to
criminal investigation (including the elements of crimes, constitutional
guidelines, criminal procedures, and investigative and evidentiary
policies and procedures); the ability to manage one’s time effectively
RECOMMENDATIONS FOR ELECTRONIC RECORDING OF CUSTODIAL INTERVIEWING (2005),

available at http://www.doj.state.wi.us/dles/tns/elecrecord/10BestPractices.pdf.
and efficiently so as to be able to investigate multiple cases

simultaneously while under time constraints; determination and
persistence in seeking clues to solve cases; and knowledge of the
community (including knowing and understanding criminal suspects and
their accomplices, criminal networks, and who might have information
that will help solve cases).
Given what we know about human psychology and its inherent
vulnerability to the tunnel vision phenomenon, an additional criterion
for choosing detectives is called for: the ability to understand and guard
against tunnel vision. Police executives who appoint officers as
detectives should seek out officers who have demonstrated a willingness
and ability to explore alternative theories of criminal cases; seek and
accept input from other investigators; be aware of and control their own
personal biases; resist the temptation to lock in on some suspects to the
total exclusion of others; avoid becoming defensive about one’s
decisions, methods, and judgments; and be open to constructive
critiques of the same. Official job descriptions for a detective should
reflect these mental abilities in addition to the conventional sets of
knowledge, skills, and abilities. Detective selection procedures should
incorporate some assessment of the degree to which candidates possess
the ability to guard against tunnel vision.
b. Selection of Investigative Supervisors

The investigative supervisor is perhaps the most critical role in
guarding against tunnel vision in criminal investigations. Depending on
the size and structure of the police agency, the investigative supervisor
is typically either a sergeant or a lieutenant responsible for assigning
cases to detectives, monitoring their progress, reviewing their reports,
and liaising with prosecutors about investigative procedures. In larger
police agencies there will be several layers of investigative
supervision—first-line supervisors, investigative commanders, and
perhaps high-level investigative executives. While anyone in the
investigations hierarchy might take the initiative to caution against
tunnel vision and to challenge the accumulated evidence in a particular
case, it is the first-line investigative supervisor who is in the best
position to do so. The first-line supervisor should consult with the case
detectives regularly and read their reports.
Careful consideration should be given to the knowledge, skills, and
abilities sought in individuals who assume these supervisory roles.
Investigative supervisor candidates should demonstrate an
understanding of the tunnel vision phenomenon and be familiar with
techniques for guarding against it. They must be comfortable
challenging detectives, especially experienced detectives, about their
theories, methods, and conclusions in such a way as to mitigate tunnel

vision without undermining the investigation. This is not always done
so easily, especially where, as is oftentimes true, the major case
detectives have more experience than do their supervisors. For a
variety of reasons, the police culture grants detectives a considerable
amount of independence and discretion. It is commonly believed that
detectives have earned this independence by virtue of having
demonstrated certain skills and knowledge about their craft. Many
detectives resent what they perceive to be excessive and undue scrutiny
of their work. Moreover, detectives often deal directly with
prosecutors on matters relating to their cases, oftentimes bypassing
their own investigative supervisors in these communications. While
this is usually a more efficient way to handle matters, it can make it
more difficult for a police investigations supervisor to be part of the
deliberations and decision-making in a particular case, particularly if
the detective and the prosecutor are already in agreement about the
theory and direction of the case.
c. Posing Alternate Theories of the Case

The investigative supervisor should routinely posit alternate
theories of each case during the briefing sessions in which cases are
discussed. Much as scientists seek to “prove” theories by testing the
null hypothesis (providing a reason to reject the hypothesis that
something occurred merely by chance), police investigative supervisors
should seek to “prove” a case by offering evidence and a rationale to
reject all reasonable alternate theories as to how the crime was
committed and by whom.
d. Approaching an Investigation from the Perspective of Ignorance

Police investigators commonly formulate theories about cases and
suspects on the basis of what they know (or what the available evidence
appears to indicate) at any particular point in time. At some point, they
might reasonably conclude that they have enough evidence and
knowledge (applying the probable cause standard) to support a
conclusion that a particular suspect committed the crime, even if gaps
remain in their evidence and knowledge. They might conclude that the
gaps in knowledge either cannot be filled or will be filled at a later
stage (after arrest, during pretrial preparation, or during trial). A
different approach to criminal investigations can help reduce the
likelihood of tunnel vision and premature conclusions about the case.
By anticipating all of the information that a reasonable person might
want to know about a case, the investigation can be built around what
investigators do not know, but should try to discover. By aggressively

seeking to fill in all of the significant knowledge gaps in a case,
investigators should be constantly challenged to explain those
knowledge gaps. Do the gaps exist merely because the evidence has
not yet been found, or do they exist because the theory of the case is
wrong?479
To be sure, “probable cause” is a slippery notion. While it
constitutes a minimal threshold of knowledge necessary to support a
criminal arrest in a court of law, it need not be interpreted by police
investigators and supervisors at its most minimal level. Police can and
should hold themselves to a higher standard of proof than that which
might minimally satisfy a judge or grand jury in a probable cause
determination, particularly when the potential penalty for the crime
under investigation is severe.
e. Apportioning Case Investigation Responsibilities

