Tunnel Vision

• In Event: Crime, Law, and Deviance II

Abstract

With almost daily frequency the United States is made aware of someone who has been exonerated of a crime he or she did not commit. To date, there are 1,693 individuals found innocent, representing on average 9 lost years due to unwarranted incarceration. There has been significant scholarship on the contributing factors of wrongful convictions, ranging from eyewitness misidentification, false accusation, misleading forensic evidence, false confessions, to official misconduct. The intent of this paper is to go beyond these contributing effects to examine an underlying cause. An argument is presented that mistakes at the early investigative stages of an alleged criminal activity are not easily corrected. In fact, research suggests a social psychological tendency for these errors to be ignored and passed on through a form of confirmation bias referred to as tunnel vision. Here is how one scholar bluntly describes the situation: “Once [the police] come to suspect someone as the culprit … then the investigation blindly focuses in on that adopted ‘target.’ Crucial pieces of evidence are overlooked and disregarded.” After a review of the tunnel vision literature, this paper proceeds with an examination of the wrongful convictions in Texas, the state that has the most exonerations (n=214), to determine the percentage that indicate confirmation bias during the initial phase of the investigation. To ground this quantitative analysis, the wrongful conviction of Timothy Cole in Lubbock, Texas is used for purposes of illustration. His false imprisonment will be shown to be based on errors early in the police investigation that were compounded by confirmation bias. In particular, the presiding judge at Cole’s posthumous exoneration hearing used the concept of tunnel vision to characterize what happened. He concluded that “It is plain from the record that once the Lubbock police fixed their sights on Tim Cole all other avenues of investigation were ignored. To them, it became more a matter of justifying their arrest than finding the truth.”

Authors

• Robert Wallace, McMurry University

• Paxton Grayer, Jr., Sociology