Eyewitness identification
[3] Similarly, in the United Kingdom, the Criminal Law Review Committee, writing in 1971, stated that cases of mistaken identification "constitute by far the greatest cause of actual or possible wrong convictions".
"[6] The Innocence Project has facilitated the exoneration of 214 men who were wrongfully convicted of crimes as a result of faulty eyewitness evidence.
Jennifer Thompson was a college student in North Carolina in 1984, when a man broke into her apartment, put a knife to her throat, and raped her.
"[8] Thompson went to the police station later that same day to work up a [composite sketch] of her attacker, relying on what she believed was her detailed memory.
It was not until much later, after Cotton had served 11 years in prison and was exonerated, by DNA testing, for wrongful conviction, that Thompson realized she was mistaken.
Cases such as hers have resulted in the emergence of a field within cognitive science dedicated to the study of eyewitness memory and the causes underlying its frequently recurring failures.
"[9] Acknowledging the importance of such procedural precautions as recommended by leading eyewitness researchers, in 1999 the Department of Justice published a set of best practices for conducting police lineups.
When the actual perpetrator is not included in the lineup, research has shown that the police suspect faces a significantly heightened risk of being incorrectly identified as the culprit.
Given the common, good faith occurrence of police lineups that do not include the actual perpetrator of a crime, other procedural measures must be undertaken to minimize the likelihood of an inaccurate identification.
[12] Eyewitness researchers know that the police lineup is, at center, a psychological experiment designed to test the ability of a witness to recall the identity of the perpetrator of a crime.
Researchers have noted that this rule is particularly important when the witness's description includes unique features, such as tattoos, scars, unusual hairstyles, etc.
[18] In 2005, the Illinois state legislature commissioned a pilot project to test recommended reform measures intended to increase the accuracy and reliability of police identification procedures.
Its initial report purported to show that the status quo was superior to the procedures recommended by researchers to reduce false identifications.
[19] The mainstream media spotlighted the report, suggesting that three decades' worth of otherwise uncontroverted social science had been called into question.
One critic said that "the design of the [Illinois pilot] project contained so many fundamental flaws that it is fair to wonder whether its sole purpose was to inject confusion into the debate about the efficacy of sequential double-blind procedures and to thereby prevent adoption of the reforms.
Researchers reported that the study had a basic flaw that adversely affected its scientific merit, and "guaranteed that most outcomes would be difficult or impossible to interpret.
Preparation for cross-examination, including a witness thinking about how to answer questions regarding the identification, has also been shown to artificially inflate an eyewitness's sense of certainty about it.
Any future statement of confidence or certainty is widely regarded as unreliable, as many intervening factors can distort it as time passes.
The cross-race impairment has been observed to substantially overshadow all other variables for witnesses, even when the persons tested have been surrounded by members of the other race for their entire lives.
[28] Studies have consistently shown that stress has a dramatically negative impact on the accuracy of eyewitness memory, a phenomenon that witnesses themselves often do not take into account.
In a seminal study on this topic, Yale psychiatrist Charles Morgan and a team of researchers tested the ability of trained, military survival school students to identify their interrogators following low- and high-stress scenarios.
[40] Detectives interrogating children in the court perhaps lack the necessary training to make them effective perhaps “ more work needs to be done in finding effective ways of helping appropriate members of the legal profession to develop skills and understanding in child development and in talking with children” The federal due process standard governing the admissibility of eyewitness evidence is set forth in the U.S. Supreme Court case of Manson v. Brathwaite.
According to legal scholars, "the rule of decision set out in Manson has failed to meet the Court's objective of furthering fairness and reliability.
Social scientists and legal scholars have also expressed concern that "the [Manson] list as a whole is substantially incomplete," thereby opening the courthouse doors to the admission of unreliable evidence.
To further expand jurors are " likely to put faith in the expert's testimony or even to overestimate the significance of results that the expert reports"[44] Polling data and other surveys of juror knowledge appear to contradict this proposition, however, revealing substantial misconceptions on a number of discrete topics that have been the subject of significant study by social scientists.
[45] Criminal defense lawyers often propose detailed jury instructions as a mechanism to offset undue reliance on eyewitness testimony, when factors shown to undermine its reliability are present in a given case.
A repository of video illustrative aids exists offering tests and demonstrations to prove or show during trial that eyewitnesses can be unaware of people and objects, make incorrect judgments, misremember and invent memories, and differently perceive and misperceive objects and events, Most identification procedures are regulated by Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984 Code D. In any cases where identification may be an issue, a record must be made of the description of the suspect first given by a witness.
If a judge decides to admit evidence where there has been a breach, he should give reasons,[48] and in a jury trial, the jury should normally be told "that an identification procedure enables suspects to put the reliability of an eye-witness's identification to the test, that the suspect has lost the benefit of that safeguard, and that they should take account of that fact in their assessment of the whole case, giving it such weight as they think fit".
[49] Informal identifications made through social media such as Facebook (often in breach of Code D), pose particular problems for the criminal courts.
Reform measures mandating that police use established best practices when collecting eyewitness evidence have been implemented in New Jersey, North Carolina, Wisconsin, West Virginia, and Minnesota.
