Abstract :
A truck carrying prisoners pulled into the courtyard of the Judicial Palace and three women stepped out. My friend and I looked at them and immediately concluded, judging from their appearance, that one was Lebanese, one Romanian and the other Sri Lankan. We continued our guessing game and assumed that the Lebanese woman must have been arrested for drugs, the Romanian for prostitution, and the Sri Lankan for theft. All of a sudden, we realized that we were biased in our assumptions, given that we had drawn our conclusions from first impressions. We became eager to see if we could verify our guesses, and we followed the suspects into the Judicial Palace only to learn that all three women were in fact arrested for murder. Leila is a Lebanese woman accused of conspiring with her lover to murder her husband; Christiane, who we initially thought was Romanian, was in fact French, and was accused of aborting while in her fourth month; and Lakshimi was accused of stabbing the owner of the restaurant where she worked.
