COVID origins? Thomas D. Albright, director of the Vision Center Laboratory at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, listed some of the many variables affecting eyewitness testimony in a 2017 paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, entitled Why Eyewitnesses Fail.. U. L. Rev. Witness misidentifications can affect both plaintiffs and defendants. At the time of his release, Jerry Miller had served over 26 years in prison for a crime he did not commit. According to the Innocence Project, mistaken identifications are the leading factor in wrongful convictions, accounting for almost 70 percent of the wrongful convictions overturned by post-conviction DNA evidence. Perhaps one of the most striking examples of the flaws in eyewitness testimony is the case of Jerry Miller, who was convicted of rape, robbery and kidnapping in 1982. Explore our digital archive back to 1845, including articles by more than 150 Nobel Prize winners. Renowned Expert witnesses include doctors, psychologists, psychiatrists, social workers, and other professionals who are instructed to give expert opinions in legal proceedings. Second, the police lineup has to be fair (that is, the suspect should not stand out). Thus, Chester was charged with three separate felonies as a way to overwhelm him and break him down. But a comparison of the pairs mugshots reveals that they bear little physical resemblance to one another beyond both being Black men. The variables include: viewing conditions (lighting-distance-duration), distracting stimuli (weapons-loud noises) and internal states of the observer (attention-motivation-skill-prejudice). Andy Hale is a civil rights attorney, specializing in wrongful convictions in Chicago, Illinois. 1 Garrett B. Convicting the Innocent: Where Criminal Prosecutions Go Wrong. Column: 15 minutes of fame flies by. Thanks for reading The Crime Report! Many eyewitnesses testified with high confidence despite earlier expressions of uncertainty.28. Specifically, the eyewitness had identified the defendant from her window, as the defendant was standing in the dark next to a police officer; however, the eyewitness had pointed to the defendant spontaneously, without the police asking her to do so.16 The Court ruled that, because the police had not induced the identification under suggestive circumstances, the trial judge had not erred in admitting the eyewitness testimony without assessing its reliability under the second step of the Manson test.17 The perpetrator had a brief conversation with the parking lot attendants and then fled the scene. The reliability of these alleged identifications was suspect, since the officers would have had only a fraction of a second to observe the driver whizz by them at a high rate of speed at night. According to the same theory, 33 years later, in 2002, in an almost inconceivable coincidence, evidence samples from Mixer, Ruelas and Leiterman just happened to be together again in the Michigan State Police Laboratory. A new version of that legislation, AB 308, is pending in the state Senate, though passage in this session is unlikely. Get in touch with our team of experts today! Of course, he knew that Lydell Grant was the one under suspicion. And third, the confidence expressed by the eyewitness following an identification of someone from the lineup must be recorded. Miller was ultimately charged with rape, robbery and kidnapping. But a closer examination of those witnesses testimonies reveals a few disconcerting factors: the earliest testimony from a witness came a month after the murders, and other testimony came nine, twelve months later. 8 Clifford & Hollin, Effects Of the Type of Incident and the Number of Perpetrators on Eyewitness Memory, Journal of Applied Psychology 66.3 (1981). Yes, the 1959 Matthiessen (Not Deer Park) State Park rape/robbery played a role in Wegers arrest (the rape victim ALSO ID Weger separately and BEFORE the line-up mentioned here), but it played NO role (not mentioned at all) in his trial or subsequent conviction. Instead evidence collected at the contaminated crime scene would probably be declared inadmissible. Noxious fumes wafted into their classrooms, causing some to need hospital treatment after complaining of headaches, heart palpitations, lethargy and being unable to move. 14 Manson, 432 U.S. 98, 12526 (Marshall, J., dissenting). Alex Murdaugh's defense attorneys will deliver their closing arguments in his murder trial on Thursday as they seek to raise reasonable doubt about whether he killed his wife and son in 2021. What the cases of Miller and Heidelberg highlight is that witnesses are often wrong. Your comment will be posted to MailOnline as usual. But when the witnesses had received a simple reinforcing comment following their identification (Good job, you got the guy), the mock jurors could no longer tell the difference between accurate and mistaken eyewitnesses. There are a few ways in which eyewitness testimony can be inaccurate. Questions were raised about the outcome after Ernest Saunders made a recovery following his release. Arnaud, Celia Henry. 32 National Research Council, Identifying The Culprit: Assessing Eyewitness Identification 38, 4-8 (2014). You can get our highlights each weekend.]. 5 Brewer & Treyens, Role of Schemata in Memory for Places, Cognitive Psychology 13.2 (1981). It gathered more than 100 signatures from prominent lawmakers, human rights campaigners and celebrities. The same is true of eyewitness memory: memory can be contaminated with the trace of an innocent person, but under proper testing conditions, eyewitness evidence is highly reliable. Officers of the law should be instructed by their superiors about the potential inaccuracies and dangers of witness testimony. . There, the prosecution claims that Flowers stole Doyle Simpsons gun from the glove compartment of Doyles unlocked car and then walked back to his home on the West side of town. Many more sit in prisons who have not had the opportunity to have their cases re-investigated or samples re-tested. It is important to strive to continue to conduct social science research on the nature of eyewitness and the efficacy of potential reforms like the ones above in order to create effective safeguards against unreliable eyewitness testimony. 