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From cell phones to police body cameras, today's courts increasingly use video as evidence. A common assumption is that video can help people bear witness to an event as if they themselves were transported to the complicated scène of its unfolding. Rather than the secondhand testimony provided by eyewitnesses, video is assumed to provide an unmediated and firsthand account directly to the deci-sion-maker. Video has thus been praised as a seemingly objective tooi for justice and accountability At the same time, video, just like eyewitness testimony, can be subject to a host of biases of which people are largely unaware.
Despite the potential for bias, U.S. courts, at all levels, lack clear guidelines on how video can be used and presented as evidence. As a result, courts can interpret video evidence dif-ferently, even within the lifespan of the same case. Scott v. Harris is a renowned U.S. Suprème Court case from 2007 that provided an early cautionary tale about the challenges of video evidence.1 In this oft-cited case, the court had to decide whether a police car chase, which left a driver paralyzed, violated the constitu-tional protection against unreasonable seizure. The car chase was recorded on two dashboard cameras. Lower courts ruled that reasonable jurors could dif-fer as to whether the police had used unreasonable force to end the chase, requiring a jury trial. The Suprème Court, though, ruled 8-1 in favor of the officer, explaining that the case was "clear from the videotape" and that no reasonable juror could agree with the plaintiff's account that the police had used excessive force to stop the vehicle. In an unprecedented move, the Court uploaded the video to its website, inviting the public to confirm that the video "speak[s] for itself."2 Social scientists accepted the challenge and conducted an experimental study showing that people indeed had different interpretations about the reasonableness of the officer's behavior depicted in the video. In fact, peoples perceptions differed depending on their cultural and ideological backgrounds, such as racial identity, education, income level, and political affiliation. The scientists who conducted the study thus stated that what a video says "depends on to whom it is speaking."3 In other words, seeing is not only about what the eyes physi-cally see but the experiences...