Many of us in the TED office have been in Orange Is the New Black withdrawal. We inhaled the first two seasons of the Netflix series, and have been waiting ever since for the new season to come out. If, like us, the mere mention of the show sends Regina Spektor’s “You’ve Got Time” blasting through your head, then you will want to watch this TEDx talk from Piper Kerman, the woman whose memoir inspired the show.
In the talk, Kerman tells the story of how, at age 34, she was sent to federal prison for delivering drug money a decade earlier. She shares the lessons she learned on the inside — lessons about prison survival, lessons about a broken justice system, and larger lessons about life.
This talk is especially powerful because it was given at TEDxMarionCorrectional, an event held inside a prison in Ohio that features talks from inmates and employees of the prison system. (Watch three talks from it in 2012.) Event organizers Jo Dee Davis and Jordan Edelheit shared with the TED Blog their rationale for inviting Kerman to speak. “The men who curate and attend the TEDxMarionCorrectional repeatedly asked if we thought inviting her would bring the issue [of prisons] up to people who normally wouldn’t give it a thought,” they said. “Prison and prisoners are much hidden and unknown. There is a mystery about things that happen in the dark and behind bars and fences. This real story fills in the gaps and answers some questions.”
While telling her story, Kerman makes a plea to the inmates in the audience: talk about your experience. “There are 700,000 people coming home from prison and jail every single year in this country,” she says. “When people know the real stories of real people, they will recognize that our incarceration mania is a real problem.”
Note: This story originally posted on October 24, 2013. It was updated on June 4, 2014.
]]>Bryan Stevenson, who gave the powerhouse talk “We need to talk about an injustice” at TED2012, appeared on Moyers & Company this past weekend.
Bryan Stevenson: We need to talk about an injustice
In the episode, titled “And Justice For Some,” Moyers takes a hard look at systematic biases in the American legal system. The occasion for this episode — the 50th anniversary of the Supreme Court’s decision in the case Gideon v. Wainwright, which established the right to legal representation for defendants unable to pay for it. The decision highlighted the ideal that the judicial system should function the same regardless of the defendant’s bank account.
Bryan Stevenson, a public-interest lawyer who represents the young, poor and incarcerated, knows that this sadly just isn’t the case. As he says: “We still have a system that treats you better if you’re rich and guilty than if you’re poor and innocent.”
]]>In courtrooms, eyewitness testimony is considered extremely powerful. But should it be? At TEDxUSC, forensic psychologist Scott Fraser explains why, even when witnesses feel sure they are telling a true story, or making the right identification, their minds could be playing tricks on them — filling in blanks in traumatic memories with erroneous information.
Fraser tells the story of Francisco Carrillo, who at age 17 was identified as the gunman in a drive-by shooting that left a man dead on the street in front of his teenage son and five friends. After maintaining his innocence for 20 years, Carrillo was released from jail in 2011. (Read the Los Angeles Times’ take on his release.) While all six teenage witnesses gave testimony that they had clearly seen Carrillo fire the gun from a moving car, a re-creation of the conditions of the shooting showed that it had been very dark, that few streetlights were on, and that shadows from the car would have made it impossible for anyone standing on the street to get a good look at the shooter’s face. The witnesses recanted their identifications.
As Fraser says, it wasn’t that the witnesses were lying. They were simply working from reconstructed memories.
“Under the best of observation conditions, we only detect, encode and store in our brains bits and pieces of the experience in front of us,” Fraser says. “We have a partial, incomplete story … The brain fills in information that was not originally stored, from inference, from speculation, from information that came to you after the observation.”
The brain’s tendency to reconstruct memory is one reason, Fraser says, that eyewitness testimony, though effective in courtrooms, is deeply problematic. He points to the work of The Innocence Project, an organization that works to exonerate wrongfully convicted people. Since 1992, it has cleared 297 people in the US, largely using DNA evidence. In three-quarters of cases, the conviction had hinged on eyewitness testimony alone.
(The New Jersey Supreme Court, thanks to this stat, instituted new rules in July, calling for judges to instruct juries that the “human memory is not foolproof.”)
Below, five other TED and TEDx speakers on wrongful convictions and general skews in our legal systems.
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Bryan Stevenson: We need to talk about an injustice
The United States has the highest incarceration rate in the world, says human rights lawyer Bryan Stevenson in this beautiful talk from TED2012. And our justice system cleaves a massive imbalance along racial and class lines. “We have a system of justice in this country that treats you much better if you’re rich and guilty than if you’re poor and innocent,” says Stevenson in this must-see talk.
Rob Warden: On false confessions
As a founder of the Center of Wrongful Convictions at Northwestern University, Rob Warden is concerned with how frequently people confess to crimes they didn’t commit — because they were scared of being accused of something worse, because they thought they might have blocked the crime out of their memory, or because they feel desperate after hours of police questioning. At TEDxMidwest, Warden gives the shocking statistic that, in his county, nearly 50 percent of wrongful convictions to date involved a false confession.
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Peter Donnelly: How stats fool juries
Statistics are often hard to understand. But when it’s an expert witness in a trial providing the faulty numbers, it can have a devastating impact. In this talk from TEDGlobal 2005, mathematician Peter Donnelly explains common misconceptions about statistics — and how a doctor giving a poorly calculated stat during a murder trail in England led to a woman’s wrongful conviction.
James Lockyer: Defending the wrongfully convicted
James Lockyer was a criminal lawyer for 15 years, until one case changed the course of his career. In this talk from TEDxIB@York, Lockyer tells the story of a client who had been wrongfully accused of rape and murder — and why the experience has led him to advocate against the death penalty.
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David R. Dow: Lessons from death row inmates
Lawyer David R. Dow has defended hundreds of death-row inmates, and has noticed that almost all of them share a similar biography — they come from highly dysfunctional homes and have had experience with the juvenile justice system. In this talk from TEDxAustin, Dow focuses on what could be done to help young people before they commit a violent crime — challenging society to intervene in troubled life stories.