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EYEWITNESS TESTIMONY

By "Captain Liberty" and "Rumpole"

Like Churchill 's lonely warnings about Germany through the 1930's, we've often, singularly,  and loudly decried the inherent unreliability about Eyewitness testimony. Finally, a news media outlet has reported on the issue. The title of the post links to the 60 minutes piece on eyewitness testimony. In a nutshell, the piece starts off by examining the case of a young man twice convicted of raping a woman. He was convicted, got a new trial, his attorneys brought the real rapist into the courtroom, and the woman still identified the person from the first trial. After serving ten years in prison Ron Cotton was released when his attorneys located DNA from the crime and it matched the person who they accused of the rape at the second trial. How can a person misidentify her assailant in a courtroom twice, even when being shown the real assailant? If you don't know the answer to that question then you've never read The Seven Sins Of Memory...continue to full post

Full post as published by Justice Building Blog on March 09, 2009 (boomark / email).