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. What law enforcement—and the public—needs to know. And third, the confidence expressed by the eyewitness following an identification of someone from the lineup must be recorded. Faulty eyewitness testimony has been implicated in at least 75% of DNA exoneration cases—more than any other cause ( Garrett, 2011 ). But increasingly it is being found that this is not the case. People are different in the way they recognize and recall events especially through perception. Eyewitness testimony is considered by juries to be a reliable form of evidence, if a person saw something happen then surely it happened. "Our whole point is that you have to pay attention to confidence expressed on the initial identification only." As the research on how to better eyewitness testimony continues, we have seen the development of having a double blinded study. By itself, that fact only shows that contaminated memory is unreliable (just as contaminated DNA evidence is). 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. In a particularly famous case, a man named Ronald Cotton was identified by a rape victim, Jennifer Thompson, as her rapist, and was found guilty and sentenced to life in prison study. Thompson picked out 22-year-old Ronald Cotton, whose photograph was on file because of a robbery committed in his youth. 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. Eyewitness testimony is an important area of research in cognitive psychology and human memory. When the eyewitnesses made a decision, they also noted how confident they felt about their choice on a three-point scale—high, medium, or low. The study shows that there is real information to be gained from the initial confidence level, says Craig Stark, a psychologist at UC Irvine. Any evidence can potentially be contaminated, including what is considered to be the gold standard of forensic evidence: DNA. In this article, take a look at the problems with eyewitness testimony. Faulty eyewitness testimony has been implicated in at least 75% of DNA exoneration cases—more than … But there is more to the story. The same is true of eyewitness memory: memory can be contaminated with the trace of an innocent person, but under proper testing conditions, eyewitness evidence is highly reliable. In a particularly famous case, a man named Ronald Cotton was identified by a rape victim, Jennifer Thompson, as her rapist, and was found guilty and sentenced to … Few would doubt that under such conditions, DNA evidence is highly reliable. But in 57 percent of those cases, it was possible to determine what happened on the initial (uncontaminated) memory test. No one doubts that eyewitness evidence is risky. 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. Young adults (17 – 25) and older adults (65 – 85) were shown a video of a theft. However, research into this area has found that eyewitness testimony can be affected by many psychological factors: Anxiety / Stress 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. DNA evidence has played a big role in proving the unreliability of eyewitness testimony. "Can those subtleties be applied in a balanced way in people who are coming in with clear biases and preconceived notions?". 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. And have you read a recent peer-reviewed paper that you would like to write about? However, smart criminal defense attorneys know that witness accounts are never 100% reliable. 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. Eleven years later, after DNA sequencing technology caught up, samples taken from Thomson's body matched a different man who finally confessed. Attorney Randolph Hough has decades of criminal defense experience and will put that experience to work for you to protect your freedom and reputation. This can affect eyewitness testimony because what if the witness is better in recalling than in recognizing. 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. The findings indicate that eyewitnesses can be easily fooled into confident false memories, and that showing them photographs sequentially reduces false identification. To see why, let us revisit those DNA exoneration cases that so often involve eyewitness misidentification. She negotiated, convincing him to not kill her. Eyewitness testimony may only be credible under these circumstances. The ability of a person who witnesses a crime to later pick the perpetrator out of a lineup is atrocious—right? 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. We have previously written about the problems with relying on eyewitness testimony to solve crimes and secure convictions. Subsequent memory tests, including the dramatic one that occurs in court in front of the jury, constitute contaminated evidence. AAAS is a partner of HINARI, AGORA, OARE, CHORUS, CLOCKSS, CrossRef and COUNTER. Jury’s place great reliance on eyewitness testimony and ignore the dangers of false memories (Engelhardt, n. d). John Wixted is a Distinguished Professor of Psychology at the University of California, San Diego. Now, a new study of robbery investigations suggests that these changes may be doing more harm than good. As with DNA evidence, eyewitness evidence needs to be safeguarded against contamination. Why is this the case? 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Attributing that error to the unreliability of eyewitness memory is, in our view, pointing the finger of blame in the wrong direction. Subscribers get more award-winning coverage of advances in science & technology. 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. When word reached Cotton that the police were looking for him, he walked into a precinct voluntarily. 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. 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. 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. In the first one, the Innocence project examined many cases where they used DNA to exonerate 130 cases. 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. In July 1984, a man broke into the apartment of Jennifer Thompson, a 22-year-old in North Carolina, and threatened her with a knife. He was eventually sentenced to life in prison based on Thompson's testimony. While eyewitness testimony is not reliable as your sole means of proof, it can still be helpful as supporting evidence. In July 1984, a man broke into the apartment of Jennifer Thompson, a 22-year-old in North Carolina, … John is a former contributing correspondent for Science. © 2020 Scientific American, a Division of Springer Nature America, Inc. Support our award-winning coverage of advances in science & technology. Karpel et al (2001) as cited in Science Aid carried out research associated with age and eyewitness testimony. 