A Cleveland Plain Dealer article over the weekend noted the New Jersey Supreme Court’s decision last week issuing new rules that allow criminal defendants to more easily contest an eyewitness' identification could encourage similar challenges in state courts nationwide.
The New Jersey’s Court’s decision, according to a New Jersey Law Journal article last Wednesday, changed the rules for trial judges and juries considering eyewitness identification of suspects in criminal cases, citing the vagaries of human memory and a host of other factors and “adhering largely to recommendations made by a special master last June, held in State v. Henderson, A-8-08, that the standard for evaluating eyewitness identification that has been in use for 34 years can no longer be relied on, because it does not take into account the possible factors that could lead an eyewitness — even one absolutely sure in his or her own mind that an identification is accurate — to be completely wrong.” ( Special Master’s Report )
“While the decision applies only in New Jersey, it is likely to have considerable impact nationally,” an article in the New York Times said. “The state’s highest court has long been considered a trailblazer in criminal law, and New Jersey has already been a leader in establishing guidelines on how judges should handle such testimony.”
An earlier New York Times article covering the story noted that the U.S. Supreme Court, in November, is scheduled to “return to the question of what the Constitution has to say about the use of eyewitness evidence, when it hears Perry v. New Hampshire, 10-8974. The last time the court took a hard look at the question was in 1977 with Manson v. Braithwaite. Since then, the scientific understanding of human memory has been transformed and more than 2,000 studies on the topic have been published in professional journals in the past 30 years… What they collectively show is that it is perilous to base a conviction on a witness’s identification of a stranger. Memory is not a videotape. It is fragile at best, worse under stress and subject to distortion and contamination.”
The New Jersey Law Journal article reported that “Under the currently existing two-prong test for evaluating eyewitness identifications — established by Manson v. Braithwaite, 432 U.S. 98 (1977), and adopted by New Jersey in State v. Madison, 109 N.J. 223 (1988) — a trial judge first decides whether the police were impermissibly suggestive in getting the witness to pick out a particular individual. If so, the judge then considers the opportunity the witness had to view the suspect; the witness' degree of attention; the accuracy of his or her prior description; the level of certainty demonstrated by the witness; and the time between the crime and the identification… Rabner said the Manson/Madison test rested on three assumptions — that it would adequately measure reliability, that it would deter improper police practices and that jurors would be able to detect untrustworthy testimony—and sent the case to the special master, retired Superior Court Judge Geoffrey Gaulkin. In a July 2010 report, on which the Court heard arguments last March 30, found strong scientific evidence that mistaken identifications of criminal suspects occur far too often and that the assumptions underlying Manson/Madison are no longer valid, "We conclude from the hearing that they are not," Rabner said.
“The decision listed more than a dozen factors that judges should consider in evaluating the reliability of a witness’s identification, including whether a weapon was visible during a crime of short duration, the amount of time the witness had to observe the event, how close the witness was to the suspect, whether the witness was under the influence of alcohol or drugs, whether the witness was identifying someone of a different race and the length of time that had elapsed between the crime and the identification.”
Ohio, the Plain Dealer’s article mentions, enacted similar reforms a year ago, and legal experts said Thursday that the changes are proving effective in preventing witnesses from making erroneous identifications in police lineups. Senate Bill 77, which former-Gov. Ted Strickland signed last April and went into effect July 6, 2010, dealt “with issues involving DNA collection and evidence preservation, and established new procedures for conducting police photo arrays. Under the new law, the process must either be administered by an officer who is uninvolved in the investigation, or the suspect's photo must be placed in a folder and randomly shuffled among other folders containing photos… Cuyahoga County Prosecutor Bill Mason said Thursday that under those guidelines, Ohio's system for assessing the admissibility of an eyewitness identification is not far off from New Jersey's new rules.”
No comments:
Post a Comment