The Staircase

After offering a book recommendation, I'd like to follow up with a suggestion for a documentary to watch. Before I begin the commentary, however, I should say that I will be giving away spoiler-type information. If you want to watch the film as I did, with no knowledge of the outcome, stop reading now. There are some incredible twists that will lose impact if you know the outcome.

Besides being a fascinating look inside of a high-profile murder trial, The Staircase stands as a stark warning of exactly how dangerous a science-ignorant population can be. Michael Peterson’s wife was found dead at the bottom of a staircase. There was an astonishing amount of blood, leading investigators to suspect murder. The twists and turns are too numerous and bizarre to be quickly described, but it will suffice to say that the entirety of the prosecution’s case rested on the visceral response to the crime scene and the fact that Peterson engaged in homosexual affairs outside of his marriage. Southern Bigotry is a less interesting topic, and it's very difficult to determine how relevant it was, so I will be charitable to the people of Durham, NC and merely accuse them of stupidity.

The defense brought forward expert witnesses who used blood spatter patterns, the physics of impact, and a full battery of forensic and medical experts to destroy the notion that the death resulted from a beating. Among the most damning evidence to the prosecution was the fact that Peterson’s wife suffered no fracturing of the skull. There is an excellent portion of the film where the lead defense attorney goes through court and autopsy records and is unable to find a single instance of someone being beaten to death without suffering, at a minimum, some skull deformation in a decade of cases.

In a frightening instance of tailoring facts to fit an already-arrived-at conclusion, the prosecution explains the lack of fracturing by painting Peterson as a murdering genius. Peterson, they claimed, intentionally used an object that would cause trauma to his wife's brain without causing fractures because he knew that would look more accidental. Notice the odd conflation of reasoning: 1) There’s so much blood that it obviously looks like a beating. 2) The accused was a criminal genius who made this beating look like an accident. So does it look like a murder or an accident?

Setting aside the astonishing inconsistency, it stresses credulity to believe that Peterson was talented enough of a murder to hit someone's head hard enough to kill them from brain trauma, yet not hard enough to fracture the skull. On top of that, he called in the paramedics. This means he was confident that he had completed the murder without fracturing the skull, and reported the crime to reduce suspicion. That whole sequence requires a deft, steady hand, and there was no evidence to suggest that Peterson was such a proficient murderer.

But that’s not the important lesson from the film. Peterson was convicted and sentenced to life in prison by 12 people who completely ignored the scientific evidence that rendered the prosecution’s claim of a beating impossible. Michael Peterson sits in prison as you’re reading this because his wife had a tragic accident in a city filled with morons.

I understand how harsh that sounds, but when the filmmakers interviewed jury members after the case, asking how they were able to convict on such scant evidence, their major bit of evidence was the fact that there was so much blood. That sort of reliance on base emotional response and uneducated instinct is the hallmark of stupidity. Anyone with a basic respect for the complexity of the natural world quickly realizes that thoughtful study often yields counter-intuitive information.

If you look at any conspiracy theory, they almost always rely on that sort of “trust your instincts” nonsense. The Kennedy assassination claims all sorts of people certain that bullets just can't travel that way, never mind that a detailed, reasoned approach destroys that gut response. 9-11 “truthers” claim that the falling buildings “looked” like controlled demolitions. Unsurprisingly, those sorts of claims never come from anyone with actual experience in bringing buildings down, and to this day no one has ever published a peer reviewed paper claiming anything other than collapse resulting from collision, fire, and weight redistribution. And no matter how it may look, the Earth isn’t flat, and the sun does not revolve around it.

And so we have 12 people sentencing a man to a life of imprisonment because they think there was too much blood. How many crime scenes had they witnessed? What about all of the experts who explained in great detail how blood alone did not prove murder? Meh, just egg-head scientists. I know what I saw. To paraphrase Socrates, wisdom lies in knowing your own limitations, and so Peterson was condemned by people with far too much faith in their own knowledge.

The fundamental question emerging from The Staircase is this: Do you trust your neighbors to stay awake through a complicated scientific presentation proving that you could not have committed a crime you were accused of? I sure don’t.

We often bemoan the stupidity of our fellow citizens, mocking their zeal for fighting a war in a country they can’t find on a map, but those sorts of complaints are voiced with a shrug, as if to say, “what can we do?” But the issue is far more pressing and far more serious. There is a real price to pay, as Michael Peterson has learned.