Adam Liptak's latest Sidebar column in today's New York Times is, "34 Years Later, Supreme Court Will Revisit Eyewitness IDs." Here's an extended excerpt from the beginning of the article:
Mistaken identifications lead to wrongful convictions. Of the first 250 DNA exonerations, 190 involved eyewitnesses who were wrong, as documented in “Convicting the Innocent,” a recent book by Brandon L. Garrett, a law professor at the University of Virginia.
Many of those witnesses were as certain as they were wrong. “There is absolutely no question in my mind,” said one. Another was “120 percent” sure. A third said, “That is one face I will never forget.” A fourth allowed for a glimmer of doubt: “This is the man, or it is his twin brother.”
In November, the Supreme Court will return to the question of what the Constitution has to say about the use of eyewitness evidence. The last time the court took a hard look at the question was in 1977. Since then, the scientific understanding of human memory has been transformed.
Indeed, there is no area in which social science research has done more to illuminate a legal issue. More than 2,000 studies on the topic have been published in professional journals in the past 30 years.
What they collectively show is that it is perilous to base a conviction on a witness’s identification of a stranger. Memory is not a videotape. It is fragile at best, worse under stress and subject to distortion and contamination.
The unreliability of eyewitness identification is matched by its power.
“There is almost nothing more convincing,” Justice William J. Brennan Jr. wrote in a 1981 dissent, quoting from a leading study, “than a live human being who takes the stand, points a finger at the defendant, and says, ‘That’s the one!’ ”
The American Psychological Association, in a friend-of-the-court brief in the new Supreme Court case, said “research shows that juries tend to ‘over believe’ eyewitness testimony.”
Experts in the field are pleased that the Supreme Court will again consider the place of eyewitness evidence in the criminal justice system.
“It is exciting that the court has actually taken an eyewitness ID case for the first time in many years,” Professor Garrett said, “even if it might be the wrong case on the wrong issue.” The justices are likely to rule only about which kinds of eyewitness identifications warrant a closer look from judges — just those made after the police used improperly suggestive procedures or all problematic ones?
The larger and more important question of what that closer look should involve is probably not in play in the case, Perry v. New Hampshire, No, 10-8974.
The SCOTUS Blog case file for Perry v. New Hampshire contains all briefing. Related posts are in the eyewitness identification index.
Earlier coverage of Brandon Garrett, author of the recently published, Convicting the Innocent: Where Criminal Prosecutions Go Wrong, begins at this link.
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