The research I\u2019m about to present resonates with a personal experience of mine. Three years ago, I served on a jury that acquitted Cheswick, PA, councilman Jonathan Skedel on a charge of assaulting Joe Ferrero, president of the Cheswick Volunteer Fire Department. (I was stunned when the prosecutor allowed a retired college professor whose field is social psychology to sit on the jury.) The charge resulted from a fistfight between the two men in which Ferrero suffered facial injuries requiring dental surgery. The fight took place in the parking lot of a physical therapy clinic and the entire episode was captured by one of our ubiquitous surveillance cameras.<\/p>\n
The video was played several times during the trial, both at real speed and in slow motion. In his summation, the prosecutor paused the video just before Mr. Skedel delivered the punch which injured Mr. Ferrero, and stated that Mr. Skedel could have stopped the fight at that point, but instead decided to assault Mr. Ferrero.<\/p>\n
During the jury\u2019s deliberations, I was disturbed to discover\u00a0that some of my fellow jurors accepted the prosecutor\u2019s definition of the situation. I tried my best to argue\u2014with limited success\u2014that pausing the video was an artificial intervention in what was, in reality, a continuous episode that provided little opportunity for conscious deliberation by either man. The jury eventually acquitted Mr. Skedel, but this was probably due to the majority\u2019s belief that both men had acted equally badly, and it was unfair to single out one of them for prosecution.<\/p>\n
Playing crime scene videos in slow motion, or pausing them at critical points, is common practice in jury trials and their effects should be\u00a0investigated. The former of these issues was the subject\u00a0of four experiments by Dr. Eugene Caruso<\/a> of the University of Chicago and his colleagues. They compared the effects of watching a video either in slow motion or at regular speed. Their slow motion was 2.25 times slower than regular speed. The researchers measured participants\u2019 estimates of how much time had passed, and their judgments of the intentionality of the defendant\u2019s behavior.<\/p>\n Three of these experiments used a surveillance video from a Philadelphia trial in which the defendant, John Lewis, was convicted of first degree murder for \u00a0shooting a man\u00a0during a convenience store robbery. Here it is (in slow motion).<\/p>\n