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The Murder of Abel, Jacopo Tintoretto
“How perfectly goddamned delightful it all is to be sure.”
—Charles Crumb
This past fall, millions of listeners around the world downloaded the dozen episodes of the most popular podcast ever, Serial. The show, hosted and co-created by This American Life producer Sarah Koenig, revisits a 1999 murder case in which a 17-year old high school senior, Adnan Syed, is accused and convicted of killing his ex-girlfriend, Hae Min Lee, and is ultimately sentenced to life in prison where he remains to this day. Koenig takes her listeners through an addicting back-and-forth of conflicting evidence or lack thereof in which both she and her audience inevitably flip-flop between variable hunches, suspicions, and verdicts about the case. Like most listeners, I found the show riveting and, as a psychiatrist, I was struck by how many things it illustrated about the subject of this blog, the “psychiatry of everyday life.”
A Disclaimer: The Goldwater Rule
Let’s begin with a disclaimer. Like everyone else, I have my own hunches about the guilt or innocence of Adnan Syed and about whether or not he’s the cold, calculating sociopath the judge made him out to be at sentencing. But I have no professional opinions on the subject and, even if I did, I wouldn’t be disclosing them here. Although I sometimes work as a forensic psychiatrist, consulting on and testifying in civil and criminal cases, commenting on cases that one learns about through the media is unethical. Why? For one, it isn’t possible to provide an expert psychiatric opinion about someone without conducting an actual examination. Secondly, doing so without proper authorization is strictly forbidden. In psychiatric ethics, this prohibition is known as the “Goldwater Rule,” so-named after over 1800 psychiatrists responded to a 1964 poll about the suitability of Senator Barry Goldwater as a candidate for President. The majority of comments were negative, although none had actually examined the senator. Needless to say, Goldwater lost the 1964 election to President Lyndon Johnson and went on to sue the magazine that published the poll for libel.
Today, despite the American Psychiatric Association’s adoption of the Goldwater Rule so as to “protect public figures from psychiatric speculation that harms the reputation of the profession and of the unsuspecting public figure,”1 it’s not uncommon to see psychiatrists and psychologists in the media offering their opinions on one or another high-profile legal cases, often involving murder. But without examining the person in question, these talking heads can’t really offer an expert opinion about an individual—at best, they might be able to make comments on mental illness or violence in general. Attempting to provide a psychiatric assessment of an individual based on information presented through the filter of the media is little more than reckless guesswork. And if a purported expert had actually conducted a face-to-face interview with the individual in question, they’d almost certainly be bound by confidentiality such that they wouldn’t be talking about it in the media. So, when you hear a psychiatrist or psychologist comment about an individual in the news, remember that their opinions probably aren’t worth much.
The Fallibility of Memory
Now, onto Serial. If there’s one thing that makes an impression early on in the series, it’s that our memories of the past are fallible at best. In the Episode 1, “Alibi,” Koenig has interviewees struggle to recall the simplest memories about events of just the past few weeks. She then tracks down former classmates of Syed to elucidate his whereabouts on the day and estimated time of the murder 15 years earlier. Although these accounts raise the possibility of an alibi that may have never been fully explored by Syed’s defense lawyer, it turns out that people’s memories of events around the time of the murder are now hazy to say the least. This fog of memory and the inconsistency of people’s accounts related to timelines and details surrounding the case pervade Serial throughout each episode, offering evidence that seems to be alternatively damning or exculpatory. Nowhere perhaps is this more striking than in the Episode 6, “The Case Against Adnan Syed,” in which Koenig interviews a woman who, as a girl who didn’t know Syed or Lee, reported in the wake of the murder hearing a neighborhood boy talk about how someone named Adnan showed him Lee’s dead body in the trunk of the car. In other words, it seems there’s a potential eyewitness that can verify Syed’s involvement in the murder. But then Koenig manages to track down this neighborhood boy, now a grown man, and he denies it outright, stating that he’s never seen a dead body in his entire life. So, what do we believe?