30 According to … Cotton was set free. 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. 7 hours ago — Emily V. Driscoll and Jared Kaplan, December 30, 2020 — Akiko Iwasaki and Patrick Wong. 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. Are you a scientist who specializes in neuroscience, cognitive science, or psychology? 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." 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. And indeed, that's exactly how it worked out. 51 The visual attention given by a witness to a weapon can impair his or her ability to make a reliable … 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. They focused on 348 robberies that occurred in 2013 and involved eyewitnesses and a single suspect. The information gained from such research endeavors is important to defense attorneys who have to overcome the hurdle of a positive eyewitness identification of their client. 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. All rights Reserved. If confidence really is a strong indicator of accuracy, the researchers reasoned, eyewitnesses who were more certain of their choice should be more likely to identify the suspects who also had abundant corroborating evidence, and eyewitnesses who double-guessed themselves should be less accurate. 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. 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. To get a handle on the problem, researchers have conducted experiments in which actors play out a crime, and subjects try to correctly identify the perpetrator from a lineup. ", But many researchers are calling for caution before changing the system. When Thompson first identified Cotton by photo, she was not convinced of her choice. Are Eyewitnesses in the Zimmerman Trial Reliable? 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”). His aim was to see how reliable eyewitness testimony is in older people. Although the high accuracy of an initial ID made with high confidence is important to appreciate, the low accuracy of an ID made with low confidence may be even more important to appreciate. The prosecutor, Doug Evans, tried Curtis Flowers, a former employee at Tardy, six times for the crime. “The claim that eyewitness testimony is reliable and accurate is testable, and the research is clear that eyewitness identification is vulnerable to distortion without the witness’s awareness. The answer seems like a resounding “yes” if you consider some well-known and rather disconcerting information. 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. The problem is these eyewitness accounts aren't always accurate. To do this, proper testing protocols that reduce chances of contamination need to be followed. It’s true that eyewitness reports and testimony can be a powerful tool for the prosecution. Blood and fingerprint evidence, per se, would not be deemed unreliable. 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). 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. 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… Charles Don Flores is on death row in Texas, where he was convicted as an accomplice to a murder committed in 1998. I have spent over five years studying different areas of memory, such as how people remember different episodes of their lives. But in most cases, that confidence is misplaced. In short, eyewitness testimony is not as reliable as people think and needs to be scrutinized vigorously, especially by defense attorneys. "I think this is the guy," she told the police after several minutes of hesitation. 30, 2020. 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. Instead, he raped her and fled. Eyewitness testimony relies heavily on the capability of the individual’s to accurately recount the event. Courts may be "leaving more criminals on the streets and putting more innocent people behind bars than they should be. In much the same way, an eyewitness can be led to falsely remember someone committing a crime that was actually committed by someone else. 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. What it means is that the malleability of memory can harm reliability. If the contaminated evidence is relied on to establish guilt versus innocence at a trial, the risk of a wrongful conviction is high. 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. Juries are told to discount the value of eyewitness testimony and ignore how confident the witnesses may be about whom they think they saw. 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. 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. Problems with Eyewitness Testimony Memory Is Malleable. 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. As time went on, she grew surer. 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. Many believe that this conviction was based on contaminated DNA evidence. Most of us are pretty confident about our powers of observation and the reliability of our memory. Laura Mickes is an academic at Royal Holloway, University of London. So, how reliable is eyewitness testimony? Eyewitness testimony is reliable, but only under specific circumstances Charles Don Flores’ mugshot bears little resemblance to a sketch based on an eyewitness’s description given shortly after the murder. In a trial, the jury is most often persuaded due to the statement(s) of the witnesses. Memory is not as reliable as we would like to think. 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. At Holland Law, we aggressively fight the allegations and charges against you with strategic defense. But many researchers have voiced concerns about whether these laboratory experiments accurately reflect real-world situations. What would that mean for the reliability of the blood or fingerprint evidence, for example, collected at that scene? Eyewitnesses are generally unaware that their memory has been altered by post-event information To ensure the information witnesses provide is accurate, the people working on a criminal case must carefully examine how witnesses were questioned, as well as the language that law … In contrast, a high-confidence ID is highly accurate, a surprising fact that has only recently come to be appreciated by experimental psychologists. She confidently pointed to him as the man who raped her. Assessing confidence is critical because it provides direct information about the trustworthiness of the uncontaminated ID. Supporting the unreliability of eyewitness testimony are two examples of case exonerations. Weapon focus refers to a factor that affects the reliability of eyewitness testimony. Eyewitness testimony can play a big part in criminal court cases. 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