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We explore the intersection of high-profile legal cases and social media with renowned psychiatrist and author Doug Bremner. In this episode, we’ll be discussing the impact of social media on public perception, the challenges of maintaining due process in the digital age, and the complex dynamics at play in cases like Amanda Knox’s and Kyle Rittenhouse’s. Join us for a fascinating discussion as we delve into the intricacies of these high-profile cases and the role that social media plays in shaping public opinion. Hear firsthand from Doug Bremner as he shares his insights and expertise on the topic of justice in the age of judgment. Don’t miss out on this insightful conversation that sheds light on the influence of social media in legal proceedings and the battle for due process in today’s digital world.

Doug Bremner is a psychiatrist.

He discusses the book, Justice in the Age of Judgment: From Amanda Knox to Kyle Rittenhouse and the Battle for Due Process in the Digital Age.

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Transcript

Kevin Pho: Hi, and welcome to the show. Subscribe at KevinMD.com/podcast, and get CME for this episode by clicking on the CME link in the show notes. Today we welcome Doug Bremner. He’s a psychiatrist, and he’s the co-author of the book “Justice in the Age of Judgment: From Amanda Knox to Kyle Rittenhouse and the Battle for Due Process in the Digital Age.” Doug, welcome to the show.

Doug Bremner: Thanks, Kevin, it’s great to be here.

Kevin Pho: So we’re going to talk about your book a little bit. First off, just briefly share your story and journey.

Doug Bremner: Well, I’m a psychiatrist, nuclear medicine physician, and a professor of psychiatry and radiology at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. And I’m also a writer. I’ve written several books over the years, started out with “Before You Take That Pill: Why the Drug Industry May Be Bad for Your Health.”

And more recently I’ve worked with my sister, who’s a lawyer. She was a lawyer representing Amanda Knox, who, people may remember, was unjustly convicted of murder and put in jail in Perugia, Italy. She’s also represented a number of other high-profile clients, including Susan Cox Powell, who, if you remember, was the woman whose husband said that they went hiking in the middle of the night with her two toddlers, and she disappeared. And she represented the family of Susan Cox Powell. Chuck Cox was her father, and recently had a over 100 million dollar verdict against the state of Washington, which was upheld on appeal, related to the fact that the two toddlers were under the state of Washington’s protective care when they visited her former husband, who killed them and then himself and set the house on fire. So that was another fairly high-profile case.

So I was writing in the field of post-traumatic stress disorder and doing research in PTSD, and part of that was doing research on memory and the effects of stress on memory. And I became interested in the Knox case, started writing about it. My wife is Italian, so I started writing some posts in Italian, and was looking at it from some of the medical angles, including in terms of the neurobiology of memory and stress, and how that relates to why someone would give a false confession as she did. And then I also looked at some other medical things in terms of stomach contents and how you can link that to the time of death, and how that really punched holes in some of the Perugia prosecutor’s case against her.

And that led to this book, which originally was about Amanda Knox. She was working on it with the help of someone else, and I kind of came in to help with the writing, and then we expanded it to a number of different things, including everything from O.J. Simpson to the West Memphis Three and the Duke lacrosse case, and some of the common themes, which included prosecutor misconduct on the one hand, and how people make instant judgments about things and it’s very difficult to change someone’s mind after they’ve made up their mind about something, which is confirmation bias, and some of the psychological processes that come into these high-profile media cases, and then how social media affects not only high-profile crime cases but just how it affects society in general.

Kevin Pho: All right, so the book that you co-wrote with your sister is “Justice in the Age of Judgment: From Amanda Knox to Kyle Rittenhouse and the Battle for Due Process in the Digital Age.” Now, through your lens as a psychiatrist, specifically with the Amanda Knox case, tell us some of the key takeaways that you want to convey.

Doug Bremner: A key takeaway from the Knox case, which also applies to the West Memphis Three, and some of your listeners are familiar with that case, it’s very similar, was that about 25 percent of murder convictions that are overturned on appeal based on genetics have found that a false confession played a crucial role in that.

And people say, well, why would you confess to a murder you didn’t commit? Let’s just take the case of Amanda Knox. She was someone who was questioned by police in a language, Italian, that she didn’t understand very well. She didn’t have access to an attorney. She had this interpreter who was telling her to just remember and get this over with. And then she was given these hypothetical examples of, well, what if you were in the room with the murder victim, what would she have said, what would have happened? And then they interrogated her for eight hours, and hitting her on the head and yelling at her to remember. So they got this thing that she signed, and then she immediately retracted it, but then they just kept it as evidence.

So that’s a good example of what happens. With the West Memphis Three, the same thing happened, where someone confesses something they didn’t do because they were tired and they’ve been in the police station for 10 hours and they just wanted the interrogation to stop, and then they immediately retracted, but then they hold on to this coerced confession. And it’s really, really tragic.

And the other part of that is that stress can affect how you perceive things in memory, and people can get confused. There was a case that went to the international war crimes tribunal in The Hague, where there’s a patchy remembrance of an event that occurred in Bosnia, it was a war crime. And one of the things that we wrote a paper about is that stress can make memory patchy, and memory is not infallible and it’s not as consistent as we might think, and the research backs that up as well.

