The State Calls the Deceased to the Stand

All right, so why is this funny?

OK, it's funny for lots of reasons, most of them absurd.  But the most absurd bit involves a barrister seeking testimony from a dead man.  You just don't do such things.

Or do you?

A NPR story from last week tells of a crime in Brazil in which the victim came back from the grave to testify.  It involved a love triangle - two guys, one girl - that turned violent, leaving one of the male suitors, Rosa, dead.  So far, so straightforward and downright cliched.  And then:

Lenira is riven with guilt — she still loved Rosa — and so she goes to see a medium, a very famous one. She receives a letter from Rosa from the beyond.

'In the letter, channeled by this medium, the deceased confesses,' de Lima explains. 'He says his jealousy was the reason for his death. The letter includes details that only people close to him could have known.'

Nice injection of woo into the story, but here's where it gets really strange.  The letter was actually introduced in court on behalf of the shooter.  He was acquitted.

Turns out, this is not such an unusual occurrence in Brazil, particularly in the region where these events took place:

Judge Hertha Helena Rollemberg Padilha de Oliveira (no relation to Lenira) says there are many cases involving spirits in Brazil.

'If the proof is not illegal, it is lawful — you have to accept it in the process,' she says.
So when individuals present letters from the dead, written by a medium, de Oliveira says the judge has to accept it. 'He has to accept the proof in the process,' she says. 'He can't say, 'Take the letter away from the process.'

'[Brazil] is a very spiritual society,' the judge explains. 'Ninely percent of people probably will believe in some kind of spiritual influence. Most of the people believe in life after death.'

It's hard to argue with the defense attorney for introducing the letter - it worked, after all (let's hear it for zealous representation!).  It's harder to accept a court of law treating it as anything other than the trumped up sham it is.  Putting to one side that mediums are bunk (or giant douches), how on earth is the letter admissible as evidence?

In an American court, I think you'd have a serious problem getting around a hearsay objection.  True, there is an exception to the hearsay rule for statements made by a person against his own interest, but the justification for that is firmly rooted in the here and now.  The theory goes that no person would say something incriminating about himself if it wasn't true, so such statements are generally trustworthy.*  I'm not sure that justification applies to a statement from beyond the grave - if the declarant's already dead, what's the risk in making an incriminating statement?  Not to mention, those left behind and charged with a crime would have a hell of a motive to fabricate such a thing.

As it happens, according to at least one source, Brazilian law doesn't include a prohibition against hearsay, so that might not be a problem in cases like this one.  And, assuming you believe the woo involved, I suppose it's highly relevant.  It's certainly persuasive, although the two aren't always the same thing.

It's tempting to look at a story like this and dismiss it as something that happens elsewhere.  Indeed, the NPR pieces calls it "a tale of Brazil" that brings to mind the work of Gabriel Garcia-Marquez.  Only the use of spectral evidence is hardly limited to Brazil.

On January 23, 1897, Zona Shue was found dead in her home in Greenbrier County, down along the border with Virginia.  Suspicion almost immediately fell on Zona's husand, Erasmus (or Edward, if you prefer), thanks to his taking care of the body for burial, rather than leaving the task to others in the community.  The doctor who pronounced Zona dead made only a cursory examination.  Nonetheless, Zona was buried, with the cause of death listed first as "everlasting faint," and then simply "childbirth."

Shortly after Zona was buried, her mother Mary Jane reported that her daughter's ghost appeared to her, described what a cruel and otherwise shitty guy Erasmus was, and that he had broken her neck, killing her.  Mary Jane wen to the prosecutor, who had the body exhumed and a proper autopsy (such as those things were in 1897) done.  Sure enough, Zona's neck had been broken.

Erasmus was charged with murder and, at trial, Mary Jane was the main witness for the state.  In a clever bit of trial strategy, the prosecutor stayed away from the ghost stuff, but the defense attorney cross examined her about it anyway, allowing the jury to hear the story in all its glory.  Erasmus was convicted of murder and escaped a lynch mob, only to die in the Moundsville penitentiary a few years later.

