Slow-motion replays can distort criminal responsibility
bbc.com
bbc.com
Notice the research used a gunshot video. I think the average person underestimates the violence inflicted by a bullet because our human intuition fails us for small objects traveling that fast. I think what slow-motion does is help reveal the true violence inflicted on another person whether from a punch, tackle, or gunshot.
Update:
IANAL but also note that in this specific case, murder during commission of a felony ( armed robbery ) would be classed in many states as felony murder and would be first degree murder. See http://criminal.lawyers.com/criminal-law-basics/murder-durin...
So if this is a felony murder state, the slow motion would actually help the jury come to the correct conclusion.
The slow motion makes it look like actions were deliberate instead of spontaneous. So it makes it look like a planned action. If the defendant deliberately did it, they must be pretty terrible, right? Guilty of a worse crime.
the slow motion would actually help the jury come
to the correct conclusion.
The whole point of the article is that it helps them come to the wrong conclusion in a number of cases and your argument is that they must be wrong, because they came to the 'correct', in your opinion, solution in this specific case. That kind of reasoning is awful and immoral.
How do you know which verdict is wrong or right in order to say that though? You can say that slow motion makes people convict more, or convict less, or whatever, but unless you have an oracle to tell you which was the correct verdict in each case, and we don't, this data tells us nothing.
Maybe people are systematically underestimating violence when they don't get to see it in slow motion, and the acquittals when they don't have slow motion are the wrong conclusion.
Or maybe people are systematically overestimating violence when they do have the slow motion and the convictions are the wrong conclusion.
Who knows? But it doesn't really give us anything to go on does it?
But in sports, slow motion is often enlightening. After a tackle, we see a soccer player collapse to the ground, writhing in agony, clutching their shin. But then slow mo shows that the other player never even made contact with them, its a classic "dive". In that case, there's no doubt that the slow mo version is more informative.
How do you know which verdict is wrong or right in order
to say that though?
After it's been pointed out, the point of the article is entirely obvious: if we see someone take a minute before committing murder, then we will think them of having had sufficient time to think. If it takes 5 seconds, he obviously didn't have time to consider. So if we stretch 5 seconds into a minute, a jury will conclude there was rational deliberation where there was only instinctive response.
What is entirely non-obvious is supposing that brain of the average juror could 'just' compensate for his impressions based on the knowledge that it was shown in slow motion. We know they aren't capable of that with many, many other cognitive weaknesses. Sources: Influence, Thinking Fast and Slow, Predictably Irrational, ...
My opinion is that this is caused more by glamorization/trivialization of violence (in all its forms) by the US movie industry.
If we had not had access to the CCTV - both in real time and slowed down (which was actually produced by the defence, not the prosecution), then I strongly believe the outcome would have been different; indeed if another angle had been present then one count may well have been judged differently.
It is easy to view something slowly and decide that intent was more severe than may have been planned by the people involved, but in my experience it's also invaluable in seeing what actually happened, as the camera can be the most reliable witness to the facts of the matter.
Humans might be good at detecting 'intent' in the real world and calibrated for reality. Their calibration might be completely wrong for slow-motion. So maybe slow-mo does give a better view of what happened to establish the facts of the matter but may drastically skew other, more important factors.
___
* sadly it doesn't seem to be true
A judge may know the law more precisely than a layperson, but is no less fallible. But they are of the system.
Juries work remarkably well on that basis. That's not to say they're likely to be better at deciding truth, guilt or innocence. They'll undoubtedly bring some of their prejudices in from the street.
Juries have the ability to acquit a defendant despite the evidence and facts (jury nullification), which is very rarely if ever pointed out to juries. Only case I can think of was Clive Ponting, a UK civil servant, prosecuted for leaking Falklands war documents. He claimed to have done so in the public interest. The governement position was public interest is whatever we think it is. The judge directed them to convict. The jury acquitted. The govt was not happy. They later changed the Official Secrets Act such that this defence was no longer possible and since then public interest is now whatever the UK Govt says it is.
- The famous Zenger trial was a jury nullification. It did influence the development of US law -- later, but it was overtly contrary to the very well-established law of the time.
- Jury nullification was common for alcohol-related crimes in Prohibition.
- It was also common for lynch mob participants.
Were I not old enough to remember the Falklands case I doubt I'd ever have heard of it here in the UK. There was no reference to it in the information sent when I was called for jury duty, or any mention by the judges.
The Falklands case, the documents it brought to light, and the implications were in the media regularly for weeks afterwards, possibly months, so it was impossible to miss. I can't remember a more recent case (though I'm sure there must have been). All Google turfs up for the UK recently is a couple of media articles expressing the belief it should be more widely known.
http://courts.uslegal.com/jury-system/jury-instructions-and-...
That is one rather important factor.
As opposed to what non human alternatives?
> The Laws should, I think, be updated for the new technology,
I disagree (although being young I've only ever watched cricket with this sort of technology). Given the other aspects of the game rely so much on precision, I can't see letting the umpiring become more subjective and/or allowing for more human error would improve the game.
