Eyewitness Testimony

A CNN.com article Wednesday reported that “each year, 75,000 witnesses identify criminal suspects. Yet, as the New Jersey Supreme Court has acknowledged in its recent landmark, State vs. Henderson decision last month, there is ‘a troubling lack of reliability in eyewitness identifications.’”

This again having surfaced via the execution of Troy Davis that evening.

The CNN article went on to say that “a study released earlier, last Monday, by the American Judicature Society, analyzing 850 photographic lineups, found that mistakes in identification are often related to how the photos of a line-up are presented. It found if a person uninvolved in the case presents the photos one-by-one, rather than all at once, fewer mistakes are made. Another critical factor is whether the authority presenting the photos knows who the suspect is.”

Collectively, as earlier posted, while the Henderson decision applies only to New Jersey, it is likely to have considerable impact nationally,” according to a New York Times article last month. “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.”

A New York Times article a few days earlier 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.”