Unfair Book Summary - Unfair Book explained in key points

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Unfair summary

Name: Unfair
Rating: 4.2 (13 reviews)
Author: Adam Benforado

Adam Benforado

The New Science of Criminal Justice

4.2 (13 ratings)

28 mins

Table of Contents

Unfair
summarized in 12 key ideas

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Key idea 1 of 12

What’s in it for me? Discover what’s wrong with our legal system and what we can do about it.

In 2000, a 40-year-old, happily married Virginia schoolteacher began experiencing strange sexual urges, which eventually pushed him to begin collecting child pornography and even pushed him to attempt to molest his stepdaughter. When the man later sought help for severe headaches, a brain scan revealed a large tumor in his brain.

When the tumor was removed, all of his abnormal sexual urges disappeared. This unsettling episode raises important questions about criminality and guilt; in a case like this, who is really committing the crime, the man or the tumor?

And it is not only criminals whose behavior can be easily and unconsciously swayed by neurological shifts in the brain; judges, lawyers, cops and juries are all subject to cognitive biases that, taken together, have helped create a deeply unfair justice system in the United States.

These blinks will show you how the United States’ justice system is corrupted from all sides by our faulty brains, as well as the steps we can take to make the system fair.

In these blinks, you’ll learn

how David Rosenbaum of The New York Times died from a vomit stain on his shoulder;
why judges judge more fairly after lunch; and
why current ways of punishing criminals are just not working.

Hastily assigning the wrong labels to people can lead to unfair treatment.

Can a vomit stain make the difference between life and death? It did for New York Times reporter David Rosenbaum. After he was attacked on the street, passersby who found him lying unconscious on the curb spotted a vomit stain on his jacket. They thus assumed he was just another drunk and not in critical condition.

Tragically, David ultimately died from head injuries, and things might well have turned out differently if he hadn’t been mislabeled.

Unfortunately, these kinds of mistakes aren’t rare. Humans are quick to jump to conclusions based on scant evidence, largely due to the interplay between two main processes that order our brains.

First, the automatic process takes in a scene and forms rapid conclusions based on the evidence presented, disregarding missing pieces. Second, the deliberative mental process works through information more diligently and can override these initial impressions.

In David’s case, firefighters, cops and hospital staff all attributed the vomit stain to drunkenness via the automatic process. Without deferring to the deliberative process, they all discounted the possibility that he was actually in need of urgent medical attention.

This story demonstrates the fact that how we label victims affects how their cases are handled.

Consider this neurological study: when people looked at photos of Olympic athletes, middle-class Americans or the disabled, the region of their brain involved with human interaction was activated. But, when asked to look at photos of homeless people and addicts, participants registered no activity in that area; instead, their brain activity corresponded with feelings of disgust.

This study confirms a sad fact: most of us don’t regard those who are desperately down and out as human beings with feelings and needs. Instead, we tend to view alcoholism and similar disorders as choices, or voluntary behaviors. This tendency is called moral distancing, and it leads us to treat substance abusers differently.

Clearly, we need to avoid assigning damaging labels to others. In the next blink, you’ll find out how.

Suspects are subject to grueling interrogations, which can lead to false confessions.

Consider the story of Juan Rivera, an Illinois man who falsely confessed to the rape and murder of an eleven-year-old girl. His semen didn’t match the sample in the police evidence and he had an alibi, but he was still sent to prison. Although he was eventually freed after wrongly spending over 15 years in prison, the question remains: why do people confess to crimes they didn’t commit?

One key factor is that we automatically assume people believe what they say, even when we have evidence to the contrary. For instance, in one famous study, researchers asked people to evaluate various essays about Fidel Castro. Even though participants were told that the authors had been randomly assigned pro- or anti-Castro positions, readers still believed the pro-Castro writers were genuinely committed to their stances.

Brain trauma and situational factors lead people to criminality.

Few people are born evil. Rather, there are certain behavioral or situational circumstances – like poverty, social pressure or even brain trauma – that can lead people to criminality.

The brain is naturally what controls our thoughts, emotions and behavior, but it is also hugely complex, and different parts of the brain each have a massive impact on how we act.

Like the rest of us, lawyers manage to maintain a virtuous self-image – even when they break rules.

Dishonest behavior is far more common than we’d like to believe; almost everyone breaks rules from time to time. Some people illegally download movies, others fudge the numbers to pad out their expense accounts and students sometimes cheat on tests or assignments.

