Subsequent memory tests, including the dramatic one that occurs in court in front of the jury, constitute contaminated evidence. Are Eyewitnesses in the Zimmerman Trial Reliable? Eyewitness memory is reliable when initially tested using proper procedures, but the legal system nonetheless habitually relies on unreliable (contaminated) eyewitness evidence from later IDs. In a trial, the jury is most often persuaded due to the statement(s) of the witnesses. Juries are told to discount the value of eyewitness testimony and ignore how confident the witnesses may be about whom they think they saw. The answer seems like a resounding “yes” if you consider some well-known and rather disconcerting information. Eyewitness testimony can play a big part in criminal court cases. While many people may demand payment for community service, that is not the case with a Bulawayo man who has worked so unselfishly and tirelessly with the Zimbabwe Development Democracy Trust (ZDDT) for over a decade now. Researchers are increasingly finding that the problem with eyewitness testimony is based on a common misunderstanding of how memory functions. The murder victim’s cold case evidence was there because the case had recently been reopened; the 1969 preschooler’s DNA sample was there as part of an active murder investigation, and Leiterman’s DNA sample was there because he had recently been arrested for forging a prescription. The results don't mean that eyewitnesses aren't prone to confident false memories as in the Cotton case, Wixted says, but timing is key. According to the same theory, 33 years later, in 2002, in an almost inconceivable coincidence, evidence samples from Mixer, Ruelas and Leiterman just happened to be together again in the Michigan State Police Laboratory. By Jon Cohen, Dennis NormileDec. 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, “There’s a good chance that I’m making an error”). 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. If the contaminated evidence is relied on to establish guilt versus innocence at a trial, the risk of a wrongful conviction is high. They focused on 348 robberies that occurred in 2013 and involved eyewitnesses and a single suspect. By itself, that fact only shows that contaminated memory is unreliable (just as contaminated DNA evidence is). I have spent over five years studying different areas of memory, such as how people remember different episodes of their lives. Problems with Eyewitness Testimony Memory Is Malleable. When Thompson first identified Cotton by photo, she was not convinced of her choice. Eyewitness testimony relies heavily on the capability of the individual’s to accurately recount the event. Out of the 130 cases, 78 convictions were based solely on eyewitness testimony (Bryant, 2020). More recently, I have focused my attention upon how this memory research can be applied to real life situations, in particular to that of an eyewitness testimony situation where a person must use their eyewitness memory to recall an event that has taken place. Because of examples like these, the U.S. justice system has been changing how eyewitnesses are used in criminal cases. 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. Few would doubt that under such conditions, DNA evidence is highly reliable. When word reached Cotton that the police were looking for him, he walked into a precinct voluntarily. Then the police showed her a series of mug shots of similar-looking men. Even if there is a small detail in an eyewitness testimony that doesn’t match with the testimony of another, the witness account can be helpful as long as there is a lot of physical evidence that backs up the main points that are given. So a team led by John Wixted, a psychologist at the University of California (UC), San Diego, ran an experiment with the robbery division of the Houston Police Department in Texas. To make sure that the police could not unintentionally influence the process, officers who didn’t know who the real suspect was presented photos of six people to the eyewitnesses. Blood and fingerprint evidence, per se, would not be deemed unreliable. The nearly simultaneous analyses of evidence from these three cases in the same crime lab in 2002—a reunion, of sorts, among Mixer, Ruelas and Leiterman, who were ostensibly last together on the night of the murder in 1969—was either an incredible coincidence or the Mixer evidence was contaminated with DNA from both Leiterman and Ruelas. Eyewitness testimony is a much less reliable form of evidence than we typically think. The ability of a person who witnesses a crime to later pick the perpetrator out of a lineup is atrocious—right? "I think this is the guy," she told the police after several minutes of hesitation. But in 57 percent of those cases, it was possible to determine what happened on the initial (uncontaminated) memory test. Thompson picked out 22-year-old Ronald Cotton, whose photograph was on file because of a robbery committed in his youth. As with DNA evidence, eyewitness evidence needs to be safeguarded against contamination. 