Assigning different detectives different tasks in the context of one
investigation is another technique police supervisors can use to
minimize the likelihood that tunnel vision will distort the conclusions in
a criminal investigation. For example, one detective could be assigned
to process and analyze physical evidence, while another detective
interviews potential witnesses, and a third reviews documents.
Alternately, different detectives could be assigned to interview the same
witnesses, analyze the same physical evidence, or review the same
documents previously investigated by another investigator. A second
set of eyes, ears, and minds might either detect what the first set might
have missed or reach different conclusions from the same evidence.
479. Criminal investigations in which the identity of the offender is genuinely a

mystery and many individuals might be suspected commonly take many turns, with
many promising leads and suspects failing to pan out. For a fascinating and detailed
account of a criminal investigation of a serial killer that spanned over two decades and
which took many such turns, see DAVID REICHERT, CHASING THE DEVIL: MY TWENTY-
YEAR QUEST TO CAPTURE THE GREEN RIVER KILLER (2004). As Reichert wrote:
In real life, physical evidence is hard to come by, most people don’t want to
talk to you, and snitches can push you in the wrong direction. As a result,
investigators spend an awful lot of time chasing down the witnesses,
associates, friends, and acquaintances who might fill in the details of a
crime suspect’s story. Although we often discover contradictions and
startling revelations that blow a story apart, our goal is to get at the truth.
If a second, third, or fourth party confirms what we have been told and that
helps us rule out a suspect, that’s a good thing. It means we can move on
to another lead.
Id. at 81.
Under this approach, the supervisor can periodically bring the

detectives together to present their findings and challenge one another’s
methods and conclusions. This technique goes beyond a standard case
briefing in which one detective might summarize the progress being
made on a case. It openly invites detectives to challenge the evidence
and the theories of the case, and increases the likelihood that a false
theory or wrong suspect will be revealed prior to arrest.
f. Assigning an Advisory Investigator

As an alternative approach, investigative supervisors might select
another experienced criminal investigator to periodically review the
existing evidence and conclusions, and to offer suggestions to the lead
case investigator about investigative methods, alternate theories of the
case, or alternate conclusions that could be drawn from the available
evidence. This could be done either by having advisory investigators
review the written case file or by having the lead case investigator
conduct an oral briefing of the case. Whichever briefing method is
used, written recommendations are preferable to oral recommendations
because they minimize the likelihood that the case investigator will
perceive a need to defend the methods or conclusions under review.
This technique does not give the advisory investigator any
responsibility for investigating the case at hand. That person merely
gives an independent, but generally knowledgeable, perspective on the
investigation. The advisory investigator may or may not work for the
same police agency as the primary investigator. It is only important
that the primary investigator have some basis for respecting the
knowledge, experience, and perspective of the advisory investigator.
By not assuming any investigative responsibility, the advisory
investigator is less likely to become emotionally attached to any
particular suspect or theory of the case, and is freed of the pressures,
frustrations, and anxieties that come with assuming responsibility for a
successful conclusion to the case. This advisory review should occur
before the case is presented to the prosecutor for formal filing of
charges.
g. Presenting the Case to the Prosecutor

In some instances it might be advisable for someone other than the
lead investigator, ideally someone without a significant emotional
attachment to the investigation, to present the evidence and conclusions
drawn in the case to the prosecutor. This reduces the possibility that
the evidence and investigative procedures of the case will be presented
selectively.
In addition, investigative supervisors should require that a

complete log of all evidence gathered in the investigation—physical and
testimonial evidence, both confirmatory and exculpatory—be
maintained and submitted to the prosecutor at the conclusion of the
investigation.480 Even if such a requirement were to prove infeasible in
less serious criminal investigations, it should be standard practice in
more serious ones.
Generally speaking, few rules require police to preserve evidence
or make records of all case-related information discovered during an
investigation.481 Professor Dianne Martin has observed that, in Canada,
police are known for “boxing the notes”—drafting their investigative
notes in a way that ensures that “no officer contradicts another, and
where possible, that officers corroborate the version [of the offense]
decided on.”482 Professor Stanley Fisher has argued that, while
American police ostensibly attempt to report “all relevant evidence,” in
practice police reports are “artifacts of the adversary process” that tend
to include evidence of guilt and omit exculpatory facts.483 Given the
cognitive distortions and institutional pressures in play, such omissions
are inevitable.484 The consequence, however, is that “we suffer a
systematic loss and suppression of exculpatory evidence at the stage of
police investigation and reporting.”485
After studying a series of wrongful convictions in Illinois’s death
penalty system, former Illinois Governor Ryan’s Commission on
Capital Punishment noted that police failure to document and disclose
480. See Thomas P. Sullivan, Preventing Wrongful Convictions, 86

