As I am sure is true for many, I have large stacks of books waiting to be read that sit in piles on my office desk or home book stand. One pile, which I am working through — books about the role of behavioral science in criminal justice — just expanded with the publication of Mark Godsey’s Blind Injustice: A Former Prosecutor Exposes the Psychology and Politics of Wrongful Convictions. The director of the Ohio Innocence Project, Professor Godsey‘s book promises to be a tour de force about how a myriad of psychological factors — such a confirmation bias, cognitive dissonance and dehumanization, to name a few — can cause prosecutors to make horrible errors in judgment. One chapter is dedicated to tunnel vision, a term well-known to those in the field of criminal justice, which too often causes prosecutors and law enforcement to focus narrowly on evidence of guilt without objectively assessing contrary evidence of innocence (I have written about tunnel vision with regard to the famous case of Jeffrey MacDonald, the army doctor who was convicted of the brutal slaying of his wife and two young daughters more than 40 years ago).
Peppered with examples from cases Professor Godsey has worked on, as well as others in the news, the book promises to be a valuable addition to the growing body of scholarship exploring the role of psychological biases in the process of criminal adjudication.
Other notable books on the subject include: Adam Benforado’s Unfair (2015), Dan Simon’s In Doubt: The Psychology of the Criminal Justice Process (2012), and Daniel Medwed’s Prosecution Complex (2012). And, of course, there is a large and growing body of academic scholarship in law reviews, including this article by Keith Finley and Michael Scott and this one by Alafair Burke.
James G. Milles
Molly J. W. Wilson
Tigran Eldred
Behavioral Legal Ethics 