R v Dodd, 2015 ONCA 286 Donald Michael Dodd (hereinafter “Dodd”) was convicted by a jury, along with his co-accused, Timothy Carter, of second degree murder and sentenced to life with no chance of parole for 17 years. The victims, Peter Kambas and Vaios Koukousoulas, were beaten to death in Carter’s garage and transported from the scene in his vehicle. Both the garage and the vehicle were burned after the victims disappeared at the end of June 2008. The bodies were found later that year, in December. The jury had to decide whether Dodd was present at the crime scene when the assault happened or not. Dodd maintained he wasn’t. The evidence considered by the jury to convict Dodd was very frail, limited to: I. Krystal Hamelin’s testimony that …show more content…
As one could infer from this voice description, Krystal didn’t like Dodd, fact she openly admitted to the police. Her description of his voice, and her testimony overall, can easily be liked to a halo effect of her first impressions of him. Because she already didn’t perceive him as a good person, she could easily place his voice over the aggressive one she briefly heard during the assault and maintain this version during cross-examination with confidence, when, in fact, accordingly to Mary McConnell’s cross-examination (Kambas’s girlfriend, who knew Dodd better than Krystal did) his voice wasn’t even “deep”, but rather “high-pitched”. On this ground, the “loud and deep” voice screaming over the baby monitor couldn’t objectively be linked to Dodd, but Hamelin’s perception of him was too biased to interpret it differently. Her memory worked with selective thinking, applying a confirmatory bias; i.e., when trying to interpret the voice she heard that night, Hamelin recalled it with cognitive easy as belonging to Dodd because it served as an information that confirmed her initial perception of …show more content…
Despite the lack thereof evidence, the Crown only had to present a story that was plausible enough not to be immediately interpreted as a lie by the jury; after that was done, the jury was moved by its “confidence by coherence” , interpreting the facts presented as true as long as it fit the hypothesis that seemed more likely, with little regard to the quality and quantity of information as long as it was consistent with the pattern of the story they were forming in their minds. The jury applied a positive test strategy, deliberately searching for confirming evidence that was compatible with their prior beliefs . The evidence wasn’t objectively analysed in its quality nor in its quantity, but rather, overvalued because of it’s confirmatory characteristics. They weren’t sensible to the frailty of the available data because of the effect where “what you see is all there is” . Therefore, because limited data was all the data needed to form a coherent story, it was interpreted as being all the data needed period. Ultimately, a short-cut decision was made based on impressions and intuitive thinking that disregarded the limited and circumstantial evidence available, with reasoning that couldn’t be linked to any sort of rational fact-finding