We have enjoyed our collaboration with the good folks at the Illinois Innocence Project to create our video “Implicit Bias & Wrongful Conviction”. Their admirable work and the poor moral decision making on display in many wrongful conviction cases has caught our attention before in this blog (Ex: ‘He looks like a criminal to me’: Implicit Bias in the Criminal Justice System; Cognitive Dissonance and the Case of the Unindicted Co-ejaculator) and in our Ethics Unwrapped case studies (The Central Park Five).

We therefore couldn’t wait to dive into John Grisham’s new nonfiction book, Framed: Astonishing True Stories of Wrongful Convictions (2024) written with long-time exoneration activist Jim McCloskey. The book contains ten chapters (five written by each co-author), each detailing the wrongful conviction of one or more defendants. The injustice we learn about is indeed astonishing, while the poor moral decision making on display is all too familiar to those of us who study behavioral ethics.

Due to space limitations, this blog post will focus on Chapter 1, “The Norfolk Four,” written by Grisham. It will be sufficient to make the point, but don’t think it is an outlier. The other nine chapters are just as horrifying.

On July 7, 1997, Omar Ballard raped and murdered Michelle Bosko in her apartment in Norfolk, Virginia. He had assaulted another woman a couple of weeks before, and raped and murdered yet another woman ten days after. Ballard left substantial DNA evidence at the murder site, although his DNA was not tested for two more years. Michelle’s body was discovered many hours later when her sailor husband, Billy, returned from a week-long deployment at sea on the USS Simpson.

As crime scene investigators searched the Bosko apartment, detective Judy Gray approached a neighbor and asked if she had any idea who might have murdered Michelle. The neighbor demurred, but when pressed by the detective pointed out another sailor who was also a neighbor and said that “[Dan Williams was] kind of obsessed with her.” Although the neighbor soon backtracked, Gray focused her attention on Williams. As Grisham writes:

Like many police investigations that go wrong, this one began with a hunch. Often, a homicide detective will scan the crime scene, form a half-baked opinion based on a gut reaction and clouded by the tension of the moment, maybe even pick out a suspect, and before long the police are marching off in the wrong direction. (p. 4)

That certainly happened here. Being completely innocent, Williams agreed to go to the police station for questioning. He had no idea that he was a suspect and did not ask for a lawyer. He passed a polygraph test, but the police told him he had flunked. They told him that they had a witness who had seen him in the Bosko apartment. Another lie. They yelled at Williams and badgered him for hours, telling repeated lies about all evidence they had against him, and threatening him with the death penalty if he did not confess. Grisham accurately observes:

The next blunder in a wrongful conviction is often tunnel vision, which usually occurs just after the hunch. The police grab a suspect, convince themselves they’ve got the right guy, congratulate themselves for being so clever, then ignore conflicting evidence while embracing anything that will support their hunch. … If evidence undermining their theory surfaces, they simply discount it. If clear evidence of innocence (DNA) is presented after their man is convicted, they refuse to believe it and stubbornly maintain his guilt. (p. 6)

Indeed, when Williams’ wife came to the police station looking for her husband, she told them that he had been in bed with her the entire night of the murder. But the cops ignored this evidence. After 10 hours of intense questioning at nearly 6:00am, Williams–exhausted, disoriented and confused–confessed using details about the murder fed to him by his interrogators (many of which soon proved to be completely inaccurate). Although it seems to many of us that an innocent person would never confess to a murder they didn’t commit, Grisham cites the well-known fact that almost a quarter of DNA exonerations involve false confessions.

The detectives charged Williams with murder and put him in jail. Five months after the murder, Norfolk’s crime lab reported that the semen on Michelle Bosko did not belong to Williams. There was not a single shred of physical evidence indicating that he had ever been in the Bosko apartment. This evidence might have caused some detectives to second-guess their approach to the case, but not here. Instead, they theorized that Williams still murdered Michelle but must have had an accomplice who left behind the sperm, even though the forensic evidence made it clear that the crime had been committed by only one person. Another sailor, Joe Dick, lived with Williams and his wife, so the detectives concluded that obviously he must have been the imagined accomplice.

