Page 85 - Malcolm Gladwell - Talking to Strangers

far different from her own. But that’s not what we get. Instead, the people charged with making
determinations of innocence and guilt seem to be as bad as or even worse than the rest of us when it
comes to the hardest cases.
Is this part of the reason for wrongful convictions? Is the legal system constitutionally incapable
of delivering justice to the mismatched? When a judge makes a bail decision and badly
underperforms a computer, is this why? Are we sending perfectly harmless people to prison while
they await trial simply because they don’t look right? We all accept the flaws and inaccuracies of
institutional judgment when we believe that those mistakes are random. But Tim Levine’s research
suggests that they aren’t random—that we have built a world that systematically discriminates
against a class of people who, through no fault of their own, violate our ridiculous ideas about
transparency. The Amanda Knox story deserves to be retold not because it was a once-in-a-lifetime
crime saga—a beautiful woman, a picturesque Italian hilltop town, a gruesome murder. It deserves
retelling because it happens all the time.
“Her eyes didn’t seem to show any sadness, and I remember wondering if she could have been
involved,” one of Meredith Kercher’s friends said.

Amanda Knox heard years of this—perfect strangers pretending to know who she was based on
the expression on her face.
“There is no trace of me in the room where Meredith was murdered,” Knox says, at the end of
the Amanda Knox documentary. “But you’re trying to find the answer in my eyes.…You’re looking
at me. Why? These are my eyes. They’re not objective evidence.”

1 Here’s another example: Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, one of the two Chechen brothers who planted a series of deadly bombs at the
Boston Marathon in 2013. The chief issue in Tsarnaev’s trial was whether he would escape the death penalty. The prosecutor,
Nadine Pellegrini, argued strongly that he shouldn’t, because he felt no remorse for his actions. At one point Pellegrini showed
the jury a photograph of Tsarnaev in his cell, giving the finger to the video camera in the corner. “He had one last message to
send,” she said, calling Tsarnaev “unconcerned, unrepentant, and unchanged.” In Slate magazine, on the eve of the verdict, Seth
Stevenson wrote:
And though it’s risky to read too deeply into slouches and tics, Tsarnaev certainly hasn’t made much effort to appear chastened or
regretful before the jury. The closed-circuit cameras that were broadcasting from the courtroom to the media room Tuesday
were not high-resolution enough that I can 100 percent swear by this, but: I’m pretty sure that after Pellegrini showed that
photo of him flipping the bird, Tsarnaev smirked.
Sure enough, Tsarnaev was found guilty and sentenced to death. Afterward, ten members of the twelve-person jury said they believed
he had felt no remorse.
But as psychologist Lisa Feldman Barrett points out, all of this discussion of whether Tsarnaev did or did not regret his actions is a
perfect example of the pitfalls of transparency. The jury assumed that whatever Tsarnaev felt in his heart would be
automatically posted on his face, in a way that matched American ideas about how emotions are supposed to be displayed. But
Tsarnaev wasn’t American. In her book How Emotions Are Made, Barrett writes:
In the Boston Marathon Bombing case, if Tsarnaev felt remorse for his deeds, what would it have looked like? Would he have openly
cried? Begged his victims for forgiveness? Expounded on the error of his ways? Perhaps, if he were following American
stereotypes for expressing remorse, or if this were a trial in a Hollywood movie. But Tsarnaev is a young man of Muslim faith
from Chechnya.…Chechen culture expects men to be stoic in the face of adversity. If they lose a battle, they should bravely
accept defeat, a mindset known as the “Chechen wolf.” So if Tsarnaev felt remorse, he might well have remained stony-faced.
2 Knox’s list of lovers wasn’t what it seemed, either. In an effort to intimidate her, the Italian police lied to Knox and told her
she was HIV positive. Knox, afraid and alone in her cell, wrote a list of her past sexual partners to work out how this could
possibly be true.
3 There is an endless amount of this kind of thing. For the prosecutor in the case, the telling moment was when he took Knox
into the kitchen to look at the knife drawer, to see if anything was missing. “She started hitting the palms of her hands on her
ears. As if there was the memory of a noise, a sound, a scream. Meredith’s scream. Undoubtedly, I started to suspect Amanda.”
Or this: At dinner with Meredith’s friends in a restaurant, Amanda suddenly burst into song. “But what drew laughs in Seattle got
embarrassed looks in Perugia,” she writes. “It hadn’t dawned on me that the same quirks my friends at home found endearing
could actually offend people who were less accepting of differences.”
4 “What’s compelling to me about Amanda Knox is that it was her slight offness that did her in, the everyday offness to be
found on every schoolyard and in every workplace,” the critic Tom Dibblee wrote in perceptive essays about the case. “This is
the slight sort of offness that rouses muttered suspicion and gossip, the slight sort of offness that courses through our daily lives
and governs who we choose to affiliate ourselves with and who we choose to distance ourselves from.”