Study Weighs In On the Reliability of Eyewitness Testimony

sciencehabit writes The victim peers across the courtroom, points at a man sitting next to a defense lawyer, and confidently says, "That's him!" Such moments have a powerful sway on jurors who decide the fate of thousands of people every day in criminal cases. But how reliable is eyewitness testimony? A new report concludes that the use of eyewitness accounts need tighter control, and among its recommendations is a call for a more scientific approach to how eyewitnesses identify suspects during the classic police lineup.

Comments

Reader's Digest Version

[stevez67]

Eyewitnesses testimony is not nearly as accurate as one would have hoped.

Re:Reader's Digest Version

[myowntrueself]

Eyewitnesses testimony is not nearly as accurate as one would have hoped.

Theres a lot of creativity involved in memory.

Recommended documentary on eyewitness testamony...

[Anonymous Coward]

"My Cousin Vinny"

Documentary

[JStyle]

I think this information is generally well known in law enforcement by now (at least, I hope so). I saw a news documentary on it and it's surprising how poor an eyewitness account can be, especially if handled incorrectly.

Keep spreading awareness:
Documentary Part 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Documentary Part 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Re:Documentary

[kruach aum]

Nothing but the truth: 12 is divisible by 4
The whole truth: 12 is divisible by all real and imaginary numbers.

By stating nothing but the truth you can lie by omission. By stating the whole truth you can confuse your audience by focusing on irrelevant details.

(the interesting truth: 12 is divisible by 12, 6, 4, 3, 2 and 1).

The whole juror system needs to be abandoned

[kruach aum]

The idea that justice can be obtained by being judged by a jury of your peers is based on the hidden premise that people who are equal to you in the way in which they are your peers are capable of rendering a fair judgment upon you. This premise is false. Not only are my peers easily influenced by spurious logic, they are also susceptible to all manner of emotional manipulation, subliminal messaging and whatever else. Justice is not rendered by the level to which one of the lawyers is able to influence these factors. Nevertheless, that is exactly how a majority of cases judged by jurors are played out. Being judged by a jury of your peers may have been a good idea 300-400 years ago, but now we know better. Why doesn't the law reflect that?

Re:The whole juror system needs to be abandoned

[sexconker]

Being judged by your peers isn't about their ability to accurately judge, avoid bias, etc. (that's what juror selection, the judge's instructions, sequestration, etc. are for).
Being judged by your peers is about NOT being judged by a population of powerful/rich/elite fucks who absolutely have no idea what life is like for the people they are judging.

Re:The whole juror system needs to be abandoned

[Anonymous Coward]

I knew a lawyer once that told me they try to weed out critical thinkers in the selection process. If you have an engineering or science degree they don't want you. If you have a law degree, they really don't want you.

Re: The whole juror system needs to be abandoned

[Anonymous Coward]

My psych research specifically investigated the impact of warning a jury about the impact of social contagion on eyewitness statements. It found if you warned jurors they actually take this on board and shift their judgment of the testimony appropriately. This suggests that jurors specifically aren't the problem as such it is more about education - it is a very commonly held belief that eyewitness testimony is strong because people themselves don't question the accuracy of their own memories and tend to apply this in assessing the memory of others.

Re:The whole juror system needs to be abandoned

[Anonymous Coward]

Agreed. The flaw in jury by peers is that the law is written to be incomprehensible, so the jury is forced to defer to the lawyers about what actions could possibly be considered a crime. On a related note, modern juries are never informed of their right of nullification (finding the law to be at fault, rather than a simple guilty or not guilty verdict), they are told repeatedly that their only purpose is to assess the guilt or innocence of the defendant.

Coherent laws and a properly educated jury would resolve many of the issues with the justice system in the USA. The only victims would be the legislatures who would have to write better laws or risk the juries striking them down again and again.

Re:The whole juror system needs to be abandoned

[penguinoid]

We have juries not because they are great, but because the alternative is worse. Sure, if everything goes as it should, a judge or panel of professional jurors would be more accurate than a bunch of novices. But then there is nothing to stop corrupt judges (remember that judge who got bribed to fill up a juvenile for profit prison?).

