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Keisha E. McKenzie | communication | systems | social good

accountability

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Being right and doing wrong

Davontae Sanford gets to go home now.

After nine years trapped in the Michigan prison system after a false conviction, the 23-year-old gets to go home now.

‘It’s about time. It’s too bad nobody listened years ago… so this kid wouldn’t have to spend so much time in prison for a crime he didn’t do.’

“Until Tuesday, prosecutors had steadfastly insisted they’d convicted the right person for the killings on Runyon on Detroit’s east side, and they rejected any notion Sanford was innocent.”

The Detroit Free News has the full story.

Sometimes the distance between being right and doing right costs people years of their lives. State prosecutors were intent on building their case from implication through coerced confession to conviction. They were invested in “being right,” or more precisely, being seen to be right. They didn’t welcome evidence contrary to their case, even when that evidence was emphatic and their own evidence was thin.

Had the state been less invested in being right and more invested in doing right, Sanford could have spent his 15th year at home.

There’s a psychological bias that David McRaney of the You’re Not So Smart blog calls the Sunk Cost Fallacy. The idea: “Your decisions are tainted by the emotional investments you accumulate, and the more you invest in something the harder it becomes to abandon it.”

We’re all prone to this bias. It’s one of the reasons I’m still a Seventh-day Adventist and why it took me three moves and over 15 years to transfer my congregational membership out of my childhood church. Sunk costs were among the things that helped me to stay in my grad program during a particularly difficult period. This is a bias that motivates us to hang in there, and when what we’re hanging on to is worth something—perhaps an education, perhaps a marriage, perhaps a career path—that’s wonderful.

But what about when we’re wrong? We don’t like being wrong, and hanging in there is a fantastic way to avoid feeling like we’re wrong.

Yet not liking how it feels to be wrong doesn’t stop us from being wrong. Resistance to correction doesn’t guarantee accuracy.

And sometimes, the stakes are greater than our egos or resolved case ratios. Sometimes the stakes are a life, and there’s no real way to compensate Davontae Sanford for all he’s lost because people with power bet his last decade against their fear of being wrong.

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A Writing November

Cartoon of open newspaper with "Correction" advertisement: "The Downing St memo seems to be at odds with pretty much anything you remember seeing and hearing in the media in the runup to the Iraq war. Your memory is in error. We regret your mistake."
(c) Tom Toles (2005) | “The First Draft of the Rewrite of History”

I’ve decided to participate in this year’s National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo 2013), and will be using the 50,000 word-challenge to reboot my research on the British executive branch’s structure, values, personnel, and communications during the 18 months before the UK- and US invaded Iraq.*

This year marked the 10th anniversary of the March 2003 invasion and the 8th year since I began to study how the Blair administration rendered Saddam Hussein’s Iraq “non-compliant” with international protocols on weapons of mass destruction and an “imminent” threat to the UK national interest.

I’ve already written and presented about this case for other communication academics (Popular Culture Association, 2008; Journal of Technical Writing and Communication, 2009), and I’ve also written a 150-page doctoral study about it with a bibliography nearly 25 pages long. I may write for these readers again in the future, but not next month.

November is about writing about the British executive branch, weapons of mass destruction, secrecy, freedom of information, and civil servants, not for other academics and not as part of a degree program, but for members of the public: people like you who are savvy and curious, who don’t necessarily know a lot about the details of this case, and who care about good governance and want to read high-quality, engaging content about it.

I’m not going to write and revise next  month, though; I’m just going to write. By the end of the month, I’ll know whether I have it in me to turn this year-old baby into a book in 2014.

My goals for November are simple enough, and I’m declaring them here to increase the risk:

  1. Write ~2,000 words six days each week for 30 days, or a minimum of 1,670 words daily.
  2. Focus on generating these 50,000-50,100 words, rather than fretting about whether they are good words.
  3. Remember how much I love this project and wonder why it’s taken me so long post-graduation to return to it.

If you’d like to track my progress through November, there’ll be a word count widget in the right column of my homepage. And if you have a fiction or non-fiction book in you too, then you still have a day to sign up! As of tonight, nearly 190,000 other writers are waiting for you.

Expect an update on this from me in a few weeks.

* This intention marks me as a NaNo Rebel. Good luck to all the novelists too!