Which just goes to show that woo, and its ability to seep into what should be deadly serious matters, knows no boundaries.  And it's pretty funny.

* The rules of evidence aren't necessarily based on modern psychological science or the evidence of fairly routine false confessions.

The Life and Afterlife of a Classic Case Study

Back in the 1990s, when echolyn had briefly (thankfully) broken up, keyboard player Chris Buzby formed a band that made a couple of albums chock full of fusion-tinted complex prog.*  The band was called finneus gauge, which, it became clear, was a transliteration of the name of one of the most famous accidental test cases in neurological history.

Phineas Gage was an explosives guy in antebellum New England.  The tools of his trade were gunpowder and a 3.5 foot steel rod he used to tamp it (and other materials) into a hole in preparation for blasting.  The rod weighed more than 13 pounds and tapered to a point at one end.

He and his crew had been hired to blast some rock in Vermont in 1848 when, on on fall afternoon, this happened:

Gage’s crew members were loading some busted rock onto a cart, and they apparently distracted him. Accounts differ about what happened after Gage turned his head. One says Gage tried to tamp the gunpowder down with his head still turned, and scraped his iron against the side of the hole, creating a spark. Another says Gage’s assistant (perhaps also distracted) failed to pour the sand in, and when Gage turned back, he smashed the rod down hard, thinking he was packing inert material. Regardless, a spark shot out somewhere in the dark cavity, igniting the gunpowder, and the tamping iron rocketed upward.

The iron entered Gage’s head point-first, striking below the left cheekbone. It destroyed an upper molar, passed behind his left eye, and tore into the underbelly of his brain’s left frontal lobe. It then plowed through the top of his skull, exiting near the midline, just behind where his hairline started. After parabola-ing upward—one report claimed it whistled as it flew—the rod landed 25 yards away and stuck upright in the dirt, mumblety-peg-style. Witnesses described it as streaked with red and greasy to the touch, from fatty brain tissue.

What makes Gage's story so compelling is that not only did he survive the injury, he never even lost consciousness.  But, surely, the 13-pound hunk of metal that flew through his skull and brain must have had some impact on him, right?

As this article by Sam Kean at Slate points out, it's not altogether certain.  Over the years, the perception of Gage's life after his initial recovery has changed.  If Paul Simon's right that "every generation throws a hero up the pop charts," then, similarly, every generation interprets Gage for their own purposes.

Part of the problem is that there is precious little information about Gage's life, at least reliable information.  As the piece points out, the first news article about Gage contained an minor error (about the size of the rod), which seems to be a harbinger of things to come.

For instance, there were only two medical reports made about Gage, the second of which was by a doc at Harvard Medical School, but it didn't contain a lot about his actual behavior.  At the time, doctors thought that the part of the brain that got blasted by the rod wasn't all that important:

Frustratingly, Harlow limited his discussion of Gage’s mental status to a few hundred words, but he does make it clear that Gage changed—somehow. Although resolute before the accident, Harlow says Gage was now capricious, and no sooner made a plan than dropped it for another scheme. Although deferential to people’s wishes before, Gage now chafed at any restraint on his desires. Although a 'smart, shrewd businessman' before, Gage now lacked money sense. And although courteous and reverent before, Gage was now 'fitful [and] irreverent, indulging at times in the grossest profanity.' Harlow summed up Gage’s personality changes by saying, 'the equilibrium ... between his intellectual faculties and his animal propensities seems to have been destroyed.' More pithily, friends said that Gage 'was no longer Gage.'

