Black Box Thinking: Why Some People Never Learn from Their Mistakes - But Some Do

by Matthew Syed

The reframing exercise often took a distinctive path. First the prosecutors would try to deny access to DNA evidence in the first place. When that strategy was batted away by judges, and the test had excluded the convict as the source of the DNA, they would claim that it had not been carried out correctly. This didn’t last long, either, because when the test was redone it would invariably come back with the same result. The next stage was for the prosecutor to argue that the semen belonged to a different man who was not the murderer. In other words, the victim had had consensual sex with another man, but had subsequently been raped by the prisoner, who had used a condom.22 This is the domino effect of cognitive dissonance: the reframing process takes on a life of its own. The presence of an entirely new man, not mentioned at the initial trial, for whom there were no eyewitnesses, and whom the victim often couldn’t remember having sex with, may seem like a desperate ploy to evade the evidence. But it has been used so often that it has been given a name by defense lawyers: “the unindicted co-ejaculator.”