Virtual Justice
First of all, trigger warning. I’m about to graphically detail the events of a brutal murder that I just made up in my head.
Imagine that late one night as a wife and husband are preparing for bed, the wife asks her husband to head to the cornershop for cigarettes. Being an attentive man also in need of smokes, he puts on his long coat, steps on a footstool to open the front door and descends the staircase. Once he’s out on the city streets, he fastens his coat, guarding himself against the evening chill, when he feels a rectangular lump pressing against his chest. The husband reaches into the inner pocket and finds there is already a fresh pack of Luckys. Now that the errand is unnecessary, he walks back through the front door of the building, climbs the stairs and walks back into the apartment to find the window is now open, the furniture in his living room had been disturbed and his wife has had her head removed with a sharp knife which is now laying on the floor. Having no witnesses and the husband in such cases generally being the prime suspect, we would expect the husband to be doomed to life in prison. This fear may be compounded by the fact that there are no fingerprints other than his and his departed wife’s.
However, when the case gets to court, he finds they have just implemented VR in court proceedings, so jurors may better explore the scene of a crime, before or after the incident, and get a more complete imagining of what had transpired or could not have transpired according to the defendant’s own testimony. In this case perhaps, we might witness with our own eyes details that exonerate the person on trial. Through using VR to stand in the man’s own kitchen and futilely reach for the knife drawer, details like the defendant’s far-less-than-average height become apparent and we learn that he could not have reached the knife drawer in the kitchen in order to extract the weapon. Much later, we learn the true killer was indeed an escaped orangutan that climbed through the window in the manner of The Murders in the Rue Morgue.
Despite the US elections and the string of notable musician deaths, 2016 is still the year of VR and this means going beyond the realms of education, entertainment and edutainment to a new aspect of a key system operating within all functioning nation-states, the criminal justice system. The first way in which VR will be used is illustrated through my silly example above. Juries, which very occasionally visit crime scenes, may go places relevant to the case and get more complete understanding of the environments which are being discussed. Kineticorp is one such company that is hoping to use this technology in criminal and civil cases under the pretense of providing better information through true-to-life, first-person visualization. They have already worked in accurate scene recreations for use in trials, but Virtual Reality will be a further extension of this practice.
This practice also carries some risk as the powerful emotions that come with second hand accounts and photos of violent events will only be multiplied once jury members relive the experience in VR. Likewise, there is a additional avenue of bias in the justice system — as if any more were needed. I could answer these cautionary sentiments, but there is already an interview with Tomas Owens of Kineticorp at the Voices of VR podcast which responds to these questions nicely (or you may comment below if you prefer).
The entrance of VR into the courtroom scene is not merely happening in trial, but also during the schooling of these lawyers-to-be. One of the first law schools to use VR in education is Oklahoma University School of Law. In the linked interview, they explain the main feature of using VR as evidence, witness relocation. The witnesses in these cases may return to the scene where the incident occurred and give more reliable information. Not mentioned in the article is the fact that this is called Context-Dependent Memory, the phenomenon of better recalling information when finding oneself in the same environment in which the memory was acquired (also works underwater). Even if the VR evidence never goes to trial, this is a handy tool for lawyers to use in order to build their case.
So, you’ve been warned that VR is now invading your court room. In the meantime, they should make a court simulator game. Owlchemy, get on it!
