ABSTRACT
Just as in Kurosawa’s famous 1950 film, Rashomon, where events leading to a crime are reconstructed quite differently-by the robber, by the samurai, by the wife and by the passing woodcutter-we find conflicting accounts of Dr. York’s story.1 Lewis Carter comments on the researcher’s problem of choosing between different accounts of the same set of events, a problem he encountered in his 1998 study of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh’s community in Oregon. The explanations of the controversial salmonella poisoning incident in the Wasco county salad bars offered by his various informants “differed quite markedly.”2 Carter steps back and comments, “the most interesting thing about such contrasting stories is not always which of them is true. Rather, the remarkable thing in [these] cases is that both sets of stories are true as the ‘event’ was experienced from different social locations.”3 While this stance might make sense to a sociologist who has read Peter Berger and knows that “reality” is socially constructed, it would not be helpful in a courtroom where a man charged with child molestation (or acts of biological terrorism) is on trial.
