Tulsa Police officer Betty Shelby, right, being escorted into court for an early proceeding in her upcoming manslaughter trial in the killing of Terence Crutcher. CREDIT: AP Photo/Sue Ogrocki, File.
The visual evidence of Terence Crutcher’s murder by Officer Betty Shelby was so clear, and so overwhelming, there was no choice when it came to prosecuting her. The sheer obviousness of her guilt has led her lawyers to trying out something new. It’s a twinkie defense, that’s clear, but we should all remember that juries will buy a twinkie defense, especially if they want to, which will most likely happen in this case.
…It will probably be a long time before Shelby sees the inside of a courtroom. But her lawyers are already previewing her case in the media — and Shelby’s attorneys have a strange argument they’ll use in her defense.
Shelby had no idea her backup was right behind her, prepared to subdue Crutcher with a less-lethal taser, the lawyers are saying, because she was temporarily deaf due to the stress of the situation. The law enforcement community calls it “auditory exclusion.”
“She didn’t hear the gunshot, didn’t hear the sirens coming up behind her just prior to the shot,” defense lawyer Scott Wood told the Associated Press last week. Auditory exclusion is “the no. 1 perceptual distortion by people I have represented who have been involved in shootings,” he added.
Wood’s scientific-sounding argument will make Betty Shelby’s ears a strange new battlefield in the struggle to reform American law enforcement. If her lawyers manage to present “auditory exclusion” as hard science, her trial will mark a step toward allowing the use of a cloud of medical-sounding jargon to obscure the implicit racial biases that cops carry to explain a killing that has all the hallmarks of the epidemic of biased policing of black people.
Is “Auditory Exclusion” Science or Subjectivity?
Professor Philip Stinson, a former cop and criminal lawyer who now teaches at Bowling Green State University, maintains the most comprehensive database anywhere on police officer prosecutions for killing civilians. Out of 77 officers charged with murder or manslaughter for killing a civilian since the start of 2005, he said, none appears to have argued in court that “auditory exclusion” excused their actions.
“From my standpoint, it’s completely nuts,” Stinson told ThinkProgress. “I don’t see this being admissible at all.”
But researchers diverge on whether people can go temporarily deaf under duress.
Those ThinkProgress reached who study the brain’s physiology said they know of no research supporting it. “Stress does all sorts of things to sensory systems,” wrote Stanford neurologist Dr. Robert Sapolsky, “but the idea of deafening is ludicrous.” Dr. Andrew Steptoe at University College London, who studies “peritraumatic dissociation” during episodes of intense fear or stress, said the idea is plausible “but I know of no solid evidence for this.”
But approached from a psychologist’s perspective, the theory is better grounded. Penn State Behrend associate professor Melanie Hetzel-Riggin said it helps to imagine the difference between hardware and software here.
“On the hardware side, they’re right, there’s probably no physiological problem in that your hearing itself is fine. What’s happening is the info isn’t going anywhere,” she said. “It is possible, although I’m unaware of any research supporting this one way or the other, that during that experience of threat your hearing could be focusing on that and not anything else going on around you.”
[…]
Police training materials are commonly designed to neutralize the panic psychology that Shelby’s lawyers hope will exonerate her. Simulations like the “force option simulator” at San Diego Regional Law Enforcement Training Center are in widespreaduse.
With public pressure for reform mounting over the past couple years, police departments have invited reporters to try their hand at the simulators as part of a PR offensive.
The reporter sessions illustrate how your average geek off the street would struggle with the stresses of the job, to be sure. But the point of the training is to ensure cops are better than us at this stuff. The people whom society entrusts with deadly force and unique authority are supposed to know how to avoid such dangerous responses to something that overloads our brain’s fight-flight instincts. Police academies traditionally give 13 times as much attention to training officers to handle violent situations professionally as to deescalation practices.
“The good thing about police officers and other people who are emergency responders is they have all this training to make it muscle memory, to make it automatic,” said Hetzel-Riggin.
“There are many situations that are going to be perceived as less threatening, because police officers have the training, the practice.”
With all that training, there’s only one thing left – implicit bias. And all too often, when it comes to cops, explicit bias. It’s a problem everyone is tip-toeing around, and it’s the one problem which desperately needs to be addressed. Way more than enough people have been murdered by cops.
So it is either stunningly bad training,
or stunningly bad screening of trainees,
or the whole system is stunningly corrupt,
or all of the above.
This has a lot in common with the Catholic Church.
They’re basically saying she’s so bad at handling any kind of stress that she has panic-reactions comparable to a novice soldier on hostile patrol in a war zone. If this bullshit excuse were anywhere near true, I highly doubt she’d have even been able to pass anything as stressful a driving test.
That must be a condition exclusive to US Cops.
It’s also one of the big problems with psychology: no scientific data but lots of “just so” stories you can easily believe if only you want to.
It’s true that a particularly engrossing thing can make it all but impossible to notice other things (no matter how obvious they “should” have been).
And if this were the only murder of a black person by a cop, that argument might be persuasive. But as part of a larger pattern? Yeah, no. If it happens once, it’s an accident; if it happens literally every day not so much.
“Auditory exclusion” is just a fancy way of saying: “I only heard what I wanted to hear.” And a white jury will probably believe it because it’s what they want to hear.
That was also my first thought.
The mildly deranged penguin points out that “trigger finger paralysis” would be a more useful condition, stress or no stress, at least when the finger is on the trigger of a firearm (lethal weapon) without good reason.
“Auditory exclusion”.
Hm.
