Read A Deadly Wandering: A Tale of Tragedy and Redemption in the Age of Attention Online
Authors: Matt Richtel
IN THE COURTROOM, BUNDERSON
kept hammering away. He asked Dr. Strayer if talking on a phone while driving was against the law in Utah.
No, Dr. Strayer said.
What about texting?
No, Dr. Strayer said, except that he believed it was illegal for a period of time just after someone got his or her license, new teen drivers. Dr. Strayer said that, in a few states, like California, talking on a phone was illegal while driving. (In California, drivers could talk using a hands-free device.)
Bunderson asked whether there’s a general knowledge of the risks of using the phone while driving, given years of research.
Yes, Dr. Strayer thought there was.
“Is it fair to say that, as compared to talking on a cell phone or driving under the influence, the general public hasn’t had information about the risks of texting and driving?”
“In terms of the scientific literature, you are correct.”
Bunderson was pinning down the idea that the general public might not be aware of the risks of texting and driving or, if they had some passing understanding, it wasn’t necessarily born of a mass of scientific data. So how could Reggie have been expected to know twenty-six months earlier?
And Bunderson had given Judge Willmore heavy pause about the use of the term “significantly greater risk,” which might imply by its definition “substantial risk.” And, already, several times, Judge Willmore had stated he would allow no comparisons to drunk driving because, the judge said, they would be too “prejudicial” for the jury, meaning they would draw a comparison that carried too much negative weight.
Were this a prizefight, Bunderson was scoring a lot of punches.
It didn’t matter. Bunderson didn’t know that the case was already over. Reggie, still showing nothing on his face, could no longer deny it: He, his texting, had killed Jim Furfaro and Keith O’Dell.
THE TESTIMONY AND QUESTIONS
wore on and the hearing wound down. More details, more probing by Bunderson. Finally, they concluded.
Linton made a general plea, asking Judge Willmore to recognize that this was an important moment in history.
“This is a new technology,” he said. He compared the lack of awareness of the impact of electronic gadgets on drivers to a time “where police officers would catch someone with a DUI and put them back in their car and tell them to drive home.”
“The new tech is growing at exponential rates and we’re asking the court to take that into account.”
Judge Willmore said he was prepared to offer a preliminary conclusion: He would allow some of Dr. Strayer’s testimony. But it would be limited. “He cannot testify with regard to the mental condition of the defendant in a criminal case.”
There could be no mention of DUI.
As to the sixfold increase in crash risk caused by texting: “That’s the one I’m struggling with more than anything.
“I’m really struggling, Mr. Linton,” he told the prosecutor, and asked Linton to make his case again about why it should be allowed.
“It’s a fact,” Linton said. “It’s a fact there’s a six-times greater chance of being involved in an accident,” he continued. It’s up to the jury to decide if Reggie should’ve known that, if it was criminally negligent to not be aware of that.
By comparison, Linton said, a ballistics expert could testify that someone had shot another person, but that doesn’t mean the shooter “shot that person on purpose.”
He looked tired and strained when he concluded: “We cannot look inside of a human brain.”
Judge Willmore took it in. “These are tough issues. Tough cases make hard issues.”
Then he summed up. “We’re set for trial on February eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth,” he said. There would be a final pretrial hearing on February 2. “If there’s going to be a plea bargain, it has to be by that date.”
THERE WOULD BE NO
trial.
Reggie was ready to deal.
Watching him from the spartan gallery, Terryl didn’t pick that up at all. Nothing on Reggie’s face suggested a change in his position. Besides, Terryl was having a different reaction to Dr. Strayer’s testimony. It was, if not elation, then something close to it. It was a feeling that things were finally, decidedly, breaking toward the prosecution. Even though Bunderson had raised some serious doubt, Terryl felt the core science was so powerful as to overwhelm any doubts.
“This is it,” she recalls thinking at that moment. “We’ve got him. We’ve got it nailed.”
