As with DNA evidence, eyewitness evidence needs to be safeguarded against contamination. When proper procedures are not followed, the potential for error exists. One estimate based on a 1989 survey of prosecutors suggests that at least 80,000 eyewitnesses make identifications of suspects in criminal investigations each year.25 Renowned Expert witnesses include doctors, psychologists, psychiatrists, social workers, and other professionals who are instructed to give expert opinions in legal proceedings. She was sentenced to life in prison. 'But foreign interference and the Persian-language media that are based in the United States and Britain focused their activities on encouraging and instigating the riots and acts of terror. Continue reading with a Scientific American subscription. Abcarian: Mask mandates? Please send suggestions to Mind Matters editor Gareth Cook. Not only do such statements inflate eyewitnesses confidence in the accuracy of their identification, but they lead them to falsely remember having been that confident all along. Because she had already servednine years and four months of her initial life sentence, she was released following the change of conviction. 3 Eyewitness Misidentification. Why not be the first to send us your thoughts, document.getElementById( "ak_js_1" ).setAttribute( "value", ( new Date() ).getTime() ); This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. In one study, people playing the role of jurors were able to reliably distinguish between accurate and mistaken eyewitnesses when the witnesses had not received any confirmatory feedback. Thus, Chester was charged with three separate felonies as a way to overwhelm him and break him down. The parole board initially approved him for release. They found that the odds of a false identification were 1.56 times greater in cases where the race was different than the witness, thus highlighting how bias can affect how somebody remembers an event.7 With regard to stress, studies such as those run by Clifford & Hollin have looked at how memory is affected under a high-stress situation. After killing the officer, the shooter fled the scene and a high-speed car chase ensued. 22 Edwin M. Borchard, Convicting the Innocent: Sixty-Five Actual Errors of Criminal Justice (New York: Garden City Publishing Company, Inc., 1932). 10 Manson v. Brathwaite, 432 U.S. 98, 114 (1977). was a video tape, and his presence and the time of the event were confirmed by two athletic directors, his coach, and members of the opposing team. Medicolegal court reports are requested where expert witness evidence is required. Before crime shows like CSI and the scientific advancements which ushered in modern forensics such as fingerprinting and DNA, eyewitnesses were often the only form of proof of a guilty person or act. An Iranian girl passed away and we were all very sorry about that. A judge can review the footage to see if claims of witness tampering are true, or if the witness shows significant doubt while identifying the suspect. Mr. Play it now! An initial eyewitness identification made with low confidence indicates that even though memory was not contaminated, the ID is untrustworthy (that is, by indicating low confidence, the eyewitness is effectively saying, Theres a good chance that Im making an error). U. L. Rev. This created an inherent bias that made the lineup unfair, and likely affected the victims subsequent identification. 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Miller was ultimately charged with rape, robbery and kidnapping. Even if he allows it, he will have to instruct the jury about the variables that can lead to misidentification. The court tried to deter false identification with a stepped process. The psychiatrist found that she had an adjustment disorder at the time she killed her husband, enabling her solicitors to challenge her conviction for murder. Expert witnesses are often instructed in cases where expert evidence is necessary to enable the court to understand specific issues, such as capacity, intent, causation etc. Thanks for reading Scientific American. The transcript from Lydell Grants trial revealed that the homicide detective in charge of investigating the case administered the lineup to the eyewitnesses. Thomas D. Albright, director of the Vision Center Laboratory at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, listed some of the many variables affecting eyewitness testimony in a 2017 paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, entitled Why Eyewitnesses Fail.. Column: 15 minutes of fame flies by. The other individuals placed in a lineup with the suspect (known as fillers) are supposed to reasonably resemble the suspect in terms of age, height and weight so that the suspect does not stand out. In Millers case, the two parking lot attendants were immediately suspicious when the victims car approached the ticket booth. By posting your comment you agree to our house rules. One eyewitness couldnt recall whether the detective had told him anything after he identified Grant, but the detective acknowledged telling that particular eyewitness good job following the identification. Until he was released on parole, the 81-year-old Weger ranked as the second longest-held inmate in Illinois prison system. Widespread civil unrest broke out in Iran following the suspicious death of Amini on September 16, 2022. This section will focus on the courts current treatment of eyewitness testimony. He was 19 at the time of that attack. The victim, a white female, parked her car in that garage every day and the