Of course, it’s possible that some of the people interviewed about the murder case might be merely lying for one reason or another. But, as if that’s not complicating enough, we must also deal with the fact that people’s actual honest recollection of events is, at best, middling. Scott Fraser, a forensic psychologist, has built his career demonstrating the fallibility of eyewitness accounts, particularly for events associated with significant stress, like murder. Although the confidence of eyewitnesses about their memories can be very high, the accuracy of these recollections is just as often quite flawed. Based on his research, Fraser describes memories as follows:
“All our memories, put simply, are reconstructed memories. And they’re constantly changing, even as we talk about them.”2
“They are the product of what we originally experienced and everything that's happened afterwards. They're dynamic. They're malleable. They're volatile, and as a result, we all need to remember to be cautious, that the accuracy of our memories is not measured in how vivid they are nor how certain you are that they're correct.”3
Likewise, UC Irvine psychologist Elizabeth Loftus has contributed greatly to the understanding of false memories. In one of her earliest experiments, Loftus and colleague John Palmer demonstrated that people’s recollections of events were significantly biased by the words used to ask about those recollections.4 Numerous subsequent experiments have verified that based on the nature of the questioning, false memories can be easily planted into people’s minds. This work offered a provocative alternative explanation for so-called “repressed memories” of past sexual abuse that were the basis for numerous legal cases in the 1990s. Based on her research, here’s how Loftus characterizes the accuracy of memory:
“…many people believe that memory works like a recording device. You just record the information, then you call it up and play it back when you want to answer questions or identify images. But decades of work in psychology has shown that this just isn't true. Our memories are constructive. They're reconstructive. Memory works a little bit more like a Wikipedia page: You can go in there and change it, but so can other people. …And so what these studies are showing is that when you feed people misinformation about some experience that they may have had, you can distort or contaminate or change their memory. Well, out there in the real world, misinformation is everywhere. We get misinformation not only if we're questioned in a leading way, but if we talk to other witnesses who might consciously or inadvertently feed us some erroneous information, or if we see media coverage about some event we might have experienced, all of these provide the opportunity for this kind of contamination of our memory.”5
This is no surprise to many of us as we get on in life. The older we get, the more we can cite personal examples of the fallibility of our own memories. More and more often, we remember a particular event from the past, only to find that an old friend has a completely different account. In the end, despite the strength of our own convictions, we realize that it didn’t happen as we recalled, or worse, that we weren’t even present at the event in question!
So, what can we make of the wildly disparate accounts of events catalogued in Serial? Was there a phone booth in the Best Buy parking lot or wasn’t there? Was there a credible alibi for Syed or not? Did Syed say that he was going to commit murder beforehand and confess to it after the fact? Most of these questions will remain shrouded in mystery. The true nature of memory indicates that Koenig’s sleuthing isn’t likely to reveal anything definitive. In reality, many of our best memories are mere fictions.
Making Up Our Minds
If that’s the case—that there’s enough ambiguity about the key evidence in the case as to generate reasonable doubt in the minds of Koenig and her listeners—then why did the jury find Syed guilty? The answer may lie in how jurors make decisions, which may be something quite different than how Koenig goes about it, objectively and obsessively analyzing the “facts” from multiple angles. Instead, according to the “Story Model” theory advanced by Nancy Pennington and Reid Hastie:
“Different jurors will construct different stories, and a central claim of the theory is that the story will determine the decision that a particular juror reaches. Because all jurors hear the same evidence and have the same general knowledge about the expected structure of stories, differences in story construction must arise from differences in world knowledge; that is, differences in experiences and beliefs about the social world.”6
In other words, jurors bring their own biases and intuitions about how the world works to their judgments of guilt and innocence. When Koenig interviews some of the jurors in the cast, this point seems especially clear. Here’s an exchange from Episode 8, “The Deal With Jay,” in which Koenig interviews Stella Armstrong, one of the jury members from the murder trial:
Koenig: “I wanted to know, from Stella Armstrong, why she voted to convict Adnan Syed. She immediately talked about Jay, that she believed him.”
Armstrong: “Like I said, it’s been a while but I remember the one young man who was supposedly his friend, who had enabled him to move the body. And that struck me that ‘why would you admit to doing something that drastic if you hadn’t done it?’ You know what I mean? For what reason? What was he going to gain from that? He still had to go to jail.”
Koenig: “Yeah. Actually he didn't go to jail.”
Armstrong: “Oh he didn’t? The friend didn’t?”
Koenig: “No. He walked.”
Armstrong: “Oh! That’s strange. That’s strange.”
