
Slow-motion replays can distort criminal responsibility - fforflo
http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-36940475
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RcouF1uZ4gsC
I think what slow motion does is reveal the full violence of an action. Some
commenters have mentioned that slow-motion tackles and punches look much worse
than they do in real life. However, in real life, I think we underestimate the
violence. Medical research into things like CTE has revealed that there is
actually brain damage occurring during those plays.

Notice the research used a gunshot video. I think the average person
underestimates the violence inflicted by a bullet because our human intuition
fails us for small objects traveling that fast. I think what slow-motion does
is help reveal the true violence inflicted on another person whether from a
punch, tackle, or gunshot.

Update:

IANAL but also note that in this specific case, murder during commission of a
felony ( armed robbery ) would be classed in many states as felony murder and
would be first degree murder. See [http://criminal.lawyers.com/criminal-law-
basics/murder-durin...](http://criminal.lawyers.com/criminal-law-
basics/murder-during-the-commission-of-a-felony.html)

So if this is a felony murder state, the slow motion would actually help the
jury come to the correct conclusion.

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entropy_
How violent an action truly is is irrelevant when deciding whether a murder
was premeditated(first degree) or not(second degree). If I swing a hammer at a
wall and someone happens to be passing by, I hit them in the face and kill
them, it's going to look very gruesome in slow motion. That doesn't mean I
intended to kill the person. If a jury is more likely to think I had time to
notice the person passing by because of slow motion and thus believe that I
intended to kill the person, then that's an error.

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kevin_b_er
It doesn't even have to be a killing.

The slow motion makes it look like actions were deliberate instead of
spontaneous. So it makes it look like a planned action. If the defendant
deliberately did it, they must be pretty terrible, right? Guilty of a worse
crime.

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jsprogrammer
How often does spontaneous violence occur? If it looks like actions were
deliberate and planned, wouldn't you need some other reasoning to believe that
they weren't?

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syk26
Right, but the dangerous part is that slow motion biases our judgement so that
we ultimately determine an action was deliberate and planned.

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djaychela
Having recently sat on a Jury in the UK, deliberating on a triple assault
case, the CCTV was the most crucial piece of evidence - eye witness reports
were patchy and in some cases contradictory, and watching the events on CCTV
was important in deciding what actually happened.

If we had not had access to the CCTV - both in real time and slowed down
(which was actually produced by the defence, not the prosecution), then I
strongly believe the outcome would have been different; indeed if another
angle had been present then one count may well have been judged differently.

It is easy to view something slowly and decide that intent was more severe
than may have been planned by the people involved, but in my experience it's
also invaluable in seeing what actually happened, as the camera can be the
most reliable witness to the facts of the matter.

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afandian
My view is that the aim of a using juries is to bring the things humans are
good at* to the judgment process, i.e. deciding who's lying under cross-
examination.

Humans might be good at detecting 'intent' in the real world and calibrated
for reality. Their calibration might be completely wrong for slow-motion. So
maybe slow-mo does give a better view of what happened to establish the facts
of the matter but may drastically skew other, more important factors.

___

* sadly it doesn't seem to be true

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interfixus
Other, more important factors than what happened? Please elaborate.

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DanBC
Is it a just law that should be enforced?

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pc86
I don't think the speed of CCTV footage will affect any juror's opinion of the
justness of a given law.

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DanBC
Afandian wasn't talking about cctv, but was talking about juries.

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erez
This has always been a pet-peeve of mine, watching sports replays. When re-run
in slow motion, some tackles seem more aggressive, mostly because of the body
motion of the "victim" being exaggerated, while others look benign. The
commentators then make judgement calls on the validity of the umpire calls,
which is made in real-time, based on their opinion that was formed using the
slow-mo replay.

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thomasfoster96
Wait until you get into watching cricket umpiring decisions that are referred
to a TV umpire (by players or umpires) - slow motion replay (with a separate
camera to normal tv coverage), hotspot cameras, microphones, ball tracking...

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pauljohncleary
With cricket the player's intent is not considered unlike many other sports
and in courtroom trials. So looking at the most minute detail (e.g. the
snickometer, the checks if the ball made a "snick" sound passing the bat,
indicating contact) makes sense to the sport.