The detectives picked Dick up as he exited his ship and took him to the station. Dick was “introverted, withdrawn, easily manipulated, socially awkward, and quick to yield to authority figures.” (p. 14) Dick also passed a lie detector test, but was told that he had failed. There was no evidence at all linking him to the crime scene, but the cops said there was. They yelled, badgered, and manipulated Dick until he also confessed using details (again inaccurate) provided by the detectives. Dick was  jailed along with Williams, notwithstanding the fact that his ship’s records indicated that Dick had been on board during the time of the murder.

Two months later, the state crime lab reported that the DNA found at the murder scene was not Dick’s either. No physical evidence linked Williams or Dick to the crime scene. Rather than let the two go, the police decided that three men must have been involved! When a prison snitch told the cops he’d heard Dick mention someone he knew named Eric, they dug around until they found a sailor named Eric Wilson. He was also arrested, lied to, and hounded until he confessed.

Now we have three men in jail. Remember that the DNA belonged to the murderer—Omar Ballard. So, inevitably, two months later the lab reported that the DNA at the murder scene did not belong to Wilson either. So, naturally, the police arrested a fourth sailor, Derek Tice. He was questioned and jailed, but eventually the DNA test cleared him also. So, the cops then arrested a fifth sailor. And then a sixth. And then a seventh. The last three refused to confess, but all were charged and jailed anyway. All remained in jail. Indeed, having lost hope after being in jail for two years without trial, Williams and Dick pled guilty to avoid a threatened death penalty.

At this point, in 1999, Omar Ballard, now in prison for committing another murder and rape, wrote a letter to an acquaintance in which he admitted raping and killing Michelle Bosko. The recipient forwarded the letter to the police who gave it to the prosecutors. They kept it quiet until a judge ordered them to give it to defense counsel. A DNA test proved that the semen was Ballard’s. Ballard admitted the crime and said that he acted alone.

Refusing to accept the obvious reality that they had made a mistake, the police tried to badger Ballard into incriminating the seven sailors. He refused, but the police then concocted what Grisham calls “the Eight Man Gang” theory: these seven sailors, many of whom did not know the others, somehow came together, met Ballard, and then broke into Michelle’s apartment where they took turns raping and stabbing her though only Ballard ejaculated.

This was sheer lunacy. Williams tried to withdraw his guilty plea, but the judge did not allow it. Dick had convinced himself that he was guilty. Wilson and Tice went to trial and were convicted based on their coerced confessions. Williams, Dick and Tice were sentenced to life without parole for a crime they clearly did not commit. Ballard was offered a lenient sentence so that the police would not have to try him in a public setting which might have made clear how baseless were the charges against the seven sailors. Not until a decade later in 2009 was the Innocence Project able to secure pardons for Williams, Dick, Tice, and Wilson, and they certainly received no help from the police detectives and prosecutors who wrongly placed seven innocent men in jail.

A lawyer who helped exonerate these four commented that “[t]he way the prosecutors and police conducted themselves in the Bosko case is so off-the-wall, so unconscionable, and unfathomable, that there really is not precedent for it.” We wish that were true, but the other nine chapters in this book undermine the accuracy of this statement. Though extreme, this case was not simply a one-off. Numerous psychological factors that we often talk about here at Ethics Unwrapped help explain why police and prosecutors make such outlandish mistakes way too often.