Seems like a rather problematic condition for a person in what (we are repeatedly assured by defenders of the Boys In Blue) is an exceedingly dangerous profession, a profession which is pretty much guaranteed to drop its practitioners into all manner of highly stressful situations. If this ‘auditory exclusion’ thing is genuine, I think it would be a great kindness to Officer Shelby if she were to never be a law enforcement officer for the rest of her life. It would certainly cut down on the level of stress in her life.
And if ‘auditory exclusion’ is merely a sciencey-sounding piece of bullshit cooked up by Shelby’s defense attorney, she’s a murderess who needs to be off the fucking force before she kills again—and, further, needs to stay off any fucking force, permanently..
I wonder if any of the defenders of the Boys in Blue would care to offer up an argument for allowing Shelby to remain a police officer, that doesn’t amount to either (a) letting a murderess get off scot free, or else (b) inflicting highly stressful situations on a person whose stress-handling capabilities are sufficiently poor that they have, at least once, resulted in the gratuitous death of an unarmed black man.
This is a truly terrifying argument.
If successful, it would set a precedent essentially saying “a stressful situation that inhibits one’s hearing [or possibly other perceptions] absolves the defendant of legal guilt for their actions”.
If a police officer shoots someone, then obviously, they were in a stressful situation.
This is, in other words, an argument that police officers have carte blanche to shoot as they please and that, BY DEFINITION, they cannot be held legally accountable. One would have to demonstrate that the officer was under no stress, completely calm and calculating, in order to convict -- which means short of executing a gagged and chairbound prisoner, this could never be proven (and even then it would be difficult).
If auditory exclusion were a thing, you’d think it would apply much more to the unarmed victims of cops, yet you never hear cops saying ” oh that was a very stressful situation therefore they probably didn’t hear what we said”.
I’m a law enforcement officer in a saner country, one where the police are unarmed unless there’s a specific reason to be armed. Auditory exclusion was part of our training, but from the angle that if you shout instructions at somebody who’s already stressed, they’re not necessarily going to take it in, they’re just going to register that a threatening and aggressive person is attacking them and react accordingly, so DON’T, stay calm, ask people to co-operate, give them a chance to co-operate, and only escalate if forced. It was certainly not in our training as an excuse for unreasonable force, abuse of power, or unwarranted violence and aggression. That’s a bullshit defence.
SenseOfTheAbsurd:
That is intelligent and humane, and much more likely to keep everyone safe. Of course, police in other countries manage to view people as people. That doesn’t happen much here.
we should all remember that juries will buy a twinkie defense, especially if they want to
They found Emmet Till’s killers “not guilty” -- same shit, different day.
SenseOfTheAbsurd@#9:
if you shout instructions at somebody who’s already stressed, they’re not necessarily going to take it in, they’re just going to register that a threatening and aggressive person is attacking them and react accordingly, so DON’T, stay calm, ask people to co-operate, give them a chance to co-operate, and only escalate if forced
That’s one of the things that drives me nuts about these stories. The cops have all the initiative; there is no need for them to be forced into making an error. They could sit back for hours or days and wait for the situation to evolve into something safer. They could have talked to his wife. You know, basic helpful things like decent human beings do in a crisis.
Cops are trained not to back down, not to wait, not to think. Basically, that cop shot a man because she couldn’t be arsed to spend a bit more time figuring out what was going on.
They’re basically saying she’s so bad at handling any kind of stress that she has panic-reactions comparable to a novice soldier on hostile patrol in a war zone.
Then they were negligent putting someone like that in a uniform and giving them a gun.
Your move, cops’ lawyers.
I suspect there’s something very wrong in the recruitment and training of police, and have some real issues about some law enforcement and judiciary being elected roles, and so potentially unhealthily politicised.
And yes. They’re the cops. Being capable of staying calm and dealing effectively with people who are aggressive, stressed, drugged, mentally ill, frightened, or otherwise flipping out is absolutely fundamental. If they can’t do that without freaking out, panicking and murdering members of the public, something is very, very, very wrong. From the cops’ perspective, I’d suspect that operating in a highly-armed society means that a lot of officers are perpetually terrified and on an overreaction hair-trigger.
In my bailiwick, rule one is ‘don’t be the aggressor’. You can escalate in response, but it’s down to the other person to initiate violence, and set the level. We aim to go in relaxed and friendly, and try to stay there. Sometimes that’s impossible, but it’s what we try to do. Better for everybody.
SenseOfTheAbsurd
Welcome to Pharyngula.
I really hope you will continue to comment here.
Chigau:
When did I become PZ?
:D
At any rate, I hope I see more of SenseOfTheAbsurd, too.
I’m really sorry
Chris ClarkeCaine.I had too many tabs open.
May I have a
bunnyratty?You may have Amelia:
There’s my girl.
♥
Oh, I’ve been around for aeons, but as a very sporadic commenter, and at some point I changed my name.
OMG OMG is Amelia really enjoying a nice bowl of soup in the photo?
The cuteness!
SenseOfTheAbsurd @ 22:
Not soup, it’s fishing for veg. When it’s hot in summertime, I fill a dish with water and frozen veg, and everyone gets to go fishing. Exciting, y’know. :D
Only a little bit disappointed it isn’t soup.
Well, rats do love soup, too!
SenseOfTheAbsurd @ 21:
You wouldn’t be Gwendolyn, by chance?
Nope. I’ve been hanging around off and on since the days of Pharyngula at ScienceBlogs, and occasionally used the name Buffybot, but usually keep quiet.
If it’s soup, there’s supposed to be a dragon.
SenseOfTheAbsurd:
I remember you! Now I’m extra happy to see you again.