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erez
I think there's something in the LBW rules about intent, not to mention the
whole concept of "where would've the ball gone has it not been etc. etc." I
personally dislike the whole fixation over minutiae in Cricket today. The Laws
should, I think, be updated for the new technology, for instance the front-
foot no-ball which now is preposterous when they keep trying to see whether a
millimetre of the foot crossed the line or not, or the run-out with whether
the bat was firmly touching the ground on the other side of the crease or not.
Those laws were fine when the umpiring wasn't technology assisted, but they
are turning the whole game to a circus these days.

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thomasfoster96
Yep, if the ball pitches outside the line of the stumps it's not out unless
the batsman made no attempt to play a shot.

> The Laws should, I think, be updated for the new technology,

I disagree (although being young I've only ever watched cricket with this sort
of technology). Given the other aspects of the game rely so much on precision,
I can't see letting the umpiring become more subjective and/or allowing for
more human error would improve the game.

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xedarius
This is no real surprise. It's apparent when they show the replays during a
boxing match, the punches look much much worse than they do in real-time. Not
to mention all the punches that you miss due to the speed of the action.

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Pelser
The opposite might also be true - maybe slow motion shows true entent rather?

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Houshalter
Perhaps. It seems like the issue is with slowmo is it looks like you have more
time to decide and react, then you actually do. In real time it's more clear
that an action was reactive, and that there was no time to make a calculated
decision.

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chrisweekly
Confounding the issue: evidence that some reactions happen before the actor is
consciously aware that there is a decision to be made (let alone actually
making a choice and deliberately initiating a response). It goes beyond
recoiling your hand from a hot stove before you're aware of the pain. Tests w/
next-gen helicopter gunship HUD trigger controls showed pilots opening fire
microseconds _before_ their neural pathways for "friend/foe" recognition were
leveraged. Need to dig up my sources... but the TLDR: a lot of neuroscience
brings "free will" into question. Maybe consciousness is an epiphenomenon, and
free will a story we tell ourselves, and "decisions" mere post-hoc
rationalizations for actions we take before any awareness? Fascinating stuff.

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coredog64
Isn't this all based on those fMRI scans that were discredited?

[http://arstechnica.com/science/2016/07/algorithms-used-to-
st...](http://arstechnica.com/science/2016/07/algorithms-used-to-study-brain-
activity-may-be-exaggerating-results/)

~~~
mcguire
Have you heard more about this? The article you link to does not specifically
mention the studies in question:

" _" This calls into question the validity of countless published fMRI studies
based on parametric clusterwise inference." It's not clear how many of those
there are, but they're likely to be a notable fraction of the total number of
studies that use fMRI, which the authors estimate at 40,000._"

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benevol
A slow-motion replay is just 1 way of "looking closer".

The thing is, in order to not be hypocritical, we'd need to look as closely as
possible.

Once we do that, we'll be looking at the molecular structure of not only the
brain of the perpetrator but also the whole body (as there is of course
infinite interaction). We'll be asking for the causes that led to the body
being as it was at the moment of the thing will currently call "crime".

We'll end up understanding that there is no free will, which will force us to
rethink what we call "punishment".

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rubidium
Is there any way for your statement (which has many bold assertions) to lead
anywhere but "We're all just victims of our genes"?

Your materialistic assumptions are a wonderful way to do science, but a
terrible way to be human or govern.

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vidarh
It goes further. His statement (which I agree with) implies that we have no
individual responsibility because our actions are entirely beyond our control.

In that case the perpetrator is just as much victim, which alters the entire
balance of justice, and creates all kinds of ugly rabbit holes to deal with
with respect to societal effects and morality.

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hx87
Providing a strong disincentive to the perpetrator (and in the mean time,
locking them up) improves society, whereas doing so to the victim does not.
That makes all the necessary difference.

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imaginenore
But the article doesn't explain why it calls it "distortion", and not
"clarification".

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throwanem
>The researchers believe that the slow motion version is giving observers the
sense that those carrying out the violent acts on tape have more time to think
and deliberate - and the observers therefore believe there is more intent in
the violent actions.

Premeditation makes the difference between first- and second-degree murder,
and being convicted of the former tends to bring much harsher sentences. The
article describes the paper as finding that people who view (e.g. store CCTV)
recordings of a murder only in slow motion and without a timecode, thus
lacking any clear reference to the real speed of events, are much more likely
to impute premeditation than those who don't. That's what "distortion" means
here.

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dbooookldjfo
ok well just slow it in normal and slow-motion and explain to the jury that
they may experience bias when watching the slow-motion version

