James Verraday stood behind the podium and looked out at the faces of the second-year students filling the lecture hall for his cognitive psychology class. Projected above and behind him on a retractable screen was a panoramic photo of Seattle’s University of Washington campus, looking north along West Stevens Way. In the background was Guthrie Hall. It was, thought Verraday, a hideous example of New Brutalist architecture that would look more at home as the headquarters of a secret police agency in a failed socialist workers’ paradise like Bulgaria or Albania than as the building in which he was at this moment teaching his class.
In the photo, happy-looking students were going about their business on the campus. Many of them wore the sort of outdoor gear popular in the Pacific Northwest—down-filled vests and rainproof outer shells over sweaters and jackets. In the foreground, a pair of pretty girls—one blonde, the other African American—were laughing over a shared joke as they made their way to class. Farther along the sidewalk, a smiling young man with a gray backpack was gesturing to a fellow student to emphasize a point. In the background, a man in his midthirties was climbing out of a taxi, his face partially obscured by the pillar of the sedan. A trio of students lounged on the grass nearby. One of them, a young woman with shoulder-length brown hair, was taking a sip from a travel mug.
It was the sort of pleasant but forgettable photograph you’d see in a university brochure, an effect heightened by a cheery-looking script, superimposed at the top of the frame, that read “Welcome to the University of Washington!” It appeared to be some sort of placeholder image in Verraday’s PowerPoint presentation, and none of the students were paying much attention to it.
Without a word, Verraday hit a button on his laptop and the PowerPoint image disappeared, leaving a blank white screen in its place.
“So the last thing I want to talk about today,” he said, “is something called the short-term memory decay theory. In that image that was just up there behind me, what color was the down-filled vest of the girl taking a sip from the Starbucks travel mug?”
As usual, no one in the hall volunteered a response. Even with second-year students, Verraday almost always had to pry an answer out of them.
“Okay, let’s just have a show of hands instead. How many people think that the girl was wearing a maroon vest?”
He waited and in response received a small, tentative show of hands.
“Okay, how many of you say it was purple?”
More hesitation, then a larger number of hands went up.
“All right. So more of you think it was purple than think it was maroon. Anybody notice if it was red?”
There was silence in the room.
“Come on, you were all eyewitnesses,” he said archly. “You must know what color it was. Who thinks it’s red?”
A few students raised their hands hesitantly.
“Okay, so a small number of eyewitnesses think the girl was wearing a red vest. And some of you, a few more, think that it was maroon, right? You sure about that?”
There were embarrassed, uncertain grins.
“So clearly, most of you remember the vest as being purple.”
He observed the nods of the students who voted purple, confident at being in the majority.
“So those of you who said maroon or red, do you want to change your mind? Be with the majority?”
There was more nervous laughter, and a couple of hands went up.
“All right, so you thought it was something else, but now that all these other eyewitnesses said purple, you’re not so sure. Do you all recall seeing the man getting out of the taxi?”
There were more nods throughout the room. This was something they all felt much more certain about.
“Good. Looks like everybody remembers that,” said Verraday. “So now I want you to pick that man out of a lineup, or, as our friends in the police department like to call it, a six-pack.”
He clicked a button on his computer and the screen lit up with mug shot–style photos of six men. All were in their mid-to-late thirties. All of them had similar medium-length brown hair. One was on the thin side of average. Another was slightly heavyset. The rest were variations in the middle. Verraday smiled at the groans and laughter as the students realized the difficulty of the task he’d given them. He went through the men in the photos one by one, again asking the students to raise their hands to select which of the men they thought they had seen getting out of the taxi. When he was done, he noticed that one student, a mousy-looking girl in a bulky sweater and baggy jeans, hadn’t responded to any of them.
“Now, I believe there is someone who didn’t raise her hand,” said Verraday. He looked at the girl. “Am I right?”
The girl shook her head affirmatively.
He challenged her, using a mock-bellicose tone of voice: “But I just showed you a lineup of six men and told you to pick one. Are you going to let some crook get away with murder because you can’t be sure of what he looks like? Why aren’t you picking one?”
“Because it wasn’t any of them,” the girl replied, gazing at him through nondescript, wire-frame glasses. “It was you.”
“It was me?” asked Verraday, acting like it was the most absurd notion he’d ever heard.
He mugged to the rest of the class.
“She thinks the man in the taxi was me. Can you believe it?”
His comment, his stifled laugh, and his comically skeptical expression elicited snickers of disbelief throughout the lecture hall. He turned back to the girl.
“You really think it was me?”
“Yes, I do,” she replied.
“And if I told you that I’d deduct ten percent of your term grade if you were wrong, would you still say it was me?”
“Yes, I would,” she responded, quietly but still without hesitation.
“Ooooh, a risk taker,” said Verraday, getting a rise out of the other students. “Well, let’s find out then.”
Verraday clicked forward on his presentation and the original image came back up on the screen, except that now everything but the man and the taxi had been blacked out.
There was a gasp of surprise, then more laughter from the students.
“What do you know,” said Verraday. “You’re right. It is me. And everybody else in this room just falsely identified six innocent people as suspects.”
He paused.
“Now let’s take a look at the girl in the vest and see what color it was.”
He changed the slide so that the entire original scene was now visible.
“Anybody care to tell me anything about the girl in the vest? What color was it?”
