purple motes

In a path-breaking decision, the U.S. Supreme Court posted on its website a video along with text of its opinion in Scott v. Harris. Common sense is essentially multimodal. By including video along with its opinion, the Court provided a decision record that communicates its judgment more effectively than would just text.

The Court's recording of its decisions has had significant effects. In the Court's first copyright decision in 1834, the Court declared itself "unanimously of opinion that no reporter has or can have any copyright in the written opinions delivered by this Court, and that the judges thereof cannot confer on any reporter any such right." (Wheaton v. Peters, 33 U.S. 59, 668). The Court's decisions thus became a legally secure component of the public domain. In Burrow-Giles Lithographic Co. v. Sarony (1884), the Court found, "this photograph [“Oscar Wilde, No. 18”] to be an original work of art, the product of plaintiff’s intellectual invention of which plaintiff is the author, and of a class of inventions for which the constitution intended that congress should secure to him the exclusive right to use, publish, and sell." The Court did not however, include a reproduction of this photograph in its decision. It thus did not place in the public domain a work derived from a photograph of significant public importance. Not doing so, among other effects, lessened public understanding of its authoritative judgment

Verbal statements, whether in judicial opinions or elsewhere, are in some circumstances a poor substitute for video. Courts have long recognized the distinctive value of non-verbal evidence through their practice of admitting into evidence objects in addition to personal testimony and documents. A major issue in Scott v. Harris was the danger to the public from a driver fleeing from police cars signaling to the driver to pull over. Video from the police officers' cars communicates extent and nature of the danger in a way that cannot be reduced to a collection of propositional statements of fact. The video also specifies an authoritative judgment with respect to the extent of danger much more clearly, especially to the general public, than does just a text.

The justices apparently did not consciously edit video in the Scott v. Harris case record in making their opinions. The case record included four color videos automatically recorded from police cars when they activated their sirens. The justices' opinions included two very different descriptions of these videos. The decision record for the Court in this case includes, however, just one black-and-white video. That video (the "opinion video") appears to be the video from one police car appended to the video from another.

Selecting relevant video is an important aspect of reasoned argument in Scott v. Harris. In the opinion video, a total of 3.9 minutes of video (24% of the total run time of the opinion video) showed the crash of Harris' vehicle and the subsequent effects and actions (image of the overturned vehicle, the clouds of smoke rising from it, the police officers rushing toward the vehicle and desperately trying to open the car door to get Harris out of danger, etc.; for better understanding, watch the relevant segments of the video). Harris, who was only 19 years old, suffered permanent paralysis of his arms and legs from the crash. Irrespective of the legal issues associated with the crash, compassion is a natural and appropriate human reaction to Harris' suffering. Nonetheless, this specific crash and its terrible human effect is not relevant to judging the reasonableness of the prior police decision to terminate the chase in a way that created a risk of serious injury or death for the fleeing driver. Including the video segment of the crash and its aftermath fosters well-recognized biases, e.g. hindsight bias, outcome bias, affective bias. Video for judging the reasonableness of the police action should excise the video segment showing the crash and its aftermath.

Camera viewpoint is an important, case-relevant aspect of video in Scott. The camera viewpoint of the video approximates that of the eyes of a police officer in a chasing police car. This video, as a resource for immersive, imaginative experience, is thus oriented toward persons imaginatively assuming the position of a police officer. Presenting the video in a way that helps persons imaginatively assume the position of a police officer is the best use of the video. Ensuring that viewers are conscious of that particular video viewpoint helps viewers to judge critically the effects of their viewing experience.

Diegetic time is another important, case-relevant aspect of the video. The video includes the period from when the police officers began to seek to stop the driver to when a police officer terminated the resulting chase. The dangerousness of the chase depends on specific circumstances occurring over time. These circumstances include the fleeing driver's and the police officers' physiological states. Since the human hormonal system has slower-acting but more general and longer-enduring effects than the human nervous system, events that trigger hormonal reactions associated with a situation of danger can shape subsequent actions and perceptions of time and danger. Hence judgments of public danger involve complicated temporal issues.

Watching and editing video can promote and communicate reasoned judgment of public danger. An important issue is the time span in which a judgment of dangerousness is reasonably made and revised. Whether unusual events are discounted in such a judgment, or weighted extra heavily, also is an important issue. Watching and editing video as if it were a transparently objective record of events ("naive realism") obscures how video really works and impedes reasoned understanding of video's truth value.[1]

Included below are two videos created from video in the Scott case record. The first video includes segments of video from the beginning of the chase, and a segment of video up to the end of the chase. The second video highlights relatively dangerous events that occurred during the chase. Both videos are designed for the viewer to assume imaginatively the position of a police officer. Both videos use selective cuts of the action and connect the video segments with half-second cross dissolves to preserves sense of immersion. Both videos preserve real-world temporal sequence, except for in one switch in viewpoint that is obvious. The second video stops action at two points to suggest a circumstance that would have been particularly salient in a model of accumulating indications of danger. These videos are not designed to be deceptive or to be propaganda. They are meant to foster rational argument about the danger to the public of allowing the chase to continue.

(more...)

Offer Comments