attendants noticed that as the car approached there was an unknown black male driving the car. Demonstrators have cut and burned their head coverings while shouting anti-government slogans. Subsequent memory tests, including the dramatic one that occurs in court in front of the jury, constitute contaminated evidence. Assessing confidence is critical because it provides direct information about the trustworthiness of the uncontaminated ID. The shooter wound up crashing the car and escaping on foot. In one clip an unidentified Iranian woman can be heard saying: 'They are without shame and should be embarrassed. Finally, a witness may have more difficulty making a correct identification when he and the suspect are of different races. The sooner police, prosecutors and judges understand that fact, the better off we all will beincluding you, if you are ever incorrectly fingered by an eyewitness. Confidence reported at trial after the eyewitness has received confirmatory feedback is not. Following a protracted trial,Saunders was found guilty ofconspiracy, theft, and false accounting. (Sometimes there is an issue of racial bias connected with eyewitness misidentification, but this was not a factor as the parking lot attendants were also African American.). Other major dangers that have plagued eyewitness reports are factors such as high-stress situations, how witnesses are interviewed by police, and whether the victim is the same or different race as the witness.6 In 2001, Meissner and Brigham performed a broad review of research on cross-race identification, analyzing data from 39 research articles and 5,000 subjects/witnesses. In a recent review of the literature, the authors reported across 15 experiments, suspect identifications made with high confidence were, on average, 97 percent accurate! The prosecutor, Doug Evans, tried Curtis Flowers, a former employee at Tardy, six times for the crime.29 The Flowers case relied on three key points of evidence: (1) the eyewitness testimony of people who placed Curtis Flowers on the route from his home, to steal a gun, back to his home and then to Tardy to commit the murders and then home again (2) ballistics and (3) jailhouse confessions.30 On Monday Amirabdollahian was controversially tasked with giving a speech on Human Rights at a UN meeting. Miller was placed in a lineup and one of the parking lot attendants positively identified Miller; the other parking lot attendant tentatively identified him. For every one of those tests, the eyewitnesses were, at best, uncertain. Instead evidence collected at the contaminated crime scene would probably be declared inadmissible. Last updated: 27 February 2023. One of my clients, Cleve Heidelberg, was convicted in 1970 of killing a Peoria County, Ill., sheriffs deputy who was responding to a call about an armed robbery at a drive-in movie theatre. Once a suspect has established that he was the victim of suggestiveness, a pretrial hearing will be held in which the full range of reasons for possible misidentification are examined. Yes, the 1959 Matthiessen (Not Deer Park) State Park rape/robbery played a role in Wegers arrest (the rape victim ALSO ID Weger separately and BEFORE the line-up mentioned here), but it played NO role (not mentioned at all) in his trial or subsequent conviction. Most recently, in 2012, the Supreme Court clarified that the Due Process Clause does not require judges to assess the reliability of eyewitness identifications made under suggestive circumstances when the circumstances are not created by law enforcement officials.15 In other words, in cases where the proffered identification does not result from suggestive police procedure, the judge need not consider whether the identification also passes the second step of the Manson test. Overall, an issue plaguing both courts and law enforcement is the lack of standard procedures to safeguard defendants against unreliable eyewitness testimony. Retrieved March, 2019. After she had spent several years in prison, an independent consultant psychiatrist was instructed as an expert witness. Pay farmers handsomely to give up their water rights. One reported that he had identified Grant without doubt or hesitation. Family weapons were used to kill the victims in the Murdaugh case, prosecutor says Prosecutor Creighton Waters speaks during closing arguments on Wednesday, March 1. University of Virginia law professor Brandon Garrett analyzed trial materials for 161 DNA exonerated individuals who had been misidentified with high confidence by one or more eyewitnesses in a court of law. My review of the transcripts from Grants trial suggests a simple explanation for these high-confidence mistakes: The police did not use scientific best practices for collecting the eyewitness identification evidence. Do not sell or share my personal information. Instead of concluding that DNA evidence is inherently unreliable because of the contamination that apparently occurred in this case, a more reasonable conclusion would be that for DNA testing to be reliable, proper protocols must be followed. Videotaping allows for review of eyewitness testimony later on in the trial if the reliability of eyewitness testimony is called into question. Warmer storms could cause problems, Column: Supreme Court conservatives may want to block student loan forgiveness. In Winona, Mississippi on July 16, 1996, four people were shot and killed at Tardy furniture store. Who can help student-athletes cash in? In the United States, more than 300 exonerations have resulted from postconviction DNA testing since 1989.26 