Kevin Pho: So tell us, in the Knox case, after she gave that coerced confession under a tremendous amount of stress, you mentioned she didn’t have immediate access to an attorney, now tell us that intersection between things like the media and social media just blowing things up to an even worse degree.

Doug Bremner: Well, there’s a couple of points here, Kevin. One is what we call confirmation bias, where people will see something in the media, they’ll make an immediate determination in their mind that someone’s guilty or not guilty, or this thing happened or that thing happened, and then from there on people have a difficulty in changing their mind. So they’ll look for things that reinforce what they’ve already judged, or their own opinion. So they’ll be selective reading of information that supports their view and ignoring things that don’t support their view.

And that’s what happened in the Knox case, is that these tabloid newspapers splashed pictures of this what looked like a bathroom coated in blood, but in fact it was actually luminol, which is the chemical that’s used to detect very small amounts of blood. And they put that on the front page of these English tabloids, and so people immediately decided that she was guilty. I mean, I thought that she was guilty, and then trying to convince me that she was not, it was a long process.

And there’s research that shows that you can do experiments where you make someone look like they’re losing at cards, when in fact there’s kind of a conspiracy to make it look like they’re losing when they’re in fact doing well. And people, once they see someone losing at cards, they decide that that’s a bad card player. And even if you go back and say, hey, this is just a hoax that we did to make you think that they’re bad at cards, they still cling to that viewpoint.

The other thing is that the media tends to publish things that are aimed at getting headlines, and people disseminate that information on Facebook and on Twitter and social media, and that leads to these snap conclusions that are very difficult to overturn in the long run.

So the Amanda Knox case was really the beginning of what I would call our modern age of social media and the polarization in politics. And you can see that in that there were different camps. There was like people writing on forums that were pro guilt, pro innocence, and it was sort of like two competing camps. And you sort of see that now with the Republicans and Democrats, and they’re not really communicating with one another and keeping an open mind, they’re just sort of in these echo chambers that are resonating their own viewpoints and sharing information that reinforces their confirmation bias.

Kevin Pho: Now, when you say that it’s very difficult to change an opinion once it’s already formed, and then they start looking for evidence that already confirms their preconceived opinions and bias, so are you saying that there’s no hope? How difficult is it to change someone’s mind once it’s already made up?

Doug Bremner: Well, it is very difficult. And if you look at the legal arena, some people say that 80 percent of jurors have made up their mind after the opening statement, and that’s why an attorney such as my sister, they spend days and days preparing their opening statement.

I think the best thing we can do is just to kind of inform people about this process, and inform people that there’s an actual research literature that supports this, and that they should realize that we all have the capacity for this sort of confirmation bias and for making snap decisions, and that we need to really counsel ourselves to wait.

If you look at the case of the murders in Idaho, the students that were murdered by the person there, once they had arrested that individual it’s like he’d already been tried and found guilty before he had a chance to have his day in the court of law. And I think he probably was guilty, but many of us who have been thinking about the effect of social media on high-profile criminal cases, it’s not just myself, my sister, but other people that are kind of more in the Court TV space, saw immediately that this is a rush to judgment that occurred before the person had a chance, for the facts to be known and to be presented in a clear-minded and even-handed way in the court of law.

Kevin Pho: So is the responsibility purely on the individuals to take a pause and assess this information objectively, or is there a responsibility on the part of the media and social media platforms to not pile on to a rush of judgment?

Doug Bremner: Well, so we have two things, the print media, and then social media, and then the forces behind social media like Meta, which is the owner of Instagram and Facebook.

The print media, if we use the Knox case as an example, which is just one example of many, they need to take responsibility for their presentation of the news. There’s a journalist from England who was interviewed in one of these documentaries, and he said, writing these headlines, it was like having sex, was his quote. It was immediate gratification to see your byline and your story printed on the front page of the paper. But that same journalist had written a headline that said Amanda Knox found guilty, that they released 10 minutes before the verdict came out in one of her four trials, where the verdict was actually innocent. So that is an abnegation of his responsibility as a journalist.

Then if you look at Facebook, we’re learning that Facebook and Instagram are using algorithms to drive content, so they’re actually reinforcing confirmation bias. Because if you’re inclined to have a certain viewpoint of a particular story, they’re sending you stories that reinforce your opinion and not things that may have the contrary opinion.

So we all thought that Facebook and social media would be a force of good to help people connect with one another, and that’s what we all thought in the beginning of the Knox case. This is an interesting thing, we can go online on these forums and share information and our opinions and do our online research. But in retrospect, that has a very negative side as well. People tend to be, can be very rude, and also there’s this tendency to be in these echo chambers where you’re being fed information that feeds your confirmation bias.

So there’s the dark side of social media, and I see that’s happening now with these algorithms that are feeding stories to people that some of it not true, some of it fake news, and then even now with artificial intelligence, maybe things that are manufactured that are completely bogus, such as images of the pope or Joe Biden or whatever doing things that never really occurred.

