Second Jury Research Symposium taking place at the Open University to examine visual evidence in particular

1. Jury Symposium on Visual Evidence
Friday 11th June 2010, Open University, Milton Keynes
Programme overview
9.55- 10.00 Welcome
10.00-10.30 Richard Neave
Face mapping as evidence in court
10.30-10.55 Chris Williams
Surveillance footage as evidence in 1935
Coffee/tea 10.55-11.10
11.10-11.40 Minhua Eunice Ma
Virtual Reality and 3D Animation in Forensic Visualisation
11.40-12.10 Gerry Derksen
How Real is Too Real? Avatars Influence on Judgment
Lunch 12.10 – 1.10
1.10-1.35 Graham Pike
CSI effect and visual evidence
1.35-2.00 Burkhard Schafer
Mind, your own business? fMRI imaging in the legal process
Break 2.00-2.10
2.00 – 2.45 Colette R. Brunschwig
Multisensory law, a new legal discipline, and how it’s related to
(audio)-visual evidence
3.00-3.25 Burkhard Schafer
Beyond the grave: Multimedia, victim impact statements and the role
of multisensory jurisprudence
Coffee/tea 3.25 – 3.40
3.40 -4.00 Michael Bromby
Review of jury symposium held in March 2010: key themes and
outcomes
4.00-5.00 Discussion
Where do we need to go from here? Future
work/directions/collaborations
Abstracts

2. “Face Mapping” as Evidence in Court
Richard Neave
This presentation is given from the perspective of someone who drifted into the
field of what became known as Face Mapping, almost by accident, over twenty years
ago. Today the use of surveillance images in Court as evidence of a specific event
having occurred has become as much a routine as the use of the surveillance
imaging techniques themselves. When this material is used as evidence of a specific
individual being present or involved in such an event the use of pictures either
moving or still are likely to become an important part of the evidence placed before
the Court. For the Members of the Jury the introduction of this type of evidence can
come as a great relief from the prolonged periods of argument and questioning upon
which they have to concentrate, for the expert witness however, presenting such
evidence can sometimes be quite challenging.
Twenty years ago the high point of such evidence often came when two sets of
outlines printed on to cell were placed on an overhead projector and slowly
superimposed. The image may well have been projected onto a wall or hastily
acquired screen. Such simple home spun methods are hardly acceptable in this
digital age and in most cases the images will be seen on fixed TV monitors and
manipulated from a Lap Top Computer through which more sophisticated techniques
can be demonstrated.
However this move from the home-spun to the digital age inevitably raises new
questions and new uncertainties some of which may be touched upon in this
presentation.
Surveillance footage as evidence in 1935
Chris Williams
Keywords: History, surveillance, bureaucracy
In 1935, the people of the English town of Chesterfield were among the first to be
captured by police cine film surveillance. The targets of this operation were groups
of working-class men engaging in a widespread but illegal practice: off-course cash
betting. This event is significant in itself, but its denouement also illustrates a
number of the issues raised by visual surveillance and its interaction with the legal
system. This, probably the first attempt to show footage in court, ended more as a
fiasco than a spectacular, chiefly owing to the problems of reconciling the evidence
obtained from a cine camera with the prevailing laws of evidence.
Virtual Reality and 3D Animation in Forensic Visualisation

3. Minhua Eunice Ma
Key words: serious games, 3D visualization, Virtual Reality
Computer-generated 3D animation is an ideal media to accurately visualise crime or
accident scenes to the viewers and in the courtrooms. Based upon factual data,
forensic animations can reproduce the scene and demonstrate the activity at various
points in time. Using computer animation techniques to reconstruct crime scenes is
beginning to replace the traditional illustrations, photographs, and verbal
descriptions and becoming popular in today’s forensics. This paper integrates work
in the areas of 3D graphics, computer vision, motion tracking, Natural Language
Processing and forensic computing, to investigate the state-of-the-art in forensic
visualisation. It identifies and reviews areas where new applications of 3D digital
technologies and Artificial Intelligence could be used to enhance particular phases
of the forensic visualisation in order to create 3D models and animations
automatically and quickly. Having discussed the relationships between major crime
types and Level-of-Details in corresponding forensic animations, we recognised that
high Level-of-Detail animation involving human characters, which is appropriate for
many major crime types but is used limitly in courtrooms, could be useful for crime
investigation.
How Real is Too Real? Avatars Influence on Judgment
Gerry Derksen
Keywords: animated re-enactments, jury perception, judgment
Researchers have found that realistic qualities of avatar design and animation in re-
enactments of crime scenes has little effect on rational judgment. An emotional
response toward the avatars does change, however, based on how much the
characters embody humanistic qualities. (Nowak, 2004) Likenesses have yet to reach
indistinguishable levels of humans or human action, but still have the ability to
provoke viewers into responding as though avatars were ‘real’. We must consider
the differences between emotional, moral and rational judgment and how much
these cognitive responses interact while assessing criminal behaviour.
Computer simulations test the abilities of people to perform tasks under controlled
conditions, in controlled environments often considered low-fidelity in representing
the world. Getting users to respond emotionally to simulations does not require very
life-like animation. Stress felt by pilots training to fly aircraft in difficult situations,
is similar to our own experience in going to the movies. We feel sad or laugh at
animated images on the screen as if the actors were real human beings. The only
difference is we would consider films of this kind very realistic or at least a