JUDICATURE 106, 108 (2002).
481. In Arizona v. Youngblood, 488 U.S. 51, 58 (1988), and Trombetta v.
California, 467 U.S. 479, 491 (1984), the Supreme Court held that due process is not
violated by police destruction of even potentially exculpatory evidence unless the
exculpatory nature of the evidence was apparent and police acted in bad faith. Given
the cognitive biases at work, this doctrine is destined to produce many instances in
which police fail to recognize the potentially exculpatory nature of such evidence and
few instances in which, in hindsight, courts will hold that the exculpatory nature of the
evidence was apparent or that police acted in bad faith. Ironically, Larry Youngblood,
the defendant in Arizona v. Youngblood, was denied relief under the doctrine
announced by the Supreme Court in his case, but was exonerated many years later
when newly discovered DNA evidence proved his innocence. See Barbara Whitaker,
DNA Frees Inmate Years After Justices Rejected Plea, N.Y. TIMES, Aug. 11, 2000, at
A12. However one might otherwise assess the merits of this constitutional doctrine, it
is undeniable that it contributes to tunnel vision and wrongful conviction of the
innocent.
482. Martin, supra note 6, at 850.
483. Stanley Z. Fisher, “Just the Facts Ma’am”: Lying and the Omission of
Exculpatory Evidence in Police Reports, 28 NEW ENG. L. REV. 1, 18-31, 57 (1993).
484. See id. at 17.
485. Fisher, supra note 463, at 1384.
to the prosecutor all exculpatory evidence was one cause of the

errors.486 Accordingly, the commission specifically recommended that:
(a) The police must list on schedules all existing items of

relevant evidence, including exculpatory evidence, and their
location.
(b) Record-keeping obligations must be assigned to specific
police officers or employees, who must certify their
compliance in writing to the prosecutor.
(c)The police must give copies of the schedules to the
prosecution.
(d)The police must give the prosecutor access to all
investigatory materials in their possession.487
Greater attention to preserving and recording all evidence is important

to ensure that potentially exculpatory evidence is not overlooked.
h. Disclosing Investigative Information to the Media

Although police are often eager to publicize at least some of the
details regarding an investigation because an arrest might be considered
the culmination of a police investigation, an arrest is also only the
beginning of the legal adjudication of the case. Further investigation,
either by police or prosecutors, is often conducted after an arrest is
made. Moreover, citizens who comprise the jury pool are almost
certainly influenced by media reporting of investigative details in their
prejudgments about the guilt or innocence of the arrested person. For
this reason, police should be more cautious than is the current norm in
making details about the nature and strength of evidence against the
arrested suspect public. Aside from assuring the public that a suspect
has been arrested or requesting additional information from the public
about the crime, the desire to provide the details about the State’s
486. STATE OF ILL., supra note 16, at 22. Similarly, the Virginia Innocence
Commission, after reviewing proven wrongful convictions in that state, recommended
that, to counter tunnel vision,
[l]aw enforcement agencies should train their officers to document all
exculpatory, as well as inculpatory, evidence about a particular
suspect/individual that they discover and to include this information in their
official reports to ensure that all exculpatory information comes to the
attention of prosecutors and subsequently to defense attorneys.
INNOCENCE COMM’N FOR VA., supra note 20, at 73.
487. STATE OF ILL., supra note 16, at 22. These recommendations were based
in large part on the British Criminal Procedure and Investigations Act of 1996. Id. at
20 (citing Fisher, supra note 463).
evidence is nearly always outweighed by the possible prejudice to the

suspect. Although defense attorneys often release investigative
information to the media when they believe doing so will create a more
favorable public opinion of the suspect’s defense, police should
nonetheless refrain from this practice. Prosecutors are equally advised
not to create the appearance that they are trying the case in the media.
2. PROSECUTORS
Scholars have proposed a range of measures to reign in the

adversarial excesses that prosecutors sometimes exhibit. Those
suggestions run the gamut from revised ethical rules,488 to stricter
prosecutor discipline,489 to revised incentive structures,490 to more
frequent reversals of convictions based on prosecutorial misconduct.491
Several reforms that some prosecutors’ offices have adopted and that
could be adopted more widely through policy and practice are discussed
below.
a. Demanding the Fullest Disclosure of Information from Police

Prosecutors must have access to all case investigative materials,
not just those that support the conclusion reached by police. Providing
prosecutors with all such materials, and providing those materials early
in the process, better enables prosecutors to evaluate cases with an open
mind before they have settled on a theory of guilt, when neutrality is at
its peak. This requirement highlights the importance of ensuring that
police record, retain, and forward to prosecutors all investigative
information.492 It is well within the power and prerogative of a
488. See, e.g., Fisher, supra note 463.

489. See, e.g., Ellen Yaroshefsky, Wrongful Convictions: It Is Time To Take
Prosecution Discipline Seriously, 8 UDC/DCSL L. REV. 275, 278 (2004); Medwed,
490. See Fisher, supra note 262, at 200; Medwed, supra note 196, at 171-72
(citing Erwin Chemerinsky, The Role of Prosecutors in Dealing with Police Abuse:
The Lessons of Los Angeles, 8 VA. J. SOC. POL’Y & L. 305, 320 (2001) (arguing that
prosecutor performance measures ought to include factors other than conviction rates,
such as decisions not to prosecute or to turn over biological evidence for DNA testing
without litigating the case)).
491. Fisher, supra note 262, at 201; Richard A. Rosen, Disciplinary Sanctions
Against Prosecutors for Brady Violations: A Paper Tiger, 65 N.C. L. REV. 693, 737
(1987); Medwed, supra note 196, at 172-73 (noting that appellate courts reverse
infrequently and “invariably neglect to identify the prosecutor by name as a matter of
‘professional courtesy’”).
492. See supra Part III.D.1.g.
prosecutor’s office to insist upon such full disclosure from police

investigators and many already do so.
b. Maintaining Independence from Police Investigators