Gage lost his job and wound up as a travelling curiosity.  Until, it seems, he went to Chile, found work as a coach driver, and generally lived an ordinary life.  It's unclear from the record whether he underwent a sudden shift brought about by the accident or if he, perhaps slowly, returned to normal.  Part of the problem is trying to make too much out of a sparse factual record:

People butcher history all the time, of course, for various reasons. But something distinct seems to have happened with Gage. Macmillan calls it 'scientific license.' 'When you look at the stories told about Phineas,' he says, 'you get the impression that [scientists] are indulging in something like poetic license—to make the story more vivid, to make it fit in with their preconceptions.' Science historian Douglas Allchin has noted the power of preconceptions as well: 'While the stories [in science] are all about history—events that happened,' Allchin writes, 'they sometimes drift into stories of what ‘should’ have happened.'

With Gage, what scientists think 'should' have happened is colored by their knowledge of modern patients. Prefrontal lobe damage is associated with a subsequent slightly higher rate of criminal and antisocial behavior. Even if people don’t sink that low, many do change in unnerving ways: They urinate in public now, blow stop signs, mock people’s deformities to their faces, or abandon a baby to watch television. It’s probably inevitable, Macmillan says, that such powerful anecdotes influence how scientists view Gage in retrospect: 'They do see a patient and say, 'Ah, he’s like what Phineas Gage was supposed to be like.' ' To be clear, Harlow never reports anything criminal or blatantly unhinged about Gage’s conduct. But if you’re an expert on brain damage, scientific license might tempt you to read between the lines and extrapolate from 'gross profanity' and 'animal passions' to seedier behavior.

If repeated often enough, such stories acquire an air of truthiness.

The whole article is fascinating.  Kean even traces the history of the rod itself, which now resides in a display case along with Gage's skull!  Go check it out.

* Seriously, they're worth tracking down, particularly the debut, more once more.  And I don't just say that because the band used a blurb from my review in its advertising.

How to Pull a Town Out of Thin Air

One of the cool things about writing fiction is you get to make up stuff as you go along (it's sort of the nature of the game).  Not just characters and what they do but, often just as important, where they do it.  You can build entire worlds and nations in your mind, not to mention cities.  I've even made some maps (crude, but effective - I'm not a cartographer, after all) of the world in which my Water Road books are set, as well as another world I've yet to write in.  It's all quite fun.

But imagine that you could create a town out of thin air, as a fiction, only for it to pop up in real life?  Now that's really cool!

Consider the strange case of Algoe, New York (not to be confused with the planet Algon, where an ordinary cup of drinking chocolate costs 4 million pounds).

Back in the 1930s, it wasn't unusual for mapmakers to steal each other's work.  After all, if a map reflects realty and someone copies the map, don't they have a defense to plagiarism by arguing that both the original map and the alleged copy accurately reflect realty?  How can that lose?

Turns out, map makers got savvy and began including some fictional places to trap would be copyists:

That's what Otto G. Lindberg, director of the General Drafting Co., and his assistant, Ernest Alpers, did in the 1930s. They were making a road map of New York state, and on that out-of-the-way dirt road, they created a totally fictitious place called 'Agloe.' The name was a mix of the first letters in their names, Otto G. Lindberg's (OGL) and Ernest Alpers' (EA).

The trap set, it appeared to work, when the town of Algoe appeared on a map made by none other than Rand McNally a few years later.  Case closed, right?  Big check from Rand McNally to Lindberg and Alpers.  Not so fast - Rand McNally offered a defense: there really was a town called Algoe.  In fact, the official county map showed an Algoe General Store in that location.  Checkmate, cartographic honey pot.

But how'd that happen?

Good question. Here's the ironic answer. The owners had seen Agloe on a map distributed by Esso, which owned scores of gas stations. Esso had bought that map from Lindberg and Alpers. If Esso says this place is called Agloe, the store folks figured, well, that's what we'll call ourselves. So, a made-up name for a made-up place inadvertently created a real place that, for a time, really existed. Rand McNally, one presumes, was found not guilty.

Then the store closed. It isn't there anymore.

Having said that, according to the NPR story, Algoe held on for years on Google Maps until it, again, vanished into thin air recently.

So, want to have an impact on the world?  Make a map and give it a fictional town.  It might come to life without you even knowing about it!