Judge Wears VR Headset To View Defendant’s Account Of Events And What Fresh Hell Is This?

Courtroom technology: all about coulda, not shoulda.
The post Judge Wears VR Headset To View Defendant’s Account Of Events And What Fresh Hell Is This? appeared first on Above the Law.

In a new dystopian hell unleashed upon the country from — *checks notes unnecessarily* — Florida, a judge has allowed lawyers to use a virtual reality presentation to show an immersive representation of the defendant’s perspective in a — *checks notes unnecessarily again* — Stand Your Ground case.

It’s like a VR mod for Grand Theft Auto but real!

Defendant owns an event venue and claims that violence broke out at a wedding and when he tried to break it up, a crowd of revelers cornered him to yell at him and he decided to pull a gun on them. Making this less a First-Person Shooter (FPS) than a First-Person Threatening Shooter (FPTS). Which might sound like aggravated assault with a deadly weapon trial and an affirmative defense of acting in self-defense, but Florida short-circuits that process with a Stand Your Ground law that allows the judge to make a preemptive determination that if the defendant “reasonably believes that using or threatening to use such force is necessary to prevent imminent death or great bodily harm,” the charge can get tossed without a trial.

During the testimony of the defense expert… wait, hold on. What kind of “expert” is there for “this is an acceptable time to wave a gun at people” testimony? Do you need to do post baccalaureate work for that gig? Not knocking expert testimony generally, but usually it’s focused on complex questions of science or methodology and not “in my professional opinion as an employee of the defense, I believe the defendant was justified in doing the exact thing he’s charged with doing.”

Anyway, the defense expert testified about the defendant’s account of events and had a visual aide to go with it.

“I want my MTV” he’s presumably yelling.

This is goofy and dumb, seeing as it adds nothing probative to a standard testimonial account. It’s still the defendant’s account of events just rendered like it’s The Sims 4 Florida Man Expansion Pack.

Seriously, someone please take these video clips and superimpose the original Sims sounds on them.

But while the third-person perspective is unnecessary, it’s the first-person account that introduces an overwhelming prejudicial effect by placing the viewer — in this case the judge and in a future nightmare scenario a jury — in the place of the defendant living out the events from sole perspective of the defendant.

There is, the defense hopes, a closing of psychological distance and a sharp uptick in empathy if the fact-finder is placed behind the defendant’s eyes and can really see 8-bit representations of stereotypes closing in on them. To the judge’s credit, he seems skeptical about handing this evidence to the jury, but given the Florida law, it might not even come to that. We trust judges to be able to intellectually wall off evidence that’s more prejudicial than probative, but the trick of this tactic is to confuse the brain into failing to see anything prejudicial about this at all.

And will the state have an opportunity to animate its own counter-narrative? Outside of CBS Primetime, law enforcement doesn’t have infinite computing power and plucky out-of-work game designers in darkened rooms back at the station. GameRant has an appropriately technophilic response:

This particular demonstration likely would have been deemed impractical without the wireless capabilities of the Meta Quest VR line. Meta Quests can be simply put on and immediately used anywhere, whereas other VR headsets require a wired connection to a PC, and possibly external trackers to determine where a user is standing and looking. With the potential to create empathy and understanding for a defendant’s perspective and mindset through VR experiences like this one, it’s possible that Meta could see widespread adoption of its headsets by legal teams in the future.

The deck is improperly stacked against defendants in a whole host of ways but this ain’t it. Public defenders aren’t getting Quest goggles and laid off game designers any time soon. This just hands affluent defendants a tool for creating a computer-generated first-person representation of their story without direct refutation while poor defendants are drawing stick figures on napkins.

It may well “create empathy and understanding for a defendant’s perspective” but in all the ways the justice system is designed to weed out. Court is supposed to be boring because it’s supposed to sap the highly charged events of emotion for dispassionate evaluation. It’s why victims’ rights initiatives are problematic too… we don’t let victims level vigilante justice for a reason. This tech just endeavors — and if the graphics were more Apple Vision Pro than Meta Quest 2 it might succeed — to tilt the passions toward one side of the story.

It’s also not necessarily going to help out the defendants as much as idealists might hope. VR will create empathy and understanding for whichever side has the money to exploit it. The state may not have the funds to do this in every case, but rich victims can. Whether that works its way into criminal cases or skews later civil trials, there’s profound danger for the justice system in this tech.

I’m one of the people who believes in wearable tech, and I think future iterations of these goggles — especially the too-expensive-right-now Vision Pro — have a place in legal work as confidential, eyes-only workspaces and expansive canvasses for review. They might even fit in courtrooms if they allowed exploration of mutually stipulated upon settings.

But a pre-trial Stand Your Ground hearing where the defendant tries to establish that their subjective account of events inspired reasonable fear is the most Kafkaesque possible use.

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Joe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter or Bluesky if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search.