Ethics

Eyewitness Testimony and Criminal Justice Reform

By Ed Brayton

Sandra Guerra Thompson has an important article in the Marquette Law Review, which you can find at SSRN, about the many problems with eyewitness testimony and the justice system's blindness to those problems. The article begins:

As of this writing, 244 people have been exonerated by means of DNA evidence, most leaving prison cells after many years in prison. These exonerations represent only the "tip of an iceberg" -- the actual numbers of wrongly convicted are undoubtedly much higher. The leading cause of wrongful convictions has been shown to be erroneous eyewitness identifications. Many studies of exonerations find that erroneous eyewitness identifications play a part in over 75% of all wrongful convictions. These studies have led to numerous proposals for reform of police procedures, yet we see surprisingly little progress toward minimizing eyewitness-identification error, a major cause of failure in the criminal justice systems of this country.

Full post as published by Dispatches from the Culture Wars on December 14, 2009 (boomark / email).