Verraday turned around and looked at the screen.
“What do you know? She’s not wearing a vest at all! And it’s not a Starbucks travel mug. It’s just a plain old generic travel mug.”
There were more embarrassed groans and laughter.
Verraday smiled indulgently. He didn’t have to rub it in. His demonstration was making enough of an impression on its own.
“Now, the point of this exercise was not to torture or embarrass you. I’ll save that for the midterm exam next week. Rather, it was to demonstrate something called the misinformation paradigm. There are numerous documented instances in criminal investigations where police have led witnesses exactly the way I just led you, with the result that they either contradicted their original testimony or added in seeing other things that they did not in fact see, either because they weren’t in a position to see those other things or because those other things never actually happened. In a number of cases, this has led to the conviction and sometimes execution of innocent people—all because the police played fast and loose with the evidence and eyewitnesses to get the verdict they wanted.”
He glanced over at the mousy girl. In truth, he was surprised that anyone would have paid enough attention to pick him out of the photo after the fact. Verraday ruefully realized that if the situation were reversed, he would not have been able to identify the student who recognized him. Five weeks into the beginning of the fall semester, he didn’t know most of his sixty-odd students’ names, only the ones who had come to his office to discuss the course material or who were talkative in class. This girl in the big sweater and baggy jeans was neither of those things, though she was clearly more observant and confident than he would have given her credit for. He had only ever noticed her at all because he remembered thinking that her surname—something Scandinavian sounding like Jensen or Janzen or Johansen—didn’t seem to match her black hair and olive skin.
Just then, Verraday noticed someone hovering outside the door of the lecture hall. That usually meant another professor was waiting to use the room. He checked his watch and saw that it was only a couple of minutes until the end of the period. As if on cue, he heard the telltale shuffling of books and papers and the zip of Velcro. He recognized their Pavlovian response. They’d interpreted his glance at his watch as the end of the class. He knew from experience that from this point on, they’d barely hear anything he said. He decided not to fight the tide.
“Okay, we will wrap it up there for today. The readings for next class are on the course outline, but just to remind you, it’s Daniel Yarmey, in Law and Human Behavior. He’s done some interesting research on the accuracy of eyewitness memory. And it’s time to start reviewing all the material we’ve covered so far, because the midterm is fast approaching.”
Verraday switched off the projection system and began unplugging the connections on his laptop. As the bottleneck of students filing out of the room began to clear, he got a better look at the person hovering in the hall. It was a woman—in her early thirties, he guessed. She was tall and attractive, with dark hair. A tailored black pantsuit complemented her slim, athletic build.
She wasn’t anybody from the psychology department. He knew everyone in the faculty and all the teaching assistants. And he didn’t think she was any of the new hires from admin—he wouldn’t have forgotten meeting her. She was too young to be one of those helicopter parents coming to complain that he should have given their kid higher marks. She carried herself with an air of authority, he noted. He considered the possibility that she was there from the dean’s office to request he bump up a student’s mark because the parents were rich and donated to the university. It was a request he always refused.
As the last student exited, the woman slipped into the room and approached him at the lectern. She had intelligent eyes and a thoughtful expression. He really hoped she wasn’t here to ask him to pull a favor for an undeserving student.
“Can I help you?” he asked.
“Professor Verraday?”
“That’s me.”
She held out her badge. “I’m Detective Constance Maclean, Seattle Police Department.”
Verraday immediately bristled. This was worse than if she had been a flunkey from the dean’s office. Much worse.
“If you’re here to try to talk me into dropping the lawsuit, you can forget it,” he said.
“I’m not here to talk you out of anything, Professor.”
“And if the Seattle Police Department thinks that they can send someone to my place of employment to hang around the halls in front of my students and try to intimidate me, I can assure you and your bosses that is not going to work.”
“That is not my intention. I—”
“Good,” snapped Verraday, cutting her off, “because I don’t appreciate being pepper-sprayed, then having some two-hundred-pound lunkhead throw me facedown onto a sidewalk, crack my ribs, and then wrongfully detain me.”
Six months earlier, Verraday had been working on a research project about the psychology of crowd behavior. He had been legally video recording an Occupy Seattle demonstration when a riot cop by the name of Bosko had blindsided him. Bosko had tackled him from behind, knocking Verraday to the pavement, then handcuffing and arresting him. The refusal by the city or the police department to offer any sort of explanation or apology had prompted Verraday to file a suit to get their attention.
Before she could speak, he continued indignantly. “Know what? Maybe I should just call my lawyer right now.” He reached into the lower right-hand pocket of his blazer for his cell phone. It wasn’t there. Then he checked his left pocket. It wasn’t there either, and he was annoyed to realize he couldn’t remember where he’d put it.
Flustered, he noticed that she seemed to be suppressing a smile.
“Look,” she said, “I know about the Occupy thing, and I can see that you’re very upset about it. But I didn’t come to get you to drop any lawsuit.”
“Then why are you here?”
“Because I need your help.”
“You need my help?” he asked incredulously. He raised an eyebrow in disbelief. “Okay, I’m listening.”
Maclean glanced out into the hall and noticed a few students lounging on benches nearby.
“Is there somewhere we can talk in private?”
“My office. The department secretary will be just outside the door. But don’t worry—she won’t hear anything we say . . . unless I call for help, which she’ll be able to hear just fine.”