The U.S. Supreme Court recent­ly con­sid­ered Perry v. New Hampshire, a case ques­tion­ing the valid­i­ty of eye­wit­ness tes­ti­mo­ny when the iden­ti­fi­ca­tion was made under unre­li­able cir­cum­stances. At the same time, years of sci­en­tif­ic study on the accu­ra­cy of human mem­o­ry are point­ing to the need for reform in the use of eye­wit­ness evi­dence in crim­i­nal cas­es. Barbara Tversky, a psy­chol­o­gy pro­fes­sor at Columbia University, whose exper­i­ments on mem­o­ry were report­ed in the jour­nal Cognitive Psychology, not­ed, ​“Memory is weak in eye­wit­ness sit­u­a­tions because it’s over­loaded. An event hap­pens so fast, and when the police ques­tion you, you prob­a­bly weren’t con­cen­trat­ing on the details they’re ask­ing about.” About 75% of DNA-based exon­er­a­tions have come in cas­es where eye­wit­ness­es have made mis­takes. Scientists sug­gest that wit­ness tes­ti­mo­ny should be viewed more like trace evi­dence, with the same fragili­ty and vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty to con­t­a­m­i­na­tion. Strong emo­tions felt by vic­tims of a crime is one such pos­si­ble area of con­t­a­m­i­na­tion. Gary Wells, a psy­chol­o­gy pro­fes­sor at Iowa State University, found that the accu­ra­cy of line­ups improves when the pos­si­ble sus­pects are pre­sent­ed to wit­ness­es in sequence, rather than all at once, as in the tra­di­tion­al line­up. The down­fall of side-by-side line­ups, Dr. Wells said, is that ​“if the real per­pe­tra­tor is not in there, there is still some­one who looks more like him than the oth­ers.” The Supreme Court of New Jersey recent­ly pro­mul­gat­ed new rules for deal­ing with the prob­lems of eyewitness identification.

(L. Beil, ​“The Certainty of Memory Has Its Day in Court,” New York Times, November 28, 2011). See Innocence, U.S. Supreme Court and Studies.

Citation Guide