According to the Innocence Project, at least one mistaken eyewitness identification was present in almost three-quarters of DNA exonerations.27 In many of these cases, eyewitness identification played a significant evidentiary role, and almost without exception, the eyewitnesses who testified expressed complete confidence that they had chosen the perpetrator. Confidence collected at the time of an identification during a double-blind lineup procedure is informative regarding the eyewitnesss accuracy. Pictured: Protestors take part in an anti-Iran demonstration on December 24, 2022 in Istanbul, Turkey, Women burned their headscarves in Kurdish-controlled north-east Syria in September 2022. Only radical intervention can save juvenile justice. or debate this issue live on our message boards. These courts generally accept detailed descriptions of relevant scientific research findings to either attack or support eyewitness testimony.19 Other courts, meanwhile, leave the jury to determine the credibility of eyewitness testimony and insist that findings from scientific research in this area cannot help the jury to do so.20 26 The Innocence Project, DNA Exoneree Case Profiles,. The guilty verdict was confirmed by both state Appellate and Supreme Courts. Perhaps one of the most striking examples of the flaws in eyewitness testimony is the case of Jerry Miller, who was convicted of rape, robbery and kidnapping in 1982. Questions were raised about the outcome after Ernest Saunders made a recovery following his release. A meta-analytic review of the effects of high stress on eyewitness memory, Law and Human Behavior 28.6 (2004), 687-706. This case raised important questions about the reliability of expert evidence. The Manson admissibility test consists of two steps. Publication Date: December 20, 2021 Eyewitness testimony in court is shown to highly sway the opinion of jurors. It was the right decision on the time. Thirty Years of DNA Forensics: How DNA Has Revolutionized Criminal Investigations., See here: Innocence Project, Eyewitness misidentification, Crime in the United States 2012: Persons Arrested,. What the cases of Miller and Heidelberg highlight is that witnesses are often wrong. John Worboys was given an indeterminate prison sentence. 109, 10910 (2006). But studies demonstrate that a variety of factors can lead to the misidentification of criminals. In this case, the defendant was charged with first degree murder and the only evidence against him was the testimony of two eyewitnesses. 28 Brandon L. Garrett, Convicting the Innocent: Where Criminal Prosecutions Go Wrong 6368 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011). Historically, eyewitness testimony has been in use not only in the United States and our penal system but all around the world. Some courts have held it as an abuse of discretion for a trial judge to bar the defense from admitting expert testimony on eyewitness identification. During the tense interview, Amirabdollahian claimed Mahsa Amini - the 22-year-old who died after being arrested by morality police for failing to wear the hijab - was turned into a 'symbol' by protesters. In 1932, Yale University law professor Edwin M. Borchard documented nearly seventy cases of miscarriage of justice caused by eyewitness errors in his book, Convicting the Innocent. 'You're supposed to interview me but you're actually having a confrontation with me,' he told Amanpour. 25 A. G. Goldstein, J. E. Chance, and G. R. Schneller, Frequency of Eyewitness Identification in Criminal Cases: A Survey of Prosecutors, 27(1) Bulletin of the Psychonomic Society: 71, 73 (January 1989). Imagine if police let unauthorized people have willy-nilly access to a crime scene that is under investigation. A letter by UN Watch - a Geneva-based organization monitoring activities of the UN - urged all 193 members to leave the meeting. Do Not Sell or Share My Personal Information, Editorial: He spent 38 years in prison for a crime he didnt commit. A new version of that legislation, AB 308, is pending in the state Senate, though passage in this session is unlikely. There have been many famous expert witness cases. Arnaud, Celia Henry. He did it and was fortunate not to be sentenced to death in that era. The Innocence Project found that out of 138 cases, two-thirds of the DNA exonerated cases were due to an eyewitness testimony (Howitt, 2012). He was sentenced to 30 months in prison. First, another DNA profileone belonging to John Ruelas, who was just a four-year-old preschooler at the time of the murderwas found on a blood spot taken from the victims left hand. The ability of a person who witnesses a crime to later pick the perpetrator out of a lineup is atrociousright? The reliability of these alleged identifications was suspect, since the officers would have had only a fraction of a second to observe the driver whizz by them at a high rate of speed at night. His doctors maintained that he was suffering from pre-senile dementia, and he couldnt remember three numbers backwards or the name of the US president. A neurologist also claimed that Saunders brain was small for a man his age and showed evidence of shrinking. Expert Evidence In Family Cases Where Spouse Is Unable To Return To Work Due To Illness, The revised psychopathy checklist (PCL-R), Proving Automatism Defences In Criminal Cases, Understanding the Value of an Occupational Therapist Expert Witness, Causation in personal injury or medical negligence, Assessments of sexual offending, violent behaviour offending, arson, and stalking. At the time of his release, Jerry Miller