Then at the end of Episode 8, Koenig asks another juror, Lisa Flynn, about the impact of Syed not taking the stand at the instruction of his lawyer:
Koenig: “Did it bother you guys as a jury that Adnan himself didn’t testify, didn’t take the stand?”
Flynn: “Yes, it did… That was huge. We just, I think, yeah, that was huge. We all kinda like gasped like, we were all just like blown away by that. You know, why not, if you’re a defendant, you know, why would you not get up there and defend yourself, and try to prove that the State is wrong, that you weren’t there, that you’re not guilty? We were trying to be so open minded, it was just like, get up there and say something, you know, try to persuade, even though it’s not your job to persuade us, but, I don’t know.”
So, one juror seems to have been swayed by the fact that Jay, the “friend” who offers the main evidence alleging Syed’s guilt, demonstrated no motive to lie since, as an accomplice in burying Lee’s body, he was headed to prison along with Syed. Only he wasn’t—he was sentenced to probation with no jail time. Meanwhile, another juror notes how Syed not taking the stand played upon the jury’s intuitions about his guilt, despite explicit instructions by the judge not to hold that against him. These interviews suggest that the jurors might not have formed their opinions based on the legal standard of “reasonable doubt,” but on other feelings about the case not necessarily related to facts and evidence.
Then there’s the fact that Syed is a Muslim of Pakistani heritage. This is an issue that Koenig raises in Episode 10, “The Best Defense is a Good Defense,” noting that the prosecution based their case on the claim that Lee’s murder was an “honor killing” rooted in Islamic culture. Indeed, according to a wealth of evidence from psychological experiments involving mock juries, racial biases can play an important role in jury decisions. Both the race of a defendant as well as the racial make-up of a jury seem to impact verdicts. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the greatest risk of a guilty verdict occurs when an all-white jury convicts a black defendant.7 That disparity doesn’t seem to have been an issue in Syed’s case where the jury was multiracial, though Koenig notes that Syed’s family believes he was a victim of anti-Muslim sentiment.
Although it’s unclear to what extent race was influential in Syed’s trial, what’s interesting is that those of us who listened to Serial with the ears of would-be jurors were making our assessments blind. How did our intuitions about the case change when we searched for additional details on the Internet and found pictures of Syed, Lee, or Jay? And how were the jury’s conclusions about Syed’s guilt influenced by visual assessments of Jay’s testimony and Syed’s reactions continuously throughout the trial? This visual element is something we’re largely deprived of in Serial such that the jury was literally seeing a different case than we heard. That might also help to explain how the jury arrived at a guilty verdict.
A Sense of an Ending?
If there’s a signature style of Serial, it’s Koenig’s obsessive and relentlessly ambivalent way of deliberating over the case week after week. Listeners of This American Life got a hint of this in a recent episode called “Origin Story 2014” in which Koenig takes the same approach in order to resolve conflicting accounts of her own father’s life.8 In Serial, Koenig’s style gave many listeners the uneasy impression early on that the show might end without a firm conclusion, not to mention inspiring the multitude of parodies that have cropped up along the way (see versions here by Saturday Night Live and Funny or Die).9,10 An article in New York Magazine called “A Psychological Explanation for Why Serial Drives Some People Crazy” 11 suggested how the psychological trait called “need for closure” might impact one’s ability to enjoy the show. Need for closure has been defined as “a desire for an answer on a given topic, any answer… compared to confusion and ambiguity.”12 Both need for closure and the related opposite trait, “ambiguity tolerance” differ in intensity among individuals, such that those with low ambiguity tolerance and high need for closure might very well find Serial a frustrating listen, just as they likely did after the last scene of The Sopranos.
While Koenig endless flip-flopping is a testament to her journalistic objectivity and search for truth—it’s easy to see how she could have presented a more opinionated account arguing one way or another—a similar sense of dispassionate objectivity seems present within the interviews of Syed throughout Serial. Although he maintains his innocence, he doesn’t go out of his way to proclaim it, and instead talks in a kind of calm and measured fashion that some might interpret as cold and calculated. During Episode 11, “Rumors,” Koenig addresses this, attributing Syed’s approach to a deliberate effort:
Koenig: “His goal was to keep it all business. He wanted me to evaluate his case based on the evidence alone, not on his personality.
