The Causes

Government Misconduct: Tunnel Vision

  • The 3 Main Factors of Tunnel Vision
    • Confirmation Bias
      • Kirk’s ex-wife filed a missing persons report, and the lie detector test was given to Richard Gray but it was dismissed by the police.
    • Hindsight Bias
      • Prosecutors still believed Kirk was guilty after being proven innocent through DNA testing.
    • Public/Media Pressure on Police Performance
      • The community pressured police to find the suspect because the case involved a killing and raping of a 9 year-old girl.
  • Tunnel vision can be reduced by keeping an open mind, and asking for second opinions (Salet & Terpstra, 2014, p. 44).

Government Misconduct: Accusatorial Interrogations

  • Psychological interrogation techniques are used when the police use false evidence as forms of deception.
  • These techniques are commonly linked to false confessions (Kassin et. al, 2009, p. 12).
    • Kirk was presented with false evidence when the interrogators used underwear bought from a store and a rock picked up from the parking lot of the store.

Government Misconduct: Sketching Composite

  • Bloodsworth’s facial composite was created with limited mechanical options and the artist was unskilled and only had 3 days of training.
    • The boy providing details for the composite sketch was unsatisfied with the look of the mustache, the hair, and the eyes but the composite artist refused to spend more time calling in a freelance artist to make it look correct (McNamara, 2009, p.779).

Eyewitness Misidentification

  • Researchers have found the majority of wrongful convictions (three quarters) derive from eyewitness misidentifications (Kassin et. al, 2009, p. 3).
    • Kirk was misidentified by multiple people after he was exposed on News Channels.
    • Kirk was warned on his day of arrest that he might want to cover his head, but he refused, saying he did nothing wrong and was not going to hide. 
  • Child Eyewitness Information
    • In a recent study, researchers examined the effect of positive and negative reinforcement on children aged 5 through 8 years. The reinforcement strongly affected children’s likelihood of making false statements (Kassin et. al, 2009, p.20).
      • In Kirk’s case, the eyewitnesses were children aged 7 and 10. This most likely led to him being misidentified because the children gave false statements.