“Good. Looks like everybody remembers that,” said Verraday. “So now I want you to pick that man out of a lineup, or, as our friends in the police department like to call it, a six-pack.”
He clicked a button on his computer and the screen lit up with mug shot–style photos of six men. All were in their mid-to-late thirties. All of them had similar medium-length brown hair. One was on the thin side of average. Another was slightly heavyset. The rest were variations in the middle. Verraday smiled at the groans and laughter as the students realized the difficulty of the task he’d given them. He went through the men in the photos one by one, again asking the students to raise their hands to select which of the men they thought they had seen getting out of the taxi. When he was done, he noticed that one student, a mousy-looking girl in a bulky sweater and baggy jeans, hadn’t responded to any of them.
“Now, I believe there is someone who didn’t raise her hand,” said Verraday. He looked at the girl. “Am I right?”
The girl shook her head affirmatively.
He challenged her, using a mock-bellicose tone of voice: “But I just showed you a lineup of six men and told you to pick one. Are you going to let some crook get away with murder because you can’t be sure of what he looks like? Why aren’t you picking one?”
“Because it wasn’t any of them,” the girl replied, gazing at him through nondescript, wire-frame glasses. “It was you.”
“It was me?” asked Verraday, acting like it was the most absurd notion he’d ever heard.
He mugged to the rest of the class.
“She thinks the man in the taxi was me. Can you believe it?”
His comment, his stifled laugh, and his comically skeptical expression elicited snickers of disbelief throughout the lecture hall. He turned back to the girl.
“You really think it was me?”
“Yes, I do,” she replied.
“And if I told you that I’d deduct ten percent of your term grade if you were wrong, would you still say it was me?”
“Yes, I would,” she responded, quietly but still without hesitation.
“Ooooh, a risk taker,” said Verraday, getting a rise out of the other students. “Well, let’s find out then.”
Verraday clicked forward on his presentation and the original image came back up on the screen, except that now everything but the man and the taxi had been blacked out.
There was a gasp of surprise, then more laughter from the students.
“What do you know,” said Verraday. “You’re right. It is me. And everybody else in this room just falsely identified six innocent people as suspects.”
He paused.
“Now let’s take a look at the girl in the vest and see what color it was.”
He changed the slide so that the entire original scene was now visible.
“Anybody care to tell me anything about the girl in the vest? What color was it?”
Verraday turned around and looked at the screen.
“What do you know? She’s not wearing a vest at all! And it’s not a Starbucks travel mug. It’s just a plain old generic travel mug.”
There were more embarrassed groans and laughter.
Verraday smiled indulgently. He didn’t have to rub it in. His demonstration was making enough of an impression on its own.
“Now, the point of this exercise was not to torture or embarrass you. I’ll save that for the midterm exam next week. Rather, it was to demonstrate something called the misinformation paradigm. There are numerous documented instances in criminal investigations where police have led witnesses exactly the way I just led you, with the result that they either contradicted their original testimony or added in seeing other things that they did not in fact see, either because they weren’t in a position to see those other things or because those other things never actually happened. In a number of cases, this has led to the conviction and sometimes execution of innocent people—all because the police played fast and loose with the evidence and eyewitnesses to get the verdict they wanted.”