Prosecutors should seek to maximize their neutrality during the
precharging phase in other ways as well. Where the prosecutor
assigned to a case has a personal relationship with a police investigator
who had a key role in the investigation, the prosecutor can easily lose
objectivity.493 Prosecutors must also guard against blindly trusting,
without evidentiary substantiation, police investigators whom the
prosecutor has come to know and trust professionally. Even well-
intentioned, honest, and trustworthy investigators can unwittingly be
affected by tunnel vision.
While it may be difficult to achieve true neutrality, it is clear that
prosecutors do manage to maintain some measure of neutrality in the
precharging context, because they do refuse to charge in a meaningful
proportion of cases.494 The lessons from the cognitive sciences and
their implications for tunnel vision reinforce the importance of
enhancing the capacity and rewards for prosecutors to exercise
independence and neutrality.
c. Employing Multiple Levels of Case Review

Multiple levels of case screening, whether achieved by a
supervisor reviewing cases prior to assigning them to individual
prosecutors or after assignment but prior to formal charging, can serve
as another check against tunnel vision. As others have noted, many
U.S. Attorney offices have policies requiring trial attorneys to seek
review and approval from a supervisor for some charging and
disposition decisions.495
d. Counterarguing
Once the decision to charge is made, cognitive biases make it
difficult to see alternative conclusions about a case. Although the task
becomes more difficult at that point, prosecutors need to understand the
importance of striving for objectivity. Because the research into
cognitive biases suggests that being compelled to argue against one’s
own position is one of the more effective means of countering one’s
493. See supra note 264.

494. Brown, supra note 243, at 1600; Givelber, supra note 243, at 255.
495. See Brown, supra note 243, at 1619.
cognitive biases, prosecutors should be taught to switch sides, to play

their own Devil’s Advocate.496
Because it can be difficult to get people to conceive
counterarguments, however, more formalized methods of
counterarguing should also be considered. Formal processes can be
developed within a prosecutor’s office for obtaining second opinions
from other prosecutors, or from review committees. Accordingly,
Professor Alafair Burke has argued that “[t]he reduction of bias might
be achieved internally within a prosecutor’s office by establishing a
process for ‘fresh looks’ of a file by a lawyer or a committee of
lawyers whose evaluation would not be tainted by earlier developments
in the case.”497 Professor Darryl Brown has noted that separating
prosecutors into “distinct offices and assignments establishes them as
checks both on police and on other prosecutors,” and that “[s]eparating
investigators from prosecutors helps make the latter a check on the
former.”498
Burke and Brown, however, have also acknowledged that getting
prosecutors to engage in critical review of a colleague’s conclusions,
free from time- and guilt-presuming pressures, can be difficult.499
Accordingly, Burke has suggested that, because “a fresh look attorney
may be reluctant to dissent from her colleague’s initial case
evaluation, . . . a more meaningful fresh look process might involve an
advisory committee that includes non-prosecutors.”500 While an
external review committee would no doubt be too cumbersome to use
regularly in routine cases, it could be employed in serious disputed
cases. In such cases, a review committee could function much like the
civil review boards that monitor police.501
Even where formal procedures for arguing and counterarguing
cases are not feasible, encouraging informal discussions and debates
among peer prosecutors regarding serious, complex, and borderline
cases can help reduce the risk that tunnel vision will negatively affect
prosecutorial decision-making.
E. Transparency
To the extent that training and new procedures are inadequate to

overcome the powerful forces that produce tunnel vision, an additional

497. Id. at 34.
498. Brown, supra note 243, at 1618.
499. Id. at 1619; Burke, supra note 127, at 36.
501. Id. at 38.
reform is necessary. Given that police and prosecutors, because they

are human, cannot be expected to recognize and correct for all of their
natural biases, the system must find a way to give sufficient case
information to those who have different incentives and different natural
biases. In the end, greater transparency at all stages of the criminal
process is the most powerful way to counter tunnel vision.502
In criminal cases, greater transparency requires providing the
fullest possible investigative information to the defendant.503 At a
minimum, this requires greater discovery.504 Expanding the Brady
doctrine would go a long way toward achieving this goal. But even
more can and should be done. Providing full investigative information
to the defense improves the capacity of the one party best situated to
evaluate the evidence free from guilt-confirming biases.505
The trend in state criminal justice systems is toward broad,
reciprocal discovery.506 In federal court and most state systems,
however, discovery in criminal cases is far less extensive than in civil
cases.507 That gap can and should be closed. For example, some states
effectively mandate open investigation files, while others allow witness
depositions in criminal cases.508 In many northern European countries,
police compile a single investigative file for each case that includes all
investigative material; those files are then disclosed fully to
502. See, e.g., INNOCENCE COMM’N FOR VA., supra note 20, at 68.
503. “The defendant is the actor in our system who has the true stake in
preventing, exposing, and mitigating prosecutorial misconduct and making sure the
adversary system works as intended.” Jonakait, supra note 267, at 567.
504. See Mary Prosser, Reforming Criminal Discovery: Why Old Objections
Must Yield to New Realities, 2006 WIS. L. REV 541. More expansive discovery is also
a frequently cited measure to protect against wrongful convictions. See, e.g.,
INNOCENCE COMM’N FOR VA., supra note 20, at 3, 59-68 (recommending “formal
discovery rules to mandate open-file discovery procedures”); Jonakait, supra note 267,
at 567; Brown, supra note 243, at 1619. Professor Jenny Roberts has argued that fuller
discovery is necessary not only as a matter of due process, but also because “restrictive
discovery rules block the delivery of effective assistance of counsel when defense
counsel has insufficient information to investigate the case.” Jenny Roberts, Too Little,
Too Late: Ineffective Assistance of Counsel, the Duty to Investigate, and Pretrial
Discovery in Criminal Cases, 31 FORDHAM URB. L.J. 1097, 1100 (2004).
505. Although, as noted above, defense counsel are also conditioned to believe
that their clients are guilty, see supra Part II.B.3, they at least are subject to
considerable countervailing pressures, not to mention ethical obligations, that make
them better situated than police or prosecutors to approach a case with an alternative
perspective.
506. Brown, supra note 243, at 1596.
507. Id. at 1622.
508. Id.
prosecutors, defense counsel, and judges.509 Applied to the American