The jury is there as the final check and balance on the judicial system (deciding guilt or innocence) and also on the legislative branch (jury nullification, declaring innocence because the law itself was wrong).

Re:The whole juror system needs to be abandoned

[Anubis IV]

I gotcha. I thought you were answering his first question (who should you be judged by?), but you were actually answering his second question (who decides who judges you?), correct?

If so, that makes a lot more sense, and it wasn't clear from the context that that's what you meant, hence my reaction, since I assumed you were answering the first question.

My primary issue with the jury system is that oftentimes the people selected as jurors are not actually peers, other than that we may both be citizens. Hypothetically, if there were a perfect means for selecting peers that are appropriate to the case at hand (e.g. technically-minded people for a technical patent case), that seems like it'd be great, and it seems as if that's the sort of thing you're suggesting by saying that judges and law professors should be able to choose jurors. It'd help ensure that the right people get selected for the right juries.

That said, every system of that sort that I've ever seen proposed is open to massive amounts of abuse, including the one you just proposed. Ideas like meta-committees tend to fall apart when you can't tolerate even a single false positive or need to be able to detect and act on biases quickly to remove someone from authority. Moreover, the whole "who watches the watchmen" issue quickly comes into play. Having juries that are entirely outside the purview of watchmen ensures that they're more difficult to tamper with in any sort of widespread way, though obviously there are other issues to contend with.

Honestly, I might be more inclined to simply let jurors provide preferences for which cases they'd be interested in covering. They get there, they're told in general terms what sort of cases are available (e.g. "engineering patent dispute", "murder", "traffic ticket"), they order them based on preference, and then some sort of weighted algorithm with a bit of randomness assigns them accordingly. It doesn't fix nearly everything, but it keeps people out of the process and may help to take the edge off of some of the worst aspects of purely random assignments to cases.

Re:The whole juror system needs to be abandoned

[Whatsisname]

The law is full of vagueness and contradictions. The very term "reasonable", which is common in many criminal statutes, by its very nature is open to interpretation and depends on situation.

You are right in that the laws are written much as computer programs are, except the people writing them don't even have remotely the skill to properly do so. And the law doesn't have an implementation to test against, it's written and goes straight into production. We all know how well that practice usually turns out for software developers.

Unlike code, with the law, instead of a bluescreen, when an error occurs, someone gets killed, goes to prison, or loses their property.

Re:The whole juror system needs to be abandoned

[sjames]

They can be more flexible about it even without more money. They don't HAVE to threaten with arrest right off the bat. They could not make you wait until after business hours the night before to find out if you will or will not be needed. They could provide enough chairs for everyone to sit. They could avoid calling some people every year and some never. They could waive the parking fee. Instead of arresting people who can't get there, they could give them a lift (don't tell me they don't have the resources, if they can give you a lift to jail, they can give you a lift to the courthouse).

For that matter, they could make it illegal to cut your hours or fire you if you have jury duty AND enforce it.

And, of course, they could not charge so many people with victimless nonviolent drug charges so they wouldn't need so many jurors.

Re:The whole juror system needs to be abandoned

[Chewbacon]

And what's your problem with accuracy exactly? Is it finding too many innocent people guilty or vice versa? And what methods do you propose take over? The telescreen? Mass surveillance of every moment of our lives? Not at the cost of right to privacy. Take some comfort in knowing our justice system is intended to let guilty men go free over incarcerating innocent men.

Re:Recommended documentary on eyewitness testamony

[rahvin112]

That was more a documentary on how police take innocent statements and turn them against you to make you look guilty. People should understand that when the police take his exclamation of disbelief and remove the context and emotion and read that back in court as an admission of guilt by the defendant that this is not only used in real life but used frequently and is precisely why you should never ever talk to the police without a lawyer present.

Humans are suspectible to tricks.

[gurps_npc]

Lots of little tricks affect the human mind.