27 The Innocence Project, Eyewitness Identification,. When proper procedures are not followed, the potential for error exists. Psychological scientists, however, have challenged many of the assumptions of the legal system and the general public regarding the. In an effort to overwhelm Chester and break him down, he was placed in a lineup regarding two incidents that took place in 1959 in a nearby State Park called Deer Park, one of which was that rape case and the other was a purse snatching. Psychologists have learned a. Two police officers thought the sketch resembled Miller, a man they had questioned a few days earlier. Mugshots of Lydell Grant (left, in 2010) and Jermarico Carter (right, in 2007) show the men dont look very similar. Readers speculate why, Letters to the Editor: Serious about the drought? Police lineups have evolved over time, but some states still need to catch up. The FBI estimates that 521,196 of these arrests were for violent crimes.24 Accurate data on the number of crimes observed by eyewitnesses are not available. Speak to our experts today for advice. Although the high accuracy of an initial ID made with high confidence is important to appreciate, the low accuracy of an ID made with low confidence may be even more important to appreciate. Does Irans Foreign Minister accept women can peacefully protest for change in Iran? What it means is that the malleability of memory can harm reliability. As with DNA evidence, eyewitness evidence needs to be safeguarded against contamination. 22 Edwin M. Borchard, Convicting the Innocent: Sixty-Five Actual Errors of Criminal Justice (New York: Garden City Publishing Company, Inc., 1932). But eyewitnesses aren't always right, and poor investigative practices can make matters worse. Another stated that the killers face was burned into [her] memory immediately.. The shooter wound up crashing the car and escaping on foot. There have been many famous expert witness cases. "Double-Blind" Process for Lineups and Photo Arrays. In much the same way, an eyewitness can be led to falsely remember someone committing a crime that was actually committed by someone else. In Millers case, the two parking lot attendants were immediately suspicious when the victims car approached the ticket booth. Not only do such statements inflate eyewitnesses confidence in the accuracy of their identification, but they lead them to falsely remember having been that confident all along. Expert witnesses are often instructed in cases where expert evidence is necessary to enable the court to understand specific issues, such as capacity, intent, causation etc. After the rape, with the victim now locked in the trunk, the rapist attempted to drive the womans vehicle out of the parking garage but was prevented from doing so by the two parking lot attendants who recognized the victims car and noticed that she was not driving it. Kendall Taggart BuzzFeed News Reporter First, the judge must determine whether the procedure used by law enforcement officials in obtaining the proffered eyewitness identification (e.g., photographic array or lineup) was unnecessarily suggestive.11 The judge must then weigh this determination against the following five factors to assess the reliability of the identification: In practice, therefore, the test is flexible. Why are we still having these debates? Hale is an Emmy-nominated executive producer for several true-crime documentaries highlighting wrongful convictions. cases where eyewitnesses were rightammo donation to ukraine. Juries are particularly prone to being swayed by eyewitness testimony, as evidenced in the Curtis Flowers case. In 2009, he was charged with assaulting 12 women. Prosecutors, though, have no murder weapon, bloody clothes or eyewitnesses, leaving them to build their case about Murdaugh's murky timeline of his whereabouts when the crime happened in 2021 . While his potential release faced intense scrutiny, it demonstrates how influential an expert witness report can be. 21 Commonwealth v. Walker, 625 Pa. 450, 47678 (2014). The parking lot attendants provided a description of the driver to a police sketch artist and the sketch was published in a daily police bulletin. John Wixted is a Distinguished Professor of Psychology at the University of California, San Diego. You have, Witnesses are Often Wrong: The Case Against Eyewitness ID, Florida City Creates Youth Curfew to Deter Juvenile Crime, Legislator Introduces Laws to Protect Law Enforcement After Temple University Cop is Killed in the Line of Duty, Oversight Report Shows Issues with DOJ Collection of Deaths in Policy Custody Data, Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License, New York-Based Chinese Gang Steals 3,000 Texas IDs in Cyber Fraud Case, Murdaugh Murder Trial Jurors to Visit Crime Scene, Heartbreakingly Evil: DOJ Strengthens Fight Against Elder Fraud, Sex Abuse of Athletes: Dont Tell is No Longer an Option, Criminal Justice Journalism Wins Pulitzer Prizes, View from the Trauma Center: Why Gun Violence Persists. Just because memory is malleablefor example, it can be contaminated with the trace of an innocent persondoes not mean that it has to be unreliable. Guidance can help jurors who might not know what to make of conflicting testimony. Yet, based on, among other things, this powerful purported eyewitness evidence, Heidelberg was convicted. Even though no connection between Leiterman and Ruelas was ever established, the prosecution theorized that all three must have been together after midnight at the murder scene in 1969, with the preschooler bleeding on the victim for some unknown reason while Leiterman killed her. These courts generally accept detailed descriptions of relevant scientific research findings to either attack or support eyewitness testimony.19 Other courts, meanwhile, leave the jury to determine the credibility of eyewitness testimony and insist that findings from scientific research in this area cannot help the jury to do so.20 Like eyewitness memory, DNA evidence can be contaminated with the trace of an innocent person. She was sentenced to life in prison. In response to this issue, the National Research Council (NRC) formed a research committee in 2013 chaired by Judge Jed S. Rakoff of the Southern District of New York and cognitive scientist, Thomas Albright of the Salk Institute for Biological Studies.31 The group released their findings in 2014 in a report titled Identifying the Culprit: Assessing Eyewitness Identification. Family weapons were used to kill the victims in the Murdaugh case, prosecutor says Prosecutor Creighton Waters speaks during closing arguments on Wednesday, March 1. But eyewitnesses aren & # x27 ; t always right, and poor practices. Will be posted to MailOnline as usual Go Wrong our team of experts today are a few ways which! Executive producer for cases where eyewitnesses were right true-crime documentaries highlighting wrongful convictions & # x27 ; t always right, and poor practices. Digital archive back to 1845, including articles by more than 150 Prize! Second, the police lineup has to be fair ( that is, the confidence expressed by the eyewitness an. 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