criminal justice system, this approach would effectively position police
as neutral inquisitors, and would strengthen the adversary system itself
by balancing the adversary playing field.
Transparency helps to counter tunnel vision in another important
way as well. In addition to sharing the information with actors who
have an incentive to look outside the tunnel, transparency also helps to
modify the effects of biases on decision-makers. Psychological
research has shown that, “when people feel publicly accountable for
decisions, they exhibit less bias in their hypothesis testing strategies.”510
Thus, the more that police investigations are conducted and
prosecutor’s decisions are made in open and observable ways, the more
likely police and prosecutors are to resist biasing pressures and
tendencies. This is not, of course, to suggest that there is no room for
secrecy or confidentiality in police work or prosecution. Plainly,
sensitive information relating to ongoing investigations, or that could
jeopardize witness safety, cannot be made public. But this research
does suggest that, whenever possible, transparency in the criminal
justice system should be an objective because it enhances reliability as
well as public trust and confidence.511
Once again, interrogation practices provide an example.
Increasingly, jurisdictions in the United States, as well as other
countries such as Great Britain and Australia, are mandating that
custodial interrogations of suspects be electronically recorded.512
Jurisdictions are moving toward electronic recording principally
because it provides a record of what happened during an interrogation,
thereby deterring coercive interrogation tactics and assisting courts in
determining whether Miranda rights were properly waived as well as
509. Id. at 1623-24. Brown has noted that this approach distinguishes the
typical American system from many European inquisitorial systems: “narrow discovery
rules in adversarial systems make factual accounts reliable by redundant investigations,
[while] this European model puts more emphasis on multiple scrutiny of a single file.”
Id. at 1625.
511. Stephanos Bibas has argued that greater transparency is needed throughout
the criminal justice system, particularly to make the system more understandable and
accessible to victims and the public, and to make insiders like police, prosecutors, and
judges more accountable. Stephanos Bibas, Transparency and Participation in Criminal
Procedure, 86 N.Y.U. L. REV. (forthcoming June 2006). As an example that is
particularly germane here, Bibas has noted that “[v]ideotaping police interrogations and
searches, and mandatory record-keeping, could improve monitoring and credibility.”
Id.
512. See Thomas P. Sullivan, Electronic Recording of Custodial Interrogations:
Everybody Wins, 95 J. CRIM. L. & CRIMINOLOGY 1127, 1131-35 (2005).
precisely what the defendant actually said.513 After initial resistance,

police in those jurisdictions that record have come to embrace the
practice because they have learned that it is also a powerful law
enforcement tool; recording provides compelling evidence of guilt when
a suspect confesses or responds evasively, and, at the same time,
protects police against baseless claims of misconduct.514
Interestingly, the transparency imposed by electronic recording is
also beginning to change the way that police interrogate.515 Police with
considerable experience with electronic recording find that it not only
provides a means for evaluating their own interrogation skills, but it
also requires new strategies that look better in an electronic recording
than some of the confrontational methods of the Reid Technique.516 For
example, one leading detective with many years of experience
recording interrogations, who does extensive interrogation training for
police, has noted in his training materials that “[e]xisting strategies
don’t work well on tape.”517 He teaches that, when recorded, the
officer is better served not by cutting off denials or engaging in hostile
confrontations with suspects, but instead by being “disarming,” trying
to “‘see, hear, and feel’ from the interviewee’s point of view,” treating
the interviewee “like a fellow human being,” maintaining a “friendly
atmosphere,” keeping “an open mind,” asking “objective questions,”
and asking “difficult, delicate, or distressing questions in a firm,
gentle, considerate (yet persistent) manner.”518
In essence, electronic recording has fostered a new approach that
moves police away from the Reid Technique. Instead of cutting off
denials and pressuring suspects to confess, the new approach permits
the suspect keep talking and responding to cordial but challenging
questions until the suspect’s own statements either convince the
observer of innocence, or trap the suspect in a web of lies. Nelson
reminds police that, while other interrogation techniques “[w]ere
513. See id. at 1127.