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. He was eventually sentenced to life in prison based on Thompson's testimony. "Can those subtleties be applied in a balanced way in people who are coming in with clear biases and preconceived notions?". And third, the confidence expressed by the eyewitness following an identification of someone from the lineup must be recorded. In July 1984, a man broke into the apartment of Jennifer Thompson, a 22-year-old in North Carolina, … Attributing that error to the unreliability of eyewitness memory is, in our view, pointing the finger of blame in the wrong direction. In this article, take a look at the problems with eyewitness testimony. The justice system should reconsider how eyewitness testimony is used, he says, because "there's a lot at stake here." To see why, let us revisit those DNA exoneration cases that so often involve eyewitness misidentification. Some elements include the following: First, and most important of all, because the test itself contaminates memory, only the initial memory test provides uncontaminated results. But many researchers have voiced concerns about whether these laboratory experiments accurately reflect real-world situations. And when the police had ample corroborating evidence against the suspects, the rate of positive identification by confident eyewitnesses shot up to 90%, the team reports online today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 50 Where a weapon is used during a crime, the weapon is likely to divert the witness's attention to the weapon that the perpetrator is holding and this affects the ability of the witness to concentrate on the details of the crime. Roughly 13 of cases in which a person was wrongfully ... Convictions overturned by DN Evans were based on on reliable eyewitness testimony. But increasingly it is being found that this is not the case. Eyewitness testimony is considered by juries to be a reliable form of evidence, if a person saw something happen then surely it happened. Moreover, one third of those overturned cases rested primarily on the testimony of two or more mistaken eyewitnesses. Each case also had a certain amount of corroborating evidence, ranging from weak—the suspect was known to be close to the scene of the crime—to strong—the suspect's shoes matched a footprint at the scene. The sooner police, prosecutors and judges understand that fact, the better off we all will be—including you, if you are ever incorrectly fingered by an eyewitness. And have you read a recent peer-reviewed paper that you would like to write about? AAAS is a partner of HINARI, AGORA, OARE, CHORUS, CLOCKSS, CrossRef and COUNTER. 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. Are you a scientist who specializes in neuroscience, cognitive science, or psychology? What would that mean for the reliability of the blood or fingerprint evidence, for example, collected at that scene? Consider the important, and often overlooked, distinction between malleability and reliability. As time went on, she grew surer. So, how reliable is eyewitness testimony? In much the same way, an eyewitness can be led to falsely remember someone committing a crime that was actually committed by someone else. More specifically, the assumption that memory provides an accurate recording of experience, much like … Now, a new study of robbery investigations suggests that these changes may be doing more harm than good. Courts may be "leaving more criminals on the streets and putting more innocent people behind bars than they should be. Under the right circumstances, eyewitness testimony can be reliable. Faulty eyewitness testimony has been implicated in at least 75% of DNA exoneration cases—more than … Laura Mickes is an academic at Royal Holloway, University of London. Using surveys, researchers could acquire jurors' options regarding the presented expert testimony, and what qualities made the testimony reliable or unreliable (e.g., Cutler, Penrod, & Dexter, 1989). By the time Thompson faced Cotton in court a year later, her doubts were gone. Assessing confidence is critical because it provides direct information about the trustworthiness of the uncontaminated ID. The results of the study make sense, says Aaron Benjamin, a psychologist at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, because disregarding eyewitness confidence is "dramatically inconsistent with widely accepted views about memory." In the first one, the Innocence project examined many cases where they used DNA to exonerate 130 cases. Instead, he raped her and fled. Eyewitness misidentifications are known to have played a role in 70 percent of the 349 wrongful convictions that have been overturned based on DNA evidence (so far). With the many cases where an eyewitness testimony has wrongfully convicted a suspect, one would think that the use of eyewitness evidence as the most important piece of evidence would be removed. The study shows that there is real information to be gained from the initial confidence level, says Craig Stark, a psychologist at UC Irvine. In view of these findings, this work will investigate the “extent to which eyewitness testimony is reliable in today’s judicial system” focusing on major factors that influence