1 http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1021695...
http://arstechnica.com/science/2016/07/algorithms-used-to-st...
""This calls into question the validity of countless published fMRI studies based on parametric clusterwise inference." It's not clear how many of those there are, but they're likely to be a notable fraction of the total number of studies that use fMRI, which the authors estimate at 40,000."
Assuming those studies are correct,...
Someone please correct me if I mangle the results in question; I know they've shown up here on HN before.
The ones I recall involve a participant in an fMRI machine watching a screen. The instructions are, when something occurs on the screen, decide whether or not to push a button, push the button (or don't) and then report when the conscious decision was made. The studies determined that with the assistance of the fMRI, they could predict the button push before the conscious decision:
1. Screen flash.
2. fMRI prediction.
3. Conscious decision.
4. Button push.
The usual interpretation is that consciousness and free will are illusions; the decision is made without conscious participation.
But I think there's a problem with that interpretation: specifically that its alternative is a strawman: dualism.
My argument: How, exactly, do you expect a conscious decision to be made before the neural machinery goes through whatever convolutions are necessary to make that decision?
Here's my alternative interpretation of the experiment:
1. Screen flash.
2. "Conscious" decision (although the awareness of the decision, as a conscious event itself, does not bubble up until later).
3. fMRI prediction.
4. Awareness (and reporting) of conscious decision.
5. Button push.
Consciousness and free will are not epiphenomena, but the event in the movie in your head has to appear after actual decision. The fMRI prediction is simply seeing the mechanism in progress.
The thing is, in order to not be hypocritical, we'd need to look as closely as possible.
Once we do that, we'll be looking at the molecular structure of not only the brain of the perpetrator but also the whole body (as there is of course infinite interaction). We'll be asking for the causes that led to the body being as it was at the moment of the thing will currently call "crime".
We'll end up understanding that there is no free will, which will force us to rethink what we call "punishment".
Although I don't think people here are interested in hearing arguments that don't click in desired ways with their economic interests.
Rather sadistic, the graying-out option, when used on posts like this.
- chaos; - quantum phenomenum; - creative thoughts;
Not saying it's not causal, but since we can't prove it is, yet, we can't state for sure there is no free will. Which would bother the hell out of many people :)
Your materialistic assumptions are a wonderful way to do science, but a terrible way to be human or govern.
In that case the perpetrator is just as much victim, which alters the entire balance of justice, and creates all kinds of ugly rabbit holes to deal with with respect to societal effects and morality.
2. Morality is irrelevant. We don't have free will either.
Maybe that we are influenced far more by uncontrollable environmental factors than by our "freely* willed" decisions.
>Free will: the power of acting without the constraint of necessity or fate;
When you are hungry, you need to eat. But if you don't have any money and take an apple from the market you will be punished. So technically in this situation, the person acted out of necessity and therefore did not act out of free will.
AKA (A, B, C, A, D, A, E) = 1 person out of 4 went back (25%). But, A went back 3 times so out of 7 stays 3 of them repeated (43%).
Yet another way of counting is to look at people at one point in time (C, A, D, A,). But, someone in prison regularly is much more likely to be in prison while your studying. This is mitigated by very long studies, but 10 or even 20 years is not enough.
PS: When you consider some homeless people use prison as a way to get free medical care it's easy for someone to be in and out a lot for minor reasons. Another group that's likely to come back are people who go to prison for failure to pay fines because prison tends to make you even more poor.
On the one hand, if the perpetrator is not "responsible", then it seems inhumane to punish them.
On the other, if the perpetrator has demonstrated that they cannot or will not abide by society's rules and we have no way of reprogramming them to do so, then the only rational response is to remove them from society. Permanently. And as early as possible in their career.
And fortunately, questions of "inhumanity" do not arise---we don't have any free will to worry about, either.
Premeditation makes the difference between first- and second-degree murder, and being convicted of the former tends to bring much harsher sentences. The article describes the paper as finding that people who view (e.g. store CCTV) recordings of a murder only in slow motion and without a timecode, thus lacking any clear reference to the real speed of events, are much more likely to impute premeditation than those who don't. That's what "distortion" means here.
Think of the ultimate slow motion, a photograph. Emotions and muscle movements sweep across a face, but depending on the photographer's or editor's choice of moment, the same person can look scary or beatific.
If A intended to kill B, that's murder.
If A did not intend to kill B, it's manslaughter, a lesser crime with lesser punishment.
You are sitting on the jury, with the prosecution flashing between two frames of a video of the punch and arguing that A altered the trajectory of the punch to cause B to fall onto the hard surface.
Two frames is, say, 33 milliseconds, or somewhere between 2cm and 4m (I admit, I was surprised by that speed) of neural pathway, taking the lowest and highest nerve conduction velocities I can find. How many intentions and motor changes can you perform in 33ms?