4. characterisation of the real world. Representations in simulators as in movies
become surrogates for reality and we respond accordingly regardless of their
fidelity.
Rational judgments about the world conflict with moral judgment because the
former relates to our understanding of the physical, where the latter requires
consideration of abstractions, such as virtues of good and evil, and is often
associated with post hoc emotionally based rationalizations. (Haidt, 2001) If we are
able to achieve real world representations in all of its quality the potential to
question moral judgment using rational means becomes probable because all
rationalizations are satisfied. The other side of the ‘uncanny valley’ (Mori, 1970)
approaches and eventually achieves ‘absolute realism’ eliminating the uneasiness of
human-like avatars, thus mitigating misconceptions of their goodness or badness.
Deliberate consideration of the animation can afford a more reasoned approach to
persuasion and may encourage less reliance on perception and intuition to make
judgments.
Driven by the fascination with technologies potential to represent realism
animators continue to work toward creating environments that rival the natural
world. All the advantages of animation software to improve qualities such as
movement, texture and lighting will affect greater levels of realism and in turn
emotional response and moral judgement are affected. The future of animation
seems to point toward a parallel world filled with avatars that look, move and sound
like humans in environments that evoke and respond as exact replicas to reality.
Only monitoring the influence animation has over the viewers can determine its
continued use in the field of law.
CSI effect and visual evidence
Graham Pike
The impact of the CSI effect tends to be defined as the expectation of jurors that
objective, indisputable forensic evidence will decide a case. Although this provides
a useful way of exploring the difference between reality and fiction/expectations in
how physical evidence is constructed and utiliised, it is equally, if not even more,
applicable to the use of visual evidence. Many different techniques are used to
construct visual evidence, particularly when it comes to identification, but many are
not only entirely subjective but seem to use the CSI effect to present evidence in
alignment with the expectations of jurors. This presentation explores the CSI effect
in relation to visual identification evidence and compares the reality of
contemporary techniques with how they tend to be presented to, and seen by,
jurors.

5. Mind, your own business? fMRI imaging in the legal process
Burkhard Schafer
The paper reports the findings of a collaborative workshops series between
Edinburgh Neuroscience, SYNAPSE and the AHRC funded SCRIPT Centre at the School
of Law of the University of Edinburgh. It centres on the use of fMRI brain imaging
techniques, a technology that has recently been used In a number of high profile
criminal cases in the US and India. The paper gives an overview of the legal and
technological issues involved, and focused I particular on the prejudicial effect fMRI
images can have on jury decision making
Multisensory law, a new legal discipline, and how it’s related to (audio)-visual
evidence
Colette R. Brunschwig
Key words: multisensory law, visual law, audio-visual law, auditive law, tactile-
kinesthetic law, olfactory-gustatory law
The ongoing digital revolution has manifold implications for the law. The growing
number of non-textual phenomena in the legal context raises a host of new
questions that established legal disciplines find difficult to answer. The community
on Multisensory Law at C. H. Beck publishers (see
http://blog.beck.de/gruppen/multisensorylaw) aims to tackle these questions by
positioning multisensory law as a new legal discipline. It also seeks to foster and
establish scientific and practical discourse on multisensory law.
Despite the existence of this community and other scientific endeavours (for
example, the Munich Conference on Visual, Audio-Visual, and Multisensory Law,
http://www.rwi.uzh.ch/oe/zrf/abtrv/konferenzen/2009/Muenchen.html),
multisensory law is still an unknown legal discipline.
In view of this situation, this paper adopts an interdisciplinary approach in an
attempt to intensify the debate on multisensory law. It addresses the following key
questions in order to introduce this discipline to a broader audience: 1. What does
the term “multisensory law” mean? 2. What is the subject matter of multisensory
law? 3. What cognitive/epistemological interest does multisensory law have? 4. How
does multisensory law constitute a new legal discipline?
Beyond the grave: Multimedia, victim impact statements and the role of
multisensory jurisprudence

6. Burkhard Schafer
Keywords: computational legal theory; legal epistemology; multisensory
jurisprudence
The talk introduces “multisensory jurisprudence” a term coined by Colette
Brunschwig, and shows its relevance for the topics of this workshop. As a
particularly vivid example, the use of video clips in jury death penalty hearings in
the US is introduced and discussed. There, the cases of Kelly v. California, 07-11703
& Zamudio v. California set problematic precedents for the use of highly
emotionally charged and professionally edited videos in the sentencing stage. An
attempt at a critique of these decisions is made, drawing on insights from a range of
cognate disciplines.
Review of jury symposium held in March 2010: key themes and outcomes
Michael Bromby
A two-day jury symposium was held at the Institute for Advanced Studies,
Strathclyde University, Scotland on March 25th 2010. The themes of the symposium
were the jury and…. the law, the accused, the complainer, witnesses, jurors and
the future. This talk will discuss the key themes and outcomes of this event.
One outcome will be the forthcoming Jury Research Network. The aim of this
network is it to link juror researchers together to facilitate collaboration. It will
have its own website, research themes, methodological support and events.