514. See THOMAS P. SULLIVAN, POLICE EXPERIENCES WITH RECORDING
CUSTODIAL INTERROGATIONS 6 (2004) (surveying 238 law enforcement agencies in
thirty-eight states that electronically record interrogations, and reporting that
“[v]irtually every officer with whom we spoke, having given custodial recording a try,
was enthusiastically in favor of the practice”).
515. Id. at 15.
516. Id. at 16-17.
517. NEIL NELSON, MAXIMIZING THE OPPORTUNITY: INTERVIEW AND
INTERROGATION C2 (2005). Neil Nelson is a commander with the St. Paul, Minnesota,
Police Department, who has been recording his interrogations for more than ten years.
Id. He also provides police interviewing and interrogation training through Neil Nelson
& Associates. Id.
518. Id. at B5.
created with the goal of getting a suspect to confess,” the real objective
is to gather information and “to keep[] the suspect talking (even if only
to tell lies).”519
Such new methods of interrogation, which are similar to the new
“investigative interviews” in England (which were also developed after
police began recording their interrogations), reveal that the
transparency brought by electronic recording has not just provided
fuller information to the judicial proceedings, but has also more directly
mitigated the cognitive biases that might otherwise impede the search
for the truth. In this way, Dr. Richard Leo has noted, “the presence of
a camera, and the scrutiny it implies, may help to increase the
diagnostic value of interviews and interrogations and protect the
innocent from false confessions.”520
F. Institutional Reforms
Finally, we suggest several major institutional reforms for the

police and prosecution.
1. POLICE CRIME LABORATORIES
Given our understanding of how scientists in crime laboratories are

susceptible to having their findings and conclusions influenced by what
investigators tell them they should expect to find and to conclude,521
consideration should be given to promoting a greater degree of
independence between crime laboratories on the one hand, and police
and prosecutors on the other.
There are over 350 publicly funded crime laboratories in the
United States, including some thirty-three federal labs, 203 state or
regional labs, sixty-five county labs, and fifty municipal labs.522 Crime
laboratories are generally considered an arm of law enforcement. The
nation’s largest crime lab is operated by the FBI.523 In Wisconsin, the
State Crime Laboratories operate under the jurisdiction of the Division
of Law Enforcement Services in the State Department of Justice.524 In
519. Id. at E1-E2.

521. Risinger et al., supra note 13, at 27-41; William C. Thompson, Accepting
Lower Standards: The National Research Council’s Second Report on Forensic DNA
Evidence, 37 JURIMETRICS J. 405, 408 (1997).
522. JOSEPH L. PETERSON & MATTHEW J. HICKMAN, U.S. DEP’T OF JUSTICE,
CENSUS OF PUBLICLY FUNDED FORENSIC CRIME LABORATORIES, 2002, at 1 (2005).
523. Id. at 11.
524. See Wis. Dep’t of Justice, The Wisconsin Crime Lab System,
http://www.doj.state.wi.us/dles/crimelabs/labinfo.asp (last visited Mar. 21, 2006).
many larger municipalities, the police department operates its own

forensic crime lab.525 It is not self-evident, however, that crime
laboratories should be arms of law enforcement agencies rather than
independent government agencies, as are medical examiners’ or
coroners’ offices. While organizational independence from law
enforcement is not a guarantee that forensic scientists will not share a
police investigator’s tunnel vision, independent oversight and funding
can help minimize that risk.526
Even if crime laboratories are not made organizationally
independent from law enforcement, they can and should be made
operationally independent. Ideally, this means that precautions should
be taken to insulate laboratory analysts from all case investigation
information they do not need to perform their scientific analyses.527
Thus, contrary to common current practice, laboratory analysts should
be shielded from information about the detectives’ theory of the case,
the nature of other evidence and other test results in the case, and the
results police hope to obtain from the laboratory analyses.528 Only by
insulating analysts in this way can the objectivity (and hence,
reliability) of the analysts’ conclusions be assured.529
525. PETERSON & HICKMAN, supra note 522, at 12.

526. See, e.g., Paul C. Giannelli, The Abuse of Scientific Evidence in
Criminal Cases: The Need for Independent Crime Laboratories, 4 VA. J. SOC. POL’Y &
L. 439, 470 (1997) (recommending independent crime labs); Craig M. Cooley,
Reforming the Forensic Science Community to Avert the Ultimate Injustice, 15 STAN.
L. & POL’Y REV. 381, 422-23 (2004) (recommending independent crime labs); STATE
OF ILL., supra note 16, at 52 (endorsing independent crime labs).
527. Because observer effects can influence any scientific endeavor, standard
scientific procedures—such as “double blind testing” (in which both the subject in a
study and the scientist or study administrator are blinded to the conditions or expected
results of a procedure)—require shielding the observer (the scientist or analyst) from
extraneous information that can bias perception. Risinger et al., supra note 13, at 12.
528. As Risinger and his colleagues have put it,
A wall of separation must be created between forensic science examiners
and any examination-irrelevant information about a case. That means
properly controlling information flowing to examiners from external
investigators, from laboratory managers, and from fellow examiners . . . .
The solution is to provide examiners with the information they need to
perform the tests, and only that information.
Id. at 45; see also Brown, supra note 243, at 1605.
529. The importance of this recommendation is highlighted by a recent study
of fingerprint examiners. In that study, five experienced examiners who had previously
analyzed fingerprints in a case and had all concluded that the latent prints matched a
suspect’s prints, were presented with the same prints five years later, but were told that
other evidence had excluded the suspect. Unaware that they had previously called the
prints a match, this time four out of the five examiners (80 percent) either declared that
the prints did not match (three of the four) or that the prints provided insufficient
information to permit a definite decision (one examiner). Only one of the five
2. PROSECUTION
Once a conviction has been obtained, beliefs in guilt are, quite