Reggie and Terryl had seen each other plenty of times. But they’d never met. The hearing with Dr. Strayer made the meeting imminent. Reggie was getting ready to cop to what he’d done, but Terryl, as she and others put it, was “out for blood.”
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O
N MAY 3, 1980
, thirteen-year-old Cari Lightner was walking to a church carnival in Fair Oaks, California, when she was run down by a repeat-offender drunk driver. Cari’s mother, Candy Lightner, vowed to take on drunk driving and founded Mothers Against Drunk Drivers, later renamed Mothers Against Drunk Driving.
It became, arguably, the most powerful, and effective public safety advocacy group in the country. It led the charge for tougher laws and tougher enforcement, and for public education. In 1982, four years after Reggie was born, alcohol impaired drivers—drunk drivers—caused at least 21,113 fatalities (some estimates have that figure as high as 30,000 deaths in 1980). By 1991, that figured dropped to 15,827. And by 2010, the figure had fallen to 10,228, a drop of 52 percent, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, a division of the U.S. Department of Transportation.
Alcohol-related deaths still constitute about one-third of all traffic fatalities, but the change in culture and behavior has been profound. After all, prior to MADD, it was considered socially acceptable to have one last drink at the party before getting on the road.
So, too, there has been profound improvement in the use of seat belts. Today, seat belts are worn close to 90 percent of the time. That compares to about 15 percent in 1983. The monumental change owes to a marked shift in public understanding that seat belt use saves lives—it’s the single most valuable thing someone can do to spare themselves death or injury in the event of a crash—says Barbara Harsha, who for twenty-five years was the executive director of the Governors Highway Safety Association, a group made up of state traffic-safety experts. (Harsha retired in 2013.)
In 2008, as the Reggie saga wore on, Harsha and others were trying to apply what they knew about drunk driving and seat belts to the issue of cell phone distraction by motorists. There were some caveats to the comparisons. Notably, the effects of wearing seat belts and drunk driving had been tracked for a long time and their impacts were clearly measurable, but the data set on distracted driving was just not there. Moreover, a drunk driver remains impaired for the whole ride, whereas the impairment of a cell phone user is intermittent, and impacts the brain only in the period surrounding their interaction with the device. So safety advocates cautioned against making a perfect comparison between driver distraction by cell phone and drunk driving.
Another difference, according to safety expert Bill Windsor, is that no one ever told people that drinking and driving was a wise idea, yet there has been a widespread idea in the culture that it is good to be digitally connected all the time. “There is a lot of pressure on kids and even adults to stay connected,” says Windsor, who is the assistant vice president of consumer safety at Nationwide Insurance and sits on the board of directors for MADD and the National Safety Council.
Still, in broad terms, the safety advocates hoped the successes with seat belts and drunk driving would provide a blueprint for addressing cell phone distraction. In a nutshell, those accomplishments owed to the combination of two principles: enforcement of tough laws, plus heavy public education (of the dangers, the legal costs, and human toll). Enforcement and education “are proven to work,” Harsha says.
Of course, there had to be laws on the books before one could press to enforce them. In 2006, at the time of the accident that took Keith’s and Jim’s lives, there were no laws explicitly covering texting and driving, except several prohibiting the behavior among novice drivers. Two years later, a handful of states had succeeded in banning texting or use of handheld phones by all drivers.
Enforcement remained a serious problem even where there were laws, notes Harsha and other public safety advocates. “People text in their laps,” Harsha says, which makes it tough for police to see what’s happening.
Also, people were outright lying, which was driven either by self-deception or survival. “It’s fairly rare that somebody is going to admit they were talking on a cell phone,” says Mr. Windsor. As Reggie’s case showed, it was not easy to get the cell phone records and proof.