our memory and ability to remember. Young adults (17 – 25) and older adults (65 – 85) were shown a video of a theft. Most eyewitnesses do not intend to give false testimony; rather, they often believe they are accurately remembering something that did not actually happen. Imagine if police let unauthorized people have willy-nilly access to a crime scene that is under investigation. One researcher notes that while most people consider memory to be akin to a video recording that can simply be "replayed," the truth is that memory is more like a puzzle that is constantly being reconstructe… It’s been able to definitively prove that eyewitness accounts were incorrect. To the swelling chorus of activists and researchers who argue that eyewitness testimony is both fundamentally unreliable and over-relied upon, the Cotton case is a prime example of what can go tragically wrong when court cases hinge on human recollection. In order for jurors to accurately weigh the value of testimony by its initial confidence, they will need to use sophisticated statistical reasoning, he says. Highly confident eyewitnesses fingered the suspect about 75% of the time, and falsely accused one of the five innocent people less than 20% of the time. 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. In the majority of cases where DNA evidence has exonerated someone wrongly convicted, the initial eyewitness identifications were made with low confidence, not high confidence, Wixted says. But factoring in the confidence of the eyewitness painted a different picture. If confidence scores were incorporated into the evidence, not only might fewer innocent people get accused but more guilty people might be convicted, he says. Any evidence can potentially be contaminated, including what is considered to be the gold standard of forensic evidence: DNA. Hundreds of innocent people have been exonerated by DNA evidence in the United States since the 1990s, and eyewitness misidentification was the root cause in 70% of the cases. Scientific American is part of Springer Nature, which owns or has commercial relations with thousands of scientific publications (many of them can be found at, 70 percent of the 349 wrongful convictions. No one doubts that eyewitness evidence is risky. The findings indicate that eyewitnesses can be easily fooled into confident false memories, and that showing them photographs sequentially reduces false identification. In fact, there are several issues that can arise when it comes to eyewitness testimony, which in turn, makes the testimony of an eyewitness unreliable in court. Weapon focus refers to a factor that affects the reliability of eyewitness testimony. At Holland Law, we aggressively fight the allegations and charges against you with strategic defense. Subscribers get more award-winning coverage of advances in science & technology. Eyewitness testimony is an important area of research in cognitive psychology and human memory. Juries tend to pay close attention to eyewitness testimony and generally find it a reliable source of information. First, another DNA profile—one belonging to John Ruelas, who was just a four-year-old preschooler at the time of the murder—was found on a blood spot taken from the victim’s left hand. Eyewitness testimony may only be credible under these circumstances. ATTACHMENT A Summaries of 46 Cases in Which Mistaken or Perjured Eyewitness Testimony Put Innocent Persons on Death Row Adams, Randall Dale (convicted 1977, exonerated 1989) — Mr. Adams was sentenced to death for the murder of a police officer in Dallas County, Texas. Consider, for example, the case of Gary Leiterman, who, in 2005, was convicted of murder and sentenced to life in prison following a cold case investigation in which his DNA was found on the clothing of a woman named Jane Mixer, who was murdered in 1969. Cotton was set free. © 2020 Scientific American, a Division of Springer Nature America, Inc. Support our award-winning coverage of advances in science & technology. Also, in cases where little material evidence can be collected, eyewitnesses are the focus for reaching a verdict. Whether or not a person is convicted of a crime can come down to the reliability of an eyewitness and how confidently he or she conveys testimony to a jury. Here’s the thing, testimony from eyewitnesses is not always reliable. 30 According to … Overall, the eyewitnesses fingered the suspect about one-third of the time, positively identified one of the five innocent people used to fill up the photo lineup one-third of the time, or decided that the perpetrator was not in the lineup at all one-third of the time. Eyewitnesses are generally unaware that their memory has been altered by post-event information Just hours later, a sketch artist worked with Thompson to create an image of the assailant's face. Eyewitness testimony can be quite powerful in the eyes of a jury, but it’s important to remember that it’s not one hundred percent reliable. The problem is these eyewitness accounts aren't always accurate. His aim was to see how reliable eyewitness testimony is in older people. 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