Syed: “I didn’t want to do anything that could even remotely seem like I was trying to befriend you or curry favor with you. I didn’t want anyone to ever be able to accuse me of trying to ingratiate myself with you or manipulate you.
…I’m always overthinking. Analyzing what I say, how it sounds and the fact that people always think I’m lying. All this thinking, it’s to protect myself from being hurt. Not from being accused of Hae’s murder, but from being accused of being manipulative or lying. And I know it’s crazy, I know I’m paranoid, but I can never shake it because no matter what I do, or how careful I am, it always comes back. I guess the only thing I could ask you to do is, if none of this makes any sense to you, just read it again. Except this time, please imagine that I really am innocent. And then maybe it’ll make sense to you.”
Then, in the final episode, “What We Know,” Syed offers his own recommendation about how Koenig ought to conclude the show:
Syed: “I think you should just go down the middle. I think you shouldn’t really take a side, I mean, it’s obviously not my decision, it’s yours, but if I was to be you, just go down the middle. Obviously you know how to narrate it, but I checked these things out and these are the things that look bad against him, these are the things that the State doesn’t really have an answer for. I think in a way you could even go point for point and in a sense you leave it up to the audience to determine.”
As Koenig says, Syed “knows there’s nothing he can do to change other people’s minds about him.” But just as not taking the stand at trial seems to have had an effect on the jury’s guilty verdict, so too might Syed’s mirroring of Koenig’s objectivity in Serial seem oddly misplaced in someone alleging their innocence. Perhaps need for closure and ambiguity tolerance predict not only how much we enjoy Serial, but also our own judgments of guilt or innocence as listeners of the show as well as those of the original jurors in Syed’s trial. While we’re inundated with evidence and counter-evidence throughout Serial that leaves Koenig herself with reasonable doubt in the end, no compelling alternative explanation or motive for Lee’s murder was ever really set forth during the show or the trial. For those with high need for closure and low ambiguity tolerance, that might feel wholly unsatisfying. It’s possible then that for some, in the absence of a better explanation, a guilty verdict for Syed is more favorable than a tidier conclusion.
Looking at the implications of Serial on a larger scale, it may seem just as unsettling that our legal system harbors so many opportunities for error, bias, and lack of objectivity. But what’s the alternative? Sure, there are cases where more objective evidence is available in the form of video or DNA. In fact, Syed’s case remains under appeal and the Innocence Project is attempting to complete DNA testing of material found on Lee’s body. So, maybe one day we’ll have a better ending to the story. But more often than not, that kind of clear-cut evidence just doesn’t exist so that we’re left scratching our heads. In the end, the legal system can only be as good as our brains, and our brains are less than perfect instruments to find the truth.
References
1. Cooke BK, Goddard ER, Werner TL et al. The risks and responsible roles for psychiatrists who interact with the media. J Am Acad Psychiatry Law 2014; 42:459-468.
2. Fraser S. Memory games. TED Radio Hour, May 23. 2013. http://www.npr.org/2013/05/09/182667116/memory-games
3. Fraser S. Why eyewitnesses get it wrong. TED talk, May 2012. https://www.ted.com/talks/scott_fraser_the_problem_with_eyewitness_testimony
4. Loftus EG, Palmer JC. Recontruction of automobile destruction: An example of the interaction between language and memory. Journal of Verbal Learning & Verbal Behavior 1974; 13:585-589.
5. Loftus EG. The fiction of memory. TED Talk, June 2013. http://www.ted.com/talks/elizabeth_loftus_the_fiction_of_memory?language=en - t-349000
6. Pennington N, Hastie R. A cognitive theory of juror decisions making: The story model. Cardoza Law Review 1991; 13:519-557.
7. Anwar S, Bayer P, et al. The impact of jury race in criminal trials. The Quarterly Journal of Economics 2012; 1-39.
8. Origin Story 2014. This American Life; September 19, 2014.
http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/535/origin-story-2014
9. SNL Serial parody. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EjidkNvN-Ps
10. The final episode of Serial. Funny or Die. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gww53yFfMnI
11. Singal J. A psychological explanation for why serial drives some people crazy. New York Magazine; December 5, 2014.
http://nymag.com/scienceofus/2014/12/why-serial-drives-some-people-crazy.html
12. Webster DM, Kruglanski AW. Individual differences in need for cognitive closure. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 1004; 67:1049-1062.