You can watch a man in an ape suit dance and never see him. http://www.theinvisiblegorilla...

That's why cops are supposed to do mug shots/line ups sequentially instead of simultaneously (i.e. "Is this the guy? No. How about this guy? No." Rather than "Pick the guy from these people.")

It's also why so many people confess to crimes they did not do.

Their is no such thing as indisputable proof. Just our best guess.

Re:Humans are suspectible to tricks.

[Anubis IV]

That's why cops are supposed to do mug shots/line ups sequentially instead of simultaneously

I actually read the article, and I noticed this tidbit:

For some of the scientific controversies surrounding eyewitness accounts, the new report withholds judgment. For example, the traditional police lineup can be performed in one of two ways: The witness can be shown people sequentially, or all of them at once. The goal is to minimize bias, but scientists disagree on which approach is better—or if it matters at all. The report calls this debate "unresolved."

So, it doesn't disprove what you said, but it does suggest that it's not quite so black-and-white as you put it. They did point out that there is clear evidence in favor of conducting the police lineup in a double-blind fashion, which should be a "no duh" sort of thing for any of us, but apparently is a novel idea for many police departments.

Re:Humans are unreliable

[JeffAtl]

Defense attorneys and the justice system may know that, but juries don't. Other than DNA evidence, eyewitness testimony (especially from victims) is considered gold standard evidence by juries.

It's unfortunate because eyewitness identification of strangers (especially strangers of a differing race) are very unreliable.

It's not accident that prosecutors and cops have been very upset about the "CSI effect" since it has partly educated juries to expect some physical evidence.

the 400-pound gorilla

[turkeydance]

for a police line-up what can the authorities do? http://abcnews.go.com/US/obese...

Re:the 400-pound gorilla

[multimediavt]

And therein lies the problem: the police lineup.

A new report concludes that the use of eyewitness accounts need tighter control, and among its recommendations is a call for a more scientific approach to how eyewitnesses identify suspects during the classic police lineup.

The whole lineup process is usually rigged, and can easily be rigged to single out an individual from a pack of "suspects". The lineup is the problem as that tool can too easily be manipulated to garner eyewitness testimony from someone that only "thinks" that's the person they saw and is then coached to say they are "positive" that's the person they saw. And yes, I like the example noted above of "My Cousin Vinny". It's somewhat comically presented, but the fact is people have been wrongfully convicted from dubious "eyewitness testimony" for centuries! Forensic evidence has been helping to curtail these type of wrongful convictions, but sometimes long after the fact.

Re:Recommended documentary on eyewitness testamony

[internerdj]

I read a very interesting piece just this morning where a man who was not talking to police without a lawyer ended up having his silence used to prove that he was lacked basic human empathy in a fatal hit and run. Of course, now I can't find the article.

Re:Recommended documentary on eyewitness testamony

[sjames]

That's part of the problem. Law and court aren't supposed to be a game of "Mother May I" but it's being turned in to one. Nothing in the Constitution suggests that a magic incantation must be uttered.

Re:Recommended documentary on eyewitness testamony

[PRMan]

"You have the right to remain silent."

Re:Recommended documentary on eyewitness testamony

[Whatsisname]

The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one's time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all. - H. L. Mencken

Re:Recommended documentary on eyewitness testamony

[Hussman32]

I live near this intersection, the nearest light is well over 200 yards away, and the case description suggests he didn't run the light because he made a left turn on to the road where the accident occurred. It was likely he was going too fast, but if he were sober, odds are good she would have been held at fault.

However, California state law says he should have braked even if she entered the intersection illegally, and he did kill a young girl because he was impaired. I don't think you should have your right to remain silent explicitly declared; we are all taught we are allowed to remain silent.

Re:Humans are unreliable

[JeffAtl]

Have you found that it is difficult to convince other jurors that eyewitness testimony is very unreliable?

I've found that most jurors are very swayed by eyewitness identifications, heinousness of the crime and if the defendant "looks guilty".