“ ‘Forgive me for asking, but if they are a nuisance, why don’t you call the municipal police, or the carabinieri?’
“ ‘Why don’t I call them? I call them all right, but d’you think they come?’
“In short, Signor Renna – he tells us so himself – does not like the presence of the non-European citizens at Capitolo and in the vicinity of his bar. He would like the strong arm of the law to intervene and move them on, but this doesn’t happen. He is somewhat incensed.
“All this, be it clear, does not mean that he has deliberately told us untruths about Signor Abdou Thiam.
“But setting aside his liking for – or dislike of – ‘niggers’, and his unsatisfied demand for the strong arm of the law to act in some way against these ‘niggers’, has Signor Renna told us the objective truth? Can we affirm beyond any reasonable doubt that the version provided by this witness corresponds to the truth of the actual facts with which we are concerned?
“One element of doubt may be inferred from the little experiment with the photographs, which you will remember. Renna failed to recognize the defendant in a photograph, in fact in two photographs, which you have in the records and can verify for yourselves as to their likeness to the defendant. The very man who is here in court and, above all, the person whom the witness declares he knows well and whom he saw pass his bar that August afternoon.
“Does this mean that Renna invented the lot, that he is telling lies? Certainly not. The fact that he doesn’t like ‘niggers’ and that he sensationally failed the photographic test does not mean that he knowingly lied.
“When he says he remembers that that afternoon Abdou Thiam passed his bar, without his usual bag, walking quickly in a southerly direction, the witness Renna is telling the truth.
“In the sense that he does in fact remember this sequence of events and fixes it on that afternoon. To be more precise, he tells us what he believes to be the truth. The really interesting thing – and this introduces us to the fascinating subject of how the memory functions – is that Renna believes that that is the truth, because he remembers those events, even if they never happened. Not in the terms of his account.”
Pause. I needed these notions to settle in the minds of the court, and especially of the jury. I made a pretence of rummaging in my notes until about ten seconds had passed. Just time for them to wonder what was coming next.
“Now I want to tell you about a scientific experiment into the functioning of the memory and the mechanism by which memories are produced. A team of American psychologists, at Harvard University I believe, set out to test the reliability of childhood memories. A number of children of nine or ten years old were told a story by their elder brothers or sisters, who were instructed in what to say. The story was that at the age of four or five they had escaped an attempted kidnapping. They were told that they had been in a supermarket with their mother, and at a moment when her attention was distracted a stranger had seized them by the hand and made for the exit. Their mother had realized what was happening, had started shouting and had put the would-be kidnapper to flight.
“The episode had never in fact occurred, but a few months after being told the story the children not only thought they remembered it – and really in a certain sense they did remember it – but in telling the story they even added details that were not there in the original version.
“Were these children lying? That is, were they saying untrue things in the awareness of doing so? Certainly not.
“Did these children give an account of things that had really happened? Certainly not.
“It is an acknowledged fact – and one of the most important objects of study in modern forensic psychology – that both children and adults make mistakes about the source of their memories and are convinced that they remember contexts, facts and details which have in fact been suggested by others. Deliberately, as in the case of the experiment I have recounted to you. Or involuntarily, as in many situations in everyday life and also, at times, during criminal investigations.
“On the basis of these considerations we can give an answer to the question put by the public prosecutor in the course of his speech, regarding the reliability of the witness Renna. The public prosecutor asked himself, and above all he asked you: what reason did Renna have for lying and therefore falsely accusing Abdou Thiam?
“We can answer that question with perfect confidence: no reason at all. And in fact Renna did not lie. Between lying – that is, knowingly uttering falsehoods – and telling the truth – which is giving an account of the facts as they really and truly happened – there exists a third possibility. A possibility which the public prosecutor did not take into consideration, but which you must take into very close consideration. That of a witness who gives a certain version of the facts in the erroneous conviction that it is true.
“We are here concerned with what might be defined as involuntary false witness.”
They seemed interested. Even the judge and the military-looking juryman. The pair who – I was convinced of it – had already decided to find Abdou guilty.
“There are many ways of building up involuntary false witness. Some are deliberate, as in the case of the experiment with children that I told you about. Others are themselves involuntary and often prompted by the best intentions. As in this case.
“Let us together try to reconstruct what happened in the inquiry which led to the indictment of Abdou Thiam, and therefore to this trial. A little boy disappears and two days later his dead body is found. It is a deeply disturbing event, and those whose task it is to put the investigations in hand – the carabinieri, the public prosecutor – feel it is their urgent, their pressing duty to discover the culprits. There is justifiable eagerness to satisfy to the demand for justice provoked by such a horrible crime. By questioning the child’s relatives, and other persons who knew him well, the carabinieri discover this apparent friendship existing between the boy and this African pedlar. It is something strange, unusual, that arouses suspicions. And also the feeling that perhaps they are on the right track. Perhaps it is possible to satisfy that demand for justice and to placate that anguish. The investigation is no longer groping in the dark; it now has a possible suspect and a theoretical solution. This redoubles the efforts made to find confirmation for this theoretical solution. This is how things stand when the witness Renna is heard for the first time, by the carabinieri. The investigators are understandably excited by the possibility of solving the case, and they realize that the statements of this witness could well constitute a decisive step. It is at this stage that we see the construction of the involuntary false witness.
“Attention please, I beg of you. I am very far from saying that there was any deliberate manipulation of the inquiries. And even less am I speaking of the grotesque hypothesis of plots on the part of the investigators to the detriment of the defendant. The question is, at one and the same time, both simpler and more complex, and to explain what I wish to say I will borrow a famous phrase of Albert Einstein’s. The phrase, if I remember rightly, goes more or less like this: ‘It is the theory that determines what we observe.’
“What does this mean? It means that if we have a theory – a theory we like, that we are satisfied with, that seems to us good – we tend to examine the facts in the light of that theory. Rather than objectively observing all the available data, we look only for confirmations of that theory. Our very perception is strongly influenced, is indeed determined, by the theory we have settled on. As Einstein said in speaking of science, it is indeed the theory that determines what we succeed in observing. In other words, we see, we hear, we perceive what conforms to our theory and simply pass over all the rest. There is a Chinese saying that expresses the same concept in a different way. The Chinese say: ‘Two-thirds of what we see is behind our eyes.’