naturally and appropriately, at their peak. Yet, the emerging mass of
postconviction exonerations has shown that those beliefs still can be
wrong. Although protecting the finality of judgments is a weighty
concern, there is no legitimate interest in preserving the finality of
factually incorrect judgments. Prosecutors need to find a way to
overcome the biases and pressures that inevitably make it nearly
impossible to conceive the possibility that the defendant, found guilty
beyond a reasonable doubt, might in fact be innocent, so that they can
at least fairly consider the import of new evidence of innocence.
The task for any prosecutor is daunting. To accept the possibility
that the defendant is innocent is to accept the possibility that the
prosecutor played a role in an unthinkable injustice. Reopening a case
admits the possibility that a prosecutor made a grievous error, and it is
only natural for prosecutors to fear the opprobrium or political
consequences of admitting such an error—the “fear-based assumption
that the public is intolerant of mistakes and unforgiving of those who
admit to them.”530 Moreover, the crush of ongoing business makes
prosecutors naturally disinclined to revisit settled matters.531 As Travis
County, Texas, prosecutors Ronnie Earle and Brian Case have put it,
Cases in which the evidence proves the defendant’s guilt

beyond a reasonable doubt are difficult to put together, harder
to hold together, and happily left behind once a conviction is
obtained. The ongoing onslaught of current cases and
examiners adhered to the original conclusion, calling the prints a match. Expectation
effects caused by the insertion of non-domain-specific information altered the
conclusions of these examiners. Itiel Dror, David Charlton, & Ailsa E. Péron,
Contextual Information Renders Experts Vulnerable to Making Erroneous
Identifications, 156 FORENSIC SCI. INT. 74 (2006).
530. Earle & Case, supra note 282, at 73. Prosecutors Brian Case and Ronnie
Earle, however, reflecting on their experience facilitating the exoneration and release of
several innocent men in their jurisdiction, found that the fear was unfounded:
Ronnie Earle readily confessed astonishment at the public reaction [to the
exonerations], having been convinced that mistakes of such horrendous
moment as convictions of innocent men would result in his being thrown
ignominiously out of office. Acknowledgement and remedy seemed to
matter to the public more than the game of Gotcha often played out on
political fields.
Id.
531. Id.
opposition from victims certain of the identity of the

perpetrator add to the pressure to let sleeping dogs lie.532
To counter these forces, external review panels might be especially

important when prosecutors are presented with postconviction claims of
actual innocence. Alternatively, Professor Daniel Medwed has
suggested “altering the manner in which [prosecutor’s offices] assign
post-conviction motions by creating internal innocence or post-
conviction units,” so that prosecutors wedded to a theory of guilt are
not the ones deciding the significance of new DNA or other evidence of
innocence.533 More dramatically, initial evaluations of postconviction
claims of innocence can be removed from the adversarial process
altogether and submitted for initial evaluation to an independent body
with inquisitorial powers, such as the Criminal Cases Review
Commission in Great Britain,534 or the new postconviction review
commission currently being considered by the legislature in North
Carolina.535
CONCLUSION
Tunnel vision is the product of multiple processes and pressures.

Cognitive distortions such as confirmation bias, hindsight bias, outcome
bias, and a host of other psychological phenomena make some degree
of tunnel vision inevitable. Institutional pressures on police,
prosecutors, defense lawyers, and courts amplify those natural
tendencies. Yet, instead of countering those pressures and tendencies,
normative features of the criminal justice system, from police training
to legal doctrine, institutionalize them.
The inevitability of tunnel vision does not relieve us from an
obligation to do what we can to minimize its effects. A host of
interlocking measures can reduce the distorting effects of tunnel vision,
even if they cannot eliminate it altogether. The first step toward
addressing the problem is to recognize its multiple causes and
expressions. Serious efforts must be made to identify tunnel vision, or
the features of the criminal justice system that contribute to tunnel
532. Id.
533. Medwed, supra note 196, at 175.
534. See Lissa Griffin, The Correction of Wrongful Convictions: A
Comparative Perspective, 16 AM. U. INT’L L. REV. 1241 (2001); David Horan, The
Innocence Commission: An Independent Review Board for Wrongful Convictions, 20
N. ILL. U. L. REV. 91 (2000); Findley, supra note 18, at 347.
535. See Christine C. Mumma, The North Carolina Actual Innocence
Commission: Uncommon Perspectives Joined by a Common Cause, 52 DRAKE L. REV.
647, 654 (2004).
vision, at every stage in the life of a criminal case. The recognized

