Abstract
In his recent book, Blind Injustice, lawyer and professor Mark Godsey adds an important chapter to the growing innocence literature. A former U.S. attorney in New York, Godsey provides the unique perspective of a former prosecutor who subsequently served as the director of the Ohio Innocence Project at the University of Cincinnati School of Law. Responsible for the exoneration of over 25 innocent inmates, Godsey frames wrongful convictions as a product of blind spots that prosecutors possess.
Indeed, that is Godsey’s mission with this text—to open the eyes of actors in the criminal justice system—prosecutors, judges, and defense attorneys alike—to the blind spots inherent in all participants with the hope of reducing error and increasing justice. Unlike many who condemn individuals on the other side as incompetent or evil, Godsey cleverly takes the tact of framing shortcomings as largely unintentional blind spots that develop for situational, cultural, environmental, and institutional reasons. His goal is not to shame those that fight to uphold convictions even in the presence of overwhelming evidence of innocence. Rather, Godsey wants to help open the eyes of criminal justice actors to the possibility that errors exist and the underlying biases that allow such mistakes to persist.
To that end, his book marches through a series of kinds of criminal justice “blindness”—blind denial, blind ambition, blind bias, blind memory, blind intuition, and blind tunnel vision—ultimately demonstrating human limitation. Godsey sprinkles his discussions of these topics with a series of anecdotes, mostly from his personal experience, that illustrate practical examples of these kinds of blindness. Some of his examples—the cases of Nancy Smith and Clarence Elkins come to mind—appear several times. On first blush, this feels repetitive, but by the end, it underscores the broader point that the blindness he discusses is multifaceted and presents in complex and complicated ways.
Much of what Godsey discusses does not break new ground—many of the errors and shortcomings in the criminal justice system have been well-documented. Nonetheless, his contribution is valuable both in its comprehensiveness and its inviting, noncondemnatory tone. Certainly, Godsey sheds light on some important problems. The chapter on “blind denial” explores how “good people” can unknowingly create “evil outcomes” through cognitive dissonance, administrative evil, and dehumanization. Similarly, his chapter on “blind ambition” demonstrates how the structural relationship between prosecutors and elected judges introduces conflicts of interest, promotes bias, and generally shifts the process of administering criminal justice unfairly to the side of the state.
Godsey continues his foray into blind spots in the administration of criminal justice by exploring the presence of bias in criminal cases. He provides an overview of confirmation bias, explaining how people often interpret events and evidence in a manner consistent with their preconceived assumptions about a particular situation. This inherent bias, according to Godsey, is one that we all possess and can infect prosecution, defense, and adjudication of criminal cases. In particular, confirmation bias often infects forensic science, leading to errors that put innocent people behind bars. Godsey’s litany of examples shows how serious a concern this should be.
Godsey also compiles information concerning the problems people have with memory. Scientists have increasingly demonstrated the dubious value of eyewitness testimony and false confessions and their potential to lead to incorrect outcomes in criminal cases. Godsey not only explains these problems but also discusses memory contamination and misattribution. In this chapter, Godsey underscores that this blind spot is more than just social science research about memory inaccuracy; he provides several examples of how this blind spot resulted in the incarceration of innocent individuals.
The final two areas of blindness Godsey chronicles are intuition and tunnel vision. Blind intuition relates to the idea that one can tell whether an individual is lying or telling the truth. Godsey shows that such intuition is often no more than conjecture, but that individuals place unsubstantiated weight on such instincts nonetheless. Again, he provides multiple examples of how this blindness has resulted in injustice for falsely accused individuals. Similarly, tunnel vision sets in when criminal justice actors decide that a crime happened in a certain way and then systematically ignore all evidence to the contrary. While choosing to be wedded to a belief seems nonsensical, Godsey demonstrates that such thinking is a common occurrence and results in irrational decision-making by police, prosecutors, judges, and defense attorneys. He even demonstrates his own susceptibility to tunnel vision by sharing an anecdote from his work as a prosecutor.
I would recommend the book to practitioners, particularly prosecutors—Godsey’s intended audience. The book would also be a useful addition to undergraduate or graduate classes in criminal justice, especially those that focus on topics such as innocence, injustice, and/or prosecutors.
To be sure, the value in Godsey’s book is his careful examination of how the blind spots he identifies create serious injustices for falsely accused individuals. Far from a condemnatory or bitter critic, Godsey instead shares his message as one who has himself made the same kinds of mistakes but has learned to see more clearly. And even then, Godsey notes the need to check himself with respect to some of these blind spots as they are so easy to ignore.
Godsey ends his narrative on a hopeful note, suggesting that others too can learn to overcome their blind spots and move toward reducing, if not eliminating, injustice. The implicit lesson here relates to the idea that one can play one’s role in a more fair and effective way if one has been able to experience the countervailing role. In other words, the best prosecutors may be individuals who have been public defenders, and the best public defenders may be individuals who have been prosecutors. Without providing some way for individuals to experience and understand the opposite perspective, the change that Godsey hopes to achieve seems far away, particularly given the cultural influences that drive so much of the blindness he documents.
Nonetheless, Godsey deserves credit for attempting to shine a light on the blind spots in criminal justice prosecutions, especially because he does so with a humility that invites criminal justice actors to consider the presence of such blind spots without any condemnation. Godsey’s book may not be a panacea for all of the injustices in our system, but it is a positive attempt to show the way toward change.