Tuzet Transforms the Classroom into a Witnesses' Courtroom

THE PROFESSOR OF LEGAL HERMENEUTICS MAKES USE OF EXPERIMENTS AND MULTIMEDIA TO TRIGGER REFLECTIONS ABOUT THE RELIABILITY OF EYEWITNESS TESTIMONY

The scene is unusual, to say the least. A woman enters classroom 301 and interrupts Giovanni Tuzet’s lesson. She’s pointedly shaken. “It’s disgusting”, she says addressing the professor. He tries in vain to calm her down. She mutters some other words, screams “shame on you!” and after a minute walks out, slamming the door. Tuzet apologizes for the incident, students are upset and bewildered. They do not know they’re part of an experiment. They’ll find out later, during the same lesson, when Tuzet will ask them to write down what they saw and to answer five questions about what happened and the clothing of the lady, in reality an actress. The incident turns the Legal Hermeneutics class into an experiment on the reliability of eyewitness testimony.
 
Tuzet’s course focuses on the relationship between laws and facts, with a strong interest in the delicate issue of witnesses. “Epistemology tell us that testimony is the most important source of knowledge we have”, he says. “Psychology, on the contrary, questions its value as a reliable source due to perceptual failures and the difficulty in reconstructing complex scenes”. Jurists stand in the middle trying to establish criteria for a correct taking and evaluation of the testimony. “Students need to develop a sensitivity to the issue. They do it more effectively when they have a first hand experience like the one they had in the classroom”.
 
The results of the experiment have been comforting: most of the students have reconstructed the events correctly both on the day of the incident and a month later, when Tuzet has proposed the same questionnaire again to test their memory of what happened. It got worse with the second test proposed by Tuzet to the classroom, patterned after a similar test conducted in Padua in the ’30s by the famous experimental psychologist Cesare Musatti. Tuzet showed the classroom a short film shot outside the university by students of the Gruppo Teatro Bocconi: the scene involves four people and ends in a fight and in the theft of an object. Students were advised to look carefully at the video, yet the error rate was quite high, perhaps because of the greater complexity of the scene compared to the previous one.
 
These experiments have shown how delicate is the issue of testimony. Some students have interpreted the scene according to stereotypes, others have reported non existent facts. Some students have mistakenly recognized their professor in one of the protagonists of the video just because both have beards, others have added irrelevant details. “And when a witness reveals irrelevant details a warning bell should ring: he may lie”. Tuzet’s work is uncommon. Legal studies traditionally focus on laws and verdicts, hands-on experiments are pretty rare. “We’re used to do the so called armchair philosophy”, Tuzet says. “Philosophical reflection is important, but we cannot ignore reality. These experiments contribute to answer burning questions about the value of the testimony”.

by Claudio Todesco