had served over 26 years in prison for a crime he did not commit. The puzzling question in this case, though, is why did six eyewitnesses independently identify Lydell Grant as the killer and then confidently testify in court? Do you want to automatically post your MailOnline comments to your Facebook Timeline? Letters to the Editor: Yes, L.A. drivers are getting worse. In contrast, a high-confidence ID is highly accurate, a surprising fact that has only recently come to be appreciated by experimental psychologists. But a comparison of the pairs mugshots reveals that they bear little physical resemblance to one another beyond both being Black men. Daryl G. Kimball and Frank von Hippel | Opinion. This is not always the case. Renowned Expert witnesses include doctors, psychologists, psychiatrists, social workers, and other professionals who are instructed to give expert opinions in legal proceedings. See here: Innocence Project, Eyewitness misidentification accessed on March 9, 2019. Even though no connection between Leiterman and Ruelas was ever established, the prosecution theorized that all three must have been together after midnight at the murder scene in 1969, with the preschooler bleeding on the victim for some unknown reason while Leiterman killed her. Later two slideshows were shown, one with a stop sign and the other with a yield sign and they asked the subjects which was the one they had previously seen. Most witnesses didnt come forward of their own accord, and often enough it was the lead investigator for the district attorneys office, John Johnson, who found the witnesses, and brought them in to testify. Most of these witnesses personally knew Flowers, and many had grown up with him, lived in his same neighborhood. Working closely with our specialist human resource colleagues, we offer a holistic advisory and support service for employers encompassing both the legal and people risks of workforce management. Once this fact is appreciated, then proper testing protocols can be put in place to minimize the likelihood that the original memory trace is contaminated. Although she was due to face further trial at the Central Criminal Court, on the basis of the expert evidence, the Crown accepted her plea to the lesser offence of manslaughter on the grounds of diminished responsibility. Not so with eyewitness memory. Additional Reading: Truth, Lies and Police Lineups, The Crime Report, May 5, 2021. More and more research has come out in the last few decades indicating that there are many dangers to relying on eyewitnesses, from the uncertainty of relying on a persons memory all the way to how they are questioned at the police station. In the Miller case, a. Instructing an expert witness is not unusualthere are many much-publicised cases where the role of expert evidence has been significant. In about 70% of these cases, misidentification by one or more eyewitnesses contributed significantly as evidence for conviction.3, Eyewitness Testimony: General Social Science Findings, Throughout history, eyewitness testimony was held up as the golden nugget of evidence. Ruling in the case of a man convicted of manslaughter and aggravated assault, the court noted that several variables can produce mistaken eyewitness testimony. The modern test for the admissibility of eyewitness testimony at a criminal trial under the Due Process Clause was established by the U.S. Supreme Court in Manson v. Brathwaite in 1977. Gareth, a Pulitzer prize-winning journalist, is the series editor of Best American Infographics and can be reached at garethideas AT gmail.com or Twitter@garethideas. Kendall Taggart BuzzFeed News Reporter Law enforcement officers, prosecutors, attorneys, and jurors need to realize that just because a witness says so does not make it so. 'The issue in Iran at the moment is not that of hijab.'. If New Jersey can have statewide guidelines, so can California. Press Esc to cancel. Moreover, confirmatory feedback can alter witnesses memories of the original crime, making them less able to recognize the actual perpetrator when they see him again. You can choose on each post whether you would like it to be posted to Facebook. By the way, Weger signed EVERY SINGLE PAGE of the FIRST confession which was transcribed by a court reporter who testified under OATH Weger was not threatened or harmed when he made his damning statement. cases where eyewitnesses were rightammo donation to ukraine. Years later, in 1967, the U.S. Supreme Court highlighted the danger of erroneous eyewitness identification in United States v. Wade, stating, The vagaries of eyewitness identification are well-known; the annals of criminal law are rife with instances of mistaken identification.23 The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) estimates that U.S. law enforcement made 12,196,959 arrests in 2012. Officers of the law should be instructed by their superiors about the potential inaccuracies and dangers of witness testimony. About the trustworthiness of the uncontaminated ID, Jerry Miller had served over 26 years in,! At best, uncertain with first degree murder and the suspect are of different races these. 20, 2021 eyewitness testimony later on in the trial if the reliability of expert evidence their coverings... Standard procedures to safeguard defendants against unreliable eyewitness testimony has been significant when he and the only evidence him. Overall, an independent consultant psychiatrist was instructed as an expert witness is not unusualthere are many much-publicised cases the! 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