costs of those features then can be measured against their ostensible
benefits (such as the perceived benefits in terms of obtaining
convictions, or in efficiency and finality). Where appropriate,
measures can then be taken to overcome tunnel vision. Education and
training; improved policies and procedures for interviewing suspects,
obtaining identifications, processing physical evidence, and reviewing
charging decisions; greater transparency; and doctrinal reform can all
be profitably employed to mitigate the effects of tunnel vision, and
thereby more reliably convict only the guilty.
We have suggested a range of tangible measures that can be taken
to mitigate the effects of tunnel vision, but perhaps the most important
factor toward that end is one that cannot be prescribed merely by rule:
creating and sustaining an ethical organizational and professional
culture. An ethical organizational or professional culture is more than
the just the sum of doctrine, rules, policies, procedures, and training
programs. Such a culture—among police, prosecutors, defense
counsel, and the judiciary—is one that treats wrongful arrest,
prosecution, and conviction with the utmost seriousness. It seeks to
minimize tunnel vision as a contributor to wrongful conviction not
because it must, but because it is right. Where there is a strong ethical
culture, police investigators, prosecutors, defense attorneys, and judges
do not take shortcuts in cases where it might lead them away from the
truth. Instead, they embrace the fullest disclosure of information
consistent with a fair hearing of the evidence, they are cognizant of and
guard against the pernicious effects of tunnel vision, and they are open
to the possibility—however remote—that a confluence of even honest
errors can yield an invalid result.536
Public trust and confidence in the criminal justice system has been
shaken by the recent host of exonerations. Recognizing that the system
is not perfect, a dose of humility coupled with openness to serious
reform is needed to mitigate the effects of tunnel vision and restore
trust and confidence in the system.
536. As Norm Maleng, a King County, Washington, prosecuting attorney,

wrote in the foreword to the recent report of the American Bar Association’s Ad Hoc
Innocence Committee: “The next step is to instill in every prosecutor’s office, police
agency, and crime laboratory an unwavering ethic to seek the truth through the most
reliable methods available. This carries with it the obligation to refrain from using
investigative techniques that may yield questionable results.” ABA REPORT, supra note
439, at ix.

The Multiple Dimensions of Tunnel Vision - Findley e Scott

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

The Multiple Dimensions of Tunnel Vision - Findley e Scott

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

The Multiple Dimensions of Tunnel Vision - Findley e Scott

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

THE MULTIPLE DIMENSIONS OF TUNNEL VISION IN

KEITH A. FINDLEY* AND MICHAEL S. SCOTT**

The discovery of hundreds of wrongful convictions in the last

* Clinical Professor, University of Wisconsin Law School; Co-Director,

292 WISCONSIN LAW REVIEW

“extremely rare.”4 Further, they have opened a window for scholarly

4. Schlup v. Delo, 513 U.S. 298, 321 (1995).

2006:291 Tunnel Vision in Criminal Cases 293

particular individual is the perpetrator. Convinced of guilt,

294 WISCONSIN LAW REVIEW

Illinois Governor George Ryan’s Commission on Capital Punishment

2006:291 Tunnel Vision in Criminal Cases 295

Commission for Virginia issued a report finding that tunnel vision

296 WISCONSIN LAW REVIEW

deliberate practices that reinforce the natural cognitive biases and

I. CASE STUDIES IN TUNNEL VISION

24. Innocence Project, Case Profiles: Marvin Anderson,

2006:291 Tunnel Vision in Criminal Cases 297

30. Id. at 20-21.

298 WISCONSIN LAW REVIEW

36. INNOCENCE COMM’N FOR VA., supra note 20, at 13.

2006:291 Tunnel Vision in Criminal Cases 299

Like Marvin Anderson, Steven Avery was convicted of a brutal

47. Innocence Project, supra note 24.

300 WISCONSIN LAW REVIEW

2006:291 Tunnel Vision in Criminal Cases 301

302 WISCONSIN LAW REVIEW

73. Memorandum from Peggy A. Lautenschlager to Mark Rohrer, supra note

2006:291 Tunnel Vision in Criminal Cases 303

who prosecuted Avery had convicted Allen of a very similar attempted

304 WISCONSIN LAW REVIEW

identification procedures that were employed, “the photo array

2006:291 Tunnel Vision in Criminal Cases 305

C. The Central Park Jogger Case

To say that tunnel vision has affected the investigation and

306 WISCONSIN LAW REVIEW

106. Drizin & Leo, supra note 97, at 896.

2006:291 Tunnel Vision in Criminal Cases 307

II. THE SOURCES OF TUNNEL VISION

A. Tunnel Vision as a Function of Cognitive Biases

The tendency toward tunnel vision is partly innate; it is part of our

119. Id. at 899.

308 WISCONSIN LAW REVIEW

confirmation bias, hindsight bias, and outcome bias. These cognitive

2006:291 Tunnel Vision in Criminal Cases 309

and to miss or irrationally undervalue disconfirming information.132

Confirmation bias, as the term is used in psychological literature,

310 WISCONSIN LAW REVIEW

to hypothesize a rule that explained the sequence.138 The subjects then

138. Nickerson, supra note 127, at 179.

2006:291 Tunnel Vision in Criminal Cases 311

interview a target person to determine whether that person was an

150. See id. at 151-52.

312 WISCONSIN LAW REVIEW

if it is wrong, and failing in the attempt.”158 Although such

2006:291 Tunnel Vision in Criminal Cases 313

[People] will search internally for material that refutes the

Indeed, studies show that, in some circumstances, people do not

167. See id.