Legal Commentary

Eyewitness ID: A Primary Cause of Wrongful Convictions

By TChris

A Dallas Morning News investigation has produced a series of articles that every judge, lawyer, and citizen who might ever sit on a jury should read. The paper examined 19 wrongful convictions in Dallas County.

In every instance but one, a Dallas Morning News investigation found, police and prosecutors built their case on eyewitness accounts, even though they knew such testimony can be fatally flawed.

Eyewitness identification procedures often cause victims to believe with certainty that their mistaken identifications are correct.

In such cases, witnesses can give false testimony with complete confidence. And nothing convicts like a confident eyewitness.

Part I explains why the common practice of showing an array of suspect photographs to crime victims so often leads to misidentifications and wrongful convictions. [more ...]

Part II examines the even more suggestive use of "showups" -- sometimes called "drive-by identification" -- where police take a crime victim to a suspect they've nabbed and ask the victim whether they caught the right person. No matter how poor the victim's ability to identify an assailant might be, nothing reinforces a victim's willingness to identify someone -- anyone -- as a police officer's assurance that the criminal has been captured.

Showups continue in Dallas County and elsewhere because police value them, judges seldom suppress them and juries are swayed by the results.

In light of all the research that teaches how flawed identification procedures lead to wrongful convictions, Part III asks why the procedures are still used in Dallas County.

The newspaper found that law enforcement still relies heavily on eyewitness testimony, even if corroborating evidence is weak and despite decades of research showing its shortcomings.

The answer: police and prosecutors view them as a useful "tool" of law enforcement precisely because they lead to convictions, even if the convictions are sometimes erroneous. Police and prosecutors too often value convictions more than they value the truth.

Most wrongful convictions that are based on eyewitness identifications will never be corrected, because no DNA is available to provide the certain proof that courts seem to want before admitting that a mistake was made.

"We've shown how unreliable eyewitness testimony is in sexual assault cases," said Rob Warden, executive director of the Center on Wrongful Convictions at Northwestern University law school. "But now the system itself is pretending that all of these armed robbery cases are just hunky dory when we know, if anything, it's no doubt less reliable in an armed robbery case than in a sexual assault case."

That's why it's important for everyone to understand (and for juries in every eyewitness ID case to hear expert testimony about) the fallibility of eyewitness identifications.

If you don't have time to read the three part series, the AP has a nice summary.

Full post as published by TalkLeft on October 12, 2008 (boomark / email).