So I think that it is happening, that these executives of these companies are being called to the carpet. And in my field of psychiatry, we see that increase in anxiety and depression being linked to time spent on screens in adolescents.

Kevin Pho: So what are some of the proposed paths forward? Because I think that social media genie of course is out of the box, and everything that you said is true, is that social media will serve information that already confirms what you already believe, and is unlikely to present information that’s contrary to preconceived notions. So what are some potential solutions to this, because I don’t see this getting any better anytime soon.

Doug Bremner: I think that these companies behind social media need to take some responsibility for the consequences of the social media that they present. There needs to be a little bit more of looking under the hood of the algorithms that go into how information is presented to people, and some accountability for the effects that those algorithms can have, and especially in adolescents who are more vulnerable.

Maybe us as the medical community need to think about developing guidelines, just like we develop guidelines for how people should deal with high cholesterol levels, what we recommend in terms of treatment and prevention of disease. Maybe we need guidelines in terms of prevention of mental health outcomes related to social media, and what we recommend. I don’t know what those guidelines would be, but I mean, maybe there should be some discussion about how we should be talking with parents in terms of regulating what their adolescent children are doing, or advice about how old does a kid need to be before they have their own cell phone, what do we do about kids bringing cell phones into class, et cetera, et cetera. It’s kind of a limitless number of things that can be addressed.

And then my own role would be to sort of make people aware of the research and my body of knowledge based on what we know about memory as it relates to false confessions, and about the effects of some of these psychological phenomenon like confirmation bias, et cetera, to make people more aware of how they can individually be kind of affected or influenced, and try and get some more self-awareness and knowledge that will help prevent some of these phenomenon from occurring.

Kevin Pho: We’re talking to Doug Bremner. He’s a psychiatrist, and we’re talking about his book, co-wrote with his sister Anne Bremner. It’s titled “Justice in the Age of Judgment: From Amanda Knox to Kyle Rittenhouse and the Battle for Due Process in the Digital Age.” So Doug, after writing this book with your sister, what are some of the top things that you yourself learned through your lens as a psychiatrist?

Doug Bremner: Well, I mean, I wasn’t aware of some of this literature that would be related to the confirmation bias and how strong it is, and how even after you’ve informed people that we’re basically doing an experiment to prove confirmation bias, that those conclusions are very difficult to overcome. And it occurs in intelligent people as well.

I also, going back to the beginning of the journey, I remember I was having brunch at my parents’ house in Olympia, Washington, with my sister and with her fiance at the time, John Henry Browne, who is a Seattle attorney famous for representing Ted Bundy, and wrote a book called “Counsel for the Devil,” I think it was called. But anyway, so she was talking about the Knox case at that time, and I had heard her on KIRO radio in Seattle debating someone who had written a sort of a pro guilt book.

And I remember thinking at the time, well, the police think that she’s guilty, why would they accuse someone that’s not guilty? That’s their job, right? Isn’t it their job to collect the evidence and to come to a conclusion and to prosecute people for their crimes?

And when I got into more of the details of it, I was sort of blown away by how egregious errors occurred in that case, and then how many egregious errors occurred in the West Memphis Three, which I did more research on back at the time and then for the book, and then in the Duke lacrosse case. The Duke lacrosse case, Mike Nifong, the prosecutor, gave like 17 press conferences before he even talked to the victim.

And so there are these cases where I was amazed at how far off the rails the justice system can go. And in the Mike Nifong case, he was running for reelection as the Durham County prosecutor. In the case of the West Memphis Three, there were these police that were just trying to close this case, this high-profile case where these three boys were killed. And in the case of Amanda Knox, this is just a prosecutor that had these conspiracy theories about satanic cults, who had already screwed up this other case called the Monster of Florence, and who just was, in my mind, incompetent. But why these people are in these positions is beyond me.

But I guess it just comes down to, you have to take a look at things for yourself, and you can’t always just count on the process coming up with justice.

But that said, the other thing I learned is that our American justice system, so I compared the Italian system, the American system, and thought a lot about these things, our justice system is pretty good. The juries in general do a pretty good job. Yes, there are instances where the media can be influenced. The O.J. Simpson trial is an example where his lawyers, the dream team, they got something written in New York Magazine, I think it was, about sort of outlaying their theory of, this is a racially motivated prosecution, and I think that they were able to sway the jury on that one. But nevertheless, if you look at the O.J. Simpson trial in detail, as I did, in the end the jury did a good job, and presented with the evidence that they had, decided that there was a reasonable doubt. And there were maybe some mistakes on the side of the prosecution, and some fancy footwork for the defense. But overall I think that our juries do a pretty good job.

Kevin Pho: And my final question, Doug. Tell us some of your take-home messages that you want to leave with the KevinMD audience.

Doug Bremner: The take-home message would be, do your own research, try not to be affected by confirmation bias, deal with skepticism about things you see in the social media, especially now in this age of artificial intelligence, and try not to make snap judgments, and keep an open mind, and let the evidence and the facts come in in due time, and let’s give a chance for justice to take its course.

Kevin Pho: Doug, thank you so much for sharing your perspective and insight, and thanks for coming on the show.

Doug Bremner: Thanks, Kevin.