But here’s the interesting part: we lie to ourselves to justify this kind of unethical behavior, all in order to preserve a virtuous self-image.

Jurors’ life experiences, as well as camera perspective bias, can powerfully influence a verdict.

Any time a politician denies the existence of climate change, people rush to call him an idiot – but is that actually fair? It can be hard to accept, but other people might have a reasonable justification for holding different views from one’s own.

Ultimately, our disagreements reflect differences in our backgrounds, not character flaws.

Human memory is extremely unreliable and erroneous eyewitness accounts lead to wrongful convictions.

We like to think otherwise, but eyewitness accounts are extremely unreliable, and this can have tragic consequences.

This was the case for John Jerome White – an elderly woman wrongly identified him as the man who broke into her home and raped her.

Like the rest of us, experts fail to accurately distinguish lies from truth.

We tend to trust experts, believing that their training and experience allows them to detect lies and unravel the truth. But unfortunately, that’s just not the case.

For starters, regular people and experts alike usually fail at detecting lies, as numerous studies have confirmed. Generally, most of the conventional wisdom we hear about spotting lies isn’t borne out of fact; an averted gaze doesn’t necessarily indicate a fib, and liars tend to fidget less than truth-tellers, not more.

Justice isn’t blind; everything from social background to momentary bouts of hunger can determine judicial bias.

Blind justice is one of the foundational principles of democracy. Accordingly, we expect judges to remain objective and unbiased by keeping their personal views out of the courtroom.

But, of course, that doesn’t always happen. How else would you explain the fact that judges who have a daughter, rather than a son, are 16 percent more likely to decide gender-related civil rights cases in favor of women’s rights?

The public’s desire for retribution skews our justice system.

Nobody wants to admit it, but a central goal of the US justice system is not only to deter potential offenders and incapacitate dangerous people – it also punishes out of vengeance.

To illustrate this point, psychologist Geoff Goodwin looked at public responses to shark attacks in order to determine the extent to which people were motivated by retribution.

Solitary confinement is not only ineffective, it’s torture.

Compared to other countries, the United States’ justice system is unique – and not in a good way. Minor crimes are penalized far more harshly than in other places, and the United States is the only Western country where capital punishment is still legal.

Plus, the prison system continues to embrace solitary confinement. Though proponents argue that keeping inmates in isolation leads to self-reflection and remorse, that’s simply not the case. As we’ve seen in earlier blinks, criminals aren’t necessarily rational people who made bad decisions based on clear reasoning or deliberation.

There are three challenges that must be overcome to have a fairer justice system.

We’ve learned all about the fundamental injustice of the United States’ justice system. If citizens take action, they can reform the justice system to make it fairer. But in doing so, they will face three challenges:

First, they will need to eliminate the establishment-supported notion that simple self-reflection can eliminate bias. Overstating our own objectivity entrenches our most deep-seated biases, which leads to unfair sentences.

The United States must restructure its justice system on the basis of scientific evidence and reduce dependence on human faculties.

As we’ve established, the United States’ justice system has a lot of problems. But the biggest problem of all is the fact that Americans have gotten used to it! This needs to be the starting point for all reform efforts.

In this way, instead of accepting the status quo, Americans can restructure the system on the basis of scientific evidence rather than conventional wisdom.

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What is Unfair about?

Unfair (2015) outlines the major flaws inherent to the United States’ justice system. In addition to the unreliability of eyewitness testimony or the arbitrary nature of many judges’ decisions, every actor in the entire justice system – cops, lawyers, jurors and judges alike – is fundamentally, yet unconsciously, biased. Ultimately, the author argues that addressing these blind biases is the key to reforming our justice system.

Best quote from Unfair

The labels we give victims can make a big difference in how their cases are handled.

—Adam Benforado

Who should read Unfair?

Anyone interested in law, ethics and society
Lawyers and law students curious about the foundations of the US justice system
Anyone with aspirations to change the world for the better

About the Author

Adam Benforado is an associate professor of law at Drexel University. He served as a clerk on the United States Court of Appeals and worked as an attorney at Jenner & Block. His scholarly articles, op-eds and essays have appeared in various publications including The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Philadelphia Inquirer and The Emory Law Journal.

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Psychology Society & Culture

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