From Matthew Syed's new book "Black Box Thinking: Why Most People Never Learn From Their Mistakes--But Some Do", the following piece tells us of how "being certain" is one thing, and how overwhelming evidence of the contrary often ends up cementing the home truth, i.e. that one's been wrong from the start. Almost like how doomsday cult followers become even more fervent in their belief even after the doomsday date has passed.

BTW, here's a very good episode of "Start The Week", a BBC radio show where Syed talks about his book. On to the quoted section:

On March 20, 1987, a young girl was attacked in her home in Billings, Montana. The Innocence Project, the nonprofit organization set up by two New York lawyers, Barry Scheck and Peter Neufeld, to help prisoners obtain DNA tests, describes the crime as follows: The young girl was attacked by an intruder who had broken in through a window. She was raped . . . The perpetrator fled after stealing a purse and jacket. The victim was examined the same day. Police collected her underwear and the bed sheets upon which the crime was committed. Semen was identified on the underwear and several hairs were collected from the bed sheets. The police produced a composite sketch of the intruder based upon the description given by the victim and this led an officer to interview Jimmy Ray Bromgard, an eighteen-year-old who lived in the area and who resembled the sketch. Bromgard eventually agreed to participate in a line-up. He was picked out by the victim, but not with any real confidence. She said she was “60, 65 percent sure.”

When the case came to trial, most of the prosecution case was based on forensic evidence related to hair found at the crime scene. This evidence (it was later established) was largely concocted by the “expert” called by the prosecution. There were no fingerprints, and no physical evidence beyond the flawed hair testimony. Bromgard, who said he was at home asleep at the time of the crime, was found guilty and sentenced to forty years in prison. The Innocence Project took up the case in 2000. A DNA test excluded Bromgard as the source of the semen found the victim’s underwear. This represented powerful evidence that he was not the perpetrator. “The original case was flimsy and the new evidence invalidated the conviction,” Barry Scheck told me. “The prosecutors could have dropped the case. They could have put their hands up and admitted they got the wrong man. But they didn’t.”

Or perhaps they just couldn’t. Michael McGrath, the state prosecutor, responded to the new evidence by coming up with an interpretation that, in many ways, is even more novel than the explanation given by the cult for the failure of the Keech prophecy. As Kathryn Schulz explains in her excellent book Being Wrong, McGrath claimed that Bromgard might be a “chimera.” This is where a single person has two different blood types due to the death of a twin in the womb. It has only been reported around thirty times in history. It represented a reframing of the evidence of a quite breathtaking kind. Sadly, for McGrath at least, further testing proved that Bromgard was not a chimera, but the prosecutor wasn’t finished yet. When Bromgard sued the state of Montana for wrongful conviction, Peter Neufeld from the Innocence Project came face-to-face with McGrath during the deposition. McGrath was still adamant that Bromgard was the prime suspect. Nothing seemed to prize him from that belief: no amount of persuasion, no amount of testimony, no amount of evidence. Neufeld questioned him on what had become, by this stage, an unshakable belief. If Bromgard is guilty, Neufeld asked, how could McGrath explain the presence of semen from a different man in the victim?

Kathryn Schulz quotes from the transcript of the exchange:

McGrath: The semen could have come from multiple different sources.

Neufeld: Why don’t you tell me what those multiple sources are?

McGrath: It’s potentially possible that [the victim] was sexually active with somebody else. (The victim was 8 years old.)

McGrath: It’s possible that her sister was sexually active with somebody else. (Her sister was 11 at the time.)

McGrath: It’s possible that a third person could have been in the room. It’s possible. It’s possible that the father could have left that stain in a myriad of different ways.

Neufeld: What other different ways?

McGrath: He could have masturbated in that room in those underwear . . . The father and mother could have had sex in that room in that bed, or somehow transferred a stain to those underwear . . . [The father] could have had a wet dream; could have been sleeping in that bed; he could have had an incestual relationship with one of the daughters.

The transcript runs on for another 249 pages of similar outlandish claims. “So we have four possibilities,” Schulz writes. “The eight-year-old was sexually active; her eleven-year-old sister was sexually active while wearing her sister’s underpants; a third party was in the room (even though the victim had testified to a single intruder); or the father had deposited the semen in one perverse way or another.” There was, of course, a fifth possibility, but it required McGrath to accept the evidence for what it was, rather than what he wanted it to be. Bromgard was innocent. The state of Montana eventually paid Bromgard $3.5 million in damages. And McGrath failed in his attempt to ban publication of the exchange with Neufeld.