A news item caught my attention some time ago which included facial photographs of two escaped prisoners. This following URL dates from April 2012. Although it was still active as of April 2014, it now seems to have been taken down. In any case, this was it:
http://usnews.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2012/04/18/11269929-inmates-including-murderer-at-large-after-kansas-prison-break?lite
Please now study the following pictures excerpted from that news item:
Since these pictures were taken under the same lighting conditions and offer the same viewing directions, they offer an opportunity to make an observation about human facial anatomy.
In these images, identically colored arrows are of the same length. That means red equals red, green equals green and so forth.
If you compare the sizes of the blue arrows versus the red arrows which show pupil-to-pupil spacing of the eyes of the two subjects and compare the green arrows versus the violet arrows which show head widths of the two subjects, they are only slightly different from each other. At first glance, I had expected to measure far more radical differences.
Although I would have initially thought that the two faces were very different, the fact is that the dimensions of the two faces are only slightly different from each other. The eye spacing of the face on the right is slightly less than for the face on the left, but the difference is not extreme. That observation raises two points.
The first point is that some art students, many of whom my wife has taught, are sometimes reluctant to accept the fact that most human faces have the same dimensional ratios of facial features. For example, the width of the human mouth from corner to corner is typically the same as the width of the pupil-to-pupil spacing between the eyes. Breaking some students' preconceptions about things like that can be a real struggle.
The second point, and the more important point I would say, is that witness testimony in which a description of a subject is involved can be compromised for the very reason that these two faces above seemed, at least to me, to look so different. It is a perception issue I am not competent to explain, but which I do submit seems to exist.
We are looking here at just one potential contributor to improper convictions, erroneous witness testimony. Our judicial process and our powers of observation are anything but perfect.
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