Rosenhan revisited, again

This news story shows how quickly the police at Virginia Tech shifted gears. Before the second shooting incidenct, they thought they were making progress with their first suspect:

Hilscher's roommate pointed them to the dead student's boyfriend, who had been firing guns at a shooting range recently.

When police caught up with him off campus, he fueled their suspicion by making inconsistent statements about the whereabouts of his guns.

A perfect illustration of this problem:

According to Samuel Gross, a professor of criminal procedure at Michigan Law School, "there's a point at which an open investigation of who committed a crime becomes instead the prosecution of suspect X. If that happens early on in the case, the chances of making a mistake are very great." In the Atlanta bombing, the shift from an open investigation to the prosecution of a particular suspect does seem to have taken place very early, and the result was certainly a mistake.

See also:

Criminal justice and the Rosenhan Experiment