And so all these roadblocks were making it hard to even measure who was doing the behavior, in a way that, say, Breathalyzers or field sobriety tests could measure for drunken behavior. How many people were on the phone when they got into a wreck? Most police agencies still weren’t collecting that data, or even being required to ask. There were a lot of horrific anecdotes, and there was some powerful implicit evidence: Traffic deaths remained at epidemic levels despite all the other improvements to safety, not just the fall in drunk driving fatalities and the huge increase in the use of seat belts but also in the billions spent on other safety measures, like air bags, safer roads, antilock brakes. To Dr. Strayer and others, the answer is that the rise in driver distraction, caused in large part by new technology, has undermined the gains those other safety measures have made.
Others interpreted this lack of clear evidence differently. Cell phone industry officials said that the fact traffic deaths hadn’t soared meant that distraction from electronic gadgets was being overblown as a threat.
At the time, texting was still relatively new, but talking on the phone and driving was by now ingrained and done widely. In 2008, the federal government published a paper that found that during 2007, 11 percent of drivers at any given time—1.8 million drivers—were using a phone during daylight hours.
Even as the behaviors were becoming ingrained, many drivers thought it was dangerous and stupid. The AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety, an arm of AAA (formerly, the American Automobile Association), did a survey in 2008 in which drivers said that the two biggest things that could be done to “prevent serious motor vehicle accidents” were: reduce driver distractions and reduce or avoid cell phone use. Those two ranked above asking drivers to slow down and reduce drinking and driving.
Elsewhere in the survey, drivers ranked drunk drivers as the first most serious traffic safety problem, and cell phone–using drivers as the second.
In other words, cell phone use by drivers was ranking as a serious problem by the public, and, yet, we were doing it all the time. “The culture is: ‘It’s not me, it’s you. I’m the good driver,’ ” Harsha says.
The safety advocates were confounded. Something was not quite adding up, this disconnect between attitudes and behaviors.
“We don’t really know what is going to work. We know it’s going to take a really long time.”
There was one more thing, though, that the safety advocates felt they’d learned from MADD. Something visceral and less tangential than, say, statistics, laws, police enforcement, or television commercials: The issue had to be made personal.
Says Harsha: “One of the lessons of MADD is you’ve got to put a face on the problem.”
SOMETIMES, WHEN DR. GAZZALEY
thinks a lot about a problem, the answer comes in the form of a dream. He awoke to such a dream one morning in late 2008. In it, there was an idea for an experiment. It was counterintuitive: Could a video game—the very technology that often seems to distract someone by drawing them away from other priorities or to shorten attention span through habituating players to constant stimulation—hold the keys to training people to sustain attention?
He contacted some people he knew from LucasArts, a big-time video game studio founded by
Star Wars
creator George Lucas. He told them he wanted to marry technology and brain sciences to create a scientifically engineered therapy for waning attention. In his vision, he’d prove that the game worked by using imaging technology to show improvements inside the brain.
He put together a grant proposal. They’d need a lot of resources, and it didn’t seem like it would be easy to get people to pony up. They’d need to challenge a lot of conventional wisdom.
AND DR. STRAYER MADE
a discovery that seemed just too weird. It happened unexpectedly during an experiment he had run in his driving simulator. The idea was a twist on his distracted driving studies. This one explored whether the task of driving actually interfered with the task of talking on the phone. How accurate could the driver be at thinking through complex issues, even doing math problems presented by the person on the other end of the line? In this case, the primary task was considered to be the talking—that was the top-down goal—while the driving was secondary.
After the subjects went through the simulator, a senior thesis student plotted the individual performances on a graph. As expected, the talking performance declined significantly. Except for one study subject. There was this dot on the graph that didn’t make any sense.
One person seemed to have shown slight improvement, coming across on the graph as an anomaly, an expert multitasker.
“This has got to be screwed up somehow,” Dr. Strayer thought. “This doesn’t fit with anything we know.”
The researchers looked at the coding of the data. Maybe they had made a mistake. “We tried to make it go away,” Dr. Strayer says. They spent a week looking at the data, but the outlier remained every time.