Police detectives are often facing extreme public and political pressure to solve crimes where initially there is little definitive evidence. As Grisham notes, a hunch may get the investigation started, but perhaps in the wrong direction. Once the detectives have begun placing effort and belief into a particular theory of the case, it becomes harder and harder for them to give it up. Among the overlapping and reinforcing psychological phenomena that account for this are:

  • Anchoring and adjustment: once decision makers focus on an initial conclusion (the anchor) they tend to insufficiently consider additional evidence that comes in, especially if it undermines or contradicts that initial conclusion. The decision makers often underestimate the relevance of the new information or ignore it altogether.
  • Cognitive dissonance: humans suffer mental distress when they hold two contradictory ideas in their minds at one time. Those ideas may be: “We have charged X with murder” and “This new evidence indicates that X did not commit the murder.” Often, the mind resolves the conflict by ignoring the new evidence.
  • Confirmation bias: this is the tendency of people’s minds to seek out information that supports the views they already have and to minimize or ignore altogether any contradictory information.
  • Motivated reasoning: this is biased reasoning at an unconscious level, often driven by emotions. When committed to a particular theory—especially when they have publicly embraced it and/or put substantial amounts of work into proving it—detectives will tend to examine all evidence with the (perhaps unconscious goal) of supporting that theory. It is a form of the confirmation bias.
  • Framing: humans’ decision making is heavily influenced by what is in their frame of reference when they make those decisions. Too often detectives view their job as convicting the people they have arrested rather than doing justice by finding out who actually committed the crime.
  • Loss aversion: this is the notion that people hate losses more than they enjoy gains and will therefore lie (and do other bad things) to avoid a loss that they would not do to gain something in the first place. Loss aversion makes it difficult for people to admit that they have erred because it will damage their reputation, a loss they do not wish to sustain. Once they have publicly announced support for a theory (“X committed the murder”), it will be difficult for police detectives to admit that they screwed up, so they will work very hard to support their initial conclusion and to reject contradictory information. In another chapter of Framed, in trying to explain how Louisiana authorities tried so hard to prosecute two men they had wrongfully accused well after the real killers surfaced and confessed to the crimes, Jim McCloskey writes: “One [reason] is that it would have been embarrassing, even humiliating, to admit to the wrongful indictment of six people.” (p. 241)

One sees these related judgment errors in wrongful conviction case after wrongful conviction case. These are universal errors found in human judgment, including about matters of morality. They are scarcely limited to police officers. As psychologist Keith Payne recently wrote: “[O]ur cognitive systems value self-protection, sometimes more than reason.”

There’s no magic wand that can make these flaws in reasoning go away. But adequate training and oversight might minimize their impact.

 

References:

 

Mark Godsey, Blind Injustice: A Former Prosecutor Exposes the Psychology and Politics of Wrongful Conviction (2017).

John Grisham, The Innocent Man (2006).

John Grisham & Jim McCloskey, Framed: Astonishing True Stories of Wrongful Convictions (2024).

Jim McCloskey, When the Truth is All You Have (2020).

Keith Payne, Good Reasonable People: The Psychology Behind America’s Dangerous Divide (2024).

Justin Wingerter, Four Shots in Oskie: Murder and Innocence in Middle America (2021).

 

Related Resources

 

Videos:

Cognitive Dissonance: https://ethicsunwrapped.utexas.edu/glossary/cognitive-dissonance

Confirmation Bias:  https://ethicsunwrapped.utexas.edu/glossary/confirmation-bias

Framing: https://ethicsunwrapped.utexas.edu/glossary/framing

Implicit Bias: https://ethicsunwrapped.utexas.edu/video/implicit-bias-wrongful-convictions

 

Blog Posts:

“Cognitive Dissonance and the Case of the Unindicted Co-ejaculator” https://ethicsunwrapped.utexas.edu/cognitive-dissonance-case-unindicted-co-ejaculator

“He Looks Like a Criminal to Me”: https://ethicsunwrapped.utexas.edu/he-looks-like-a-criminal-to-me-implicit-bias-in-the-criminal-justice-system

 

Case Studies:

“The Central Park Five”: https://ethicsunwrapped.utexas.edu/case-study/the-central-park-five