But increasingly it is being found that this is not the case. Eyewitness testimony may only be credible under these circumstances. In this article, take a look at the problems with eyewitness testimony. "I think this is the guy," she told the police after several minutes of hesitation. What law enforcement—and the public—needs to know. The justice system should reconsider how eyewitness testimony is used, he says, because "there's a lot at stake here." But he worries that police, jurors, and even judges will misinterpret eyewitness confidence levels. 51 The visual attention given by a witness to a weapon can impair his or her ability to make a reliable … It’s true that eyewitness reports and testimony can be a powerful tool for the prosecution. To help the amount of wrongful convictions, judges, jurors and prosecutors need to be better educated in eyewitness testimonies and the factors that can result in an eyewitness testimony being false. Instead evidence collected at the contaminated crime scene would probably be declared inadmissible. As time went on, she grew surer. “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. Problems with Eyewitness Testimony Memory Is Malleable. Thompson picked out 22-year-old Ronald Cotton, whose photograph was on file because of a robbery committed in his youth. 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. She confidently pointed to him as the man who raped her. Eyewitness testimony relies heavily on the capability of the individual’s to accurately recount the event. AAAS is a partner of HINARI, AGORA, OARE, CHORUS, CLOCKSS, CrossRef and COUNTER. 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. 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. Are Eyewitnesses in the Zimmerman Trial Reliable? 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. All rights Reserved. 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. 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). 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. The ability of a person who witnesses a crime to later pick the perpetrator out of a lineup is atrocious—right? They were then asked to recollect what they had seen in the video. 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. But in most cases, that confidence is misplaced. Any evidence can potentially be contaminated, including what is considered to be the gold standard of forensic evidence: DNA. Laura Mickes is an academic at Royal Holloway, University of London. 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. © 2020 American Association for the Advancement of Science. More specifically, the assumption that memory provides an accurate recording of experience, much like … They focused on 348 robberies that occurred in 2013 and involved eyewitnesses and a single suspect. But many researchers have voiced concerns about whether these laboratory experiments accurately reflect real-world situations. 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… 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. 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. Not so with eyewitness memory. 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. However, research into this area has found that eyewitness testimony can be affected by many psychological factors: Anxiety / Stress Memory is not as reliable as we would like to think. 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. Also, in cases where little material evidence can be collected, eyewitnesses are the focus for reaching a verdict. Confident eyewitnesses aren't necessarily more accurate, but a study of robbery cases finds that it depends on how much time has passed before you gauge their confidence. In the first one, the Innocence project examined many cases where they used DNA to exonerate 130 cases. Such moments have a powerful sway on jurors who decide the fate of thousands of people every day in criminal cases. Blood and fingerprint evidence, per se, would not be deemed unreliable. "Our whole point is that you have to pay attention to confidence expressed on the initial identification only." In contrast, a high-confidence ID is highly accurate, a surprising fact that has only recently come to be appreciated by experimental psychologists. Why is this the case? What facts gave rise to the belief that Leiterman may have been wrongfully convicted based on contaminated evidence? By the time Thompson faced Cotton in court a year later, her doubts were gone. Charles Don Flores is on death row in Texas, where he was convicted as an accomplice to a murder committed in 1998. But there is more to the story. This can affect eyewitness testimony because what if the witness is better in recalling than in recognizing. Courts may be "leaving more criminals on the streets and putting more innocent people behind bars than they should be. 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. Instead, he raped her and fled. By Jon Cohen, Dennis NormileDec. Subscribers get more award-winning coverage of advances in science & technology. 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. Are you a scientist who specializes in neuroscience, cognitive science, or psychology? However, smart criminal defense attorneys know that witness accounts are never 100% reliable. 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. His aim was to see how reliable eyewitness testimony is in older people. 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). Faulty eyewitness testimony has been implicated in at least 75% of DNA exoneration cases—more than any other cause ( Garrett, 2011 ). Assessing confidence is critical because it provides direct information about the trustworthiness of the uncontaminated ID. The study shows that there is real information to be gained from the initial confidence level, says Craig Stark, a psychologist at UC Irvine. Imagine if police let unauthorized people have willy-nilly access to a crime scene that is under investigation. 7 hours ago — Emily V. Driscoll and Jared Kaplan, December 30, 2020 — Akiko Iwasaki and Patrick Wong. As with DNA evidence, eyewitness evidence needs to be safeguarded against contamination. What it means is that the malleability of memory can harm reliability. 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! Few would doubt that under such conditions, DNA evidence is highly reliable. But factoring in the confidence of the eyewitness painted a different picture. 30 According to … The problem is these eyewitness accounts aren't always accurate. And third, the confidence expressed by the eyewitness following an identification of someone from the lineup must be recorded. Out of the 130 cases, 78 convictions were based solely on eyewitness testimony (Bryant, 2020). John is a former contributing correspondent for Science. People are different in the way they recognize and recall events especially through perception. Juries tend to pay close attention to eyewitness testimony and generally find it a reliable source of information. 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. 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. To see why, let us revisit those DNA exoneration cases that so often involve eyewitness misidentification. 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. At Holland Law, we aggressively fight the allegations and charges against you with strategic defense. But in 57 percent of those cases, it was possible to determine what happened on the initial (uncontaminated) memory test. If the contaminated evidence is relied on to establish guilt versus innocence at a trial, the risk of a wrongful conviction is high. 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. And what can we do about it? We have previously written about the problems with relying on eyewitness testimony to solve crimes and secure convictions. Cotton was set free. Juries are told to discount the value of eyewitness testimony and ignore how confident the witnesses may be about whom they think they saw. 30, 2020. It’s been able to definitively prove that eyewitness accounts were incorrect. 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. Most of us are pretty confident about our powers of observation and the reliability of our memory. 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. Jury’s place great reliance on eyewitness testimony and ignore the dangers of false memories (Engelhardt, n. d). 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. Researchers are increasingly finding that the problem with eyewitness testimony is based on a common misunderstanding of how memory functions. Please send suggestions to Mind Matters editor Gareth Cook. He was eventually sentenced to life in prison based on Thompson's testimony. Now, a new study of robbery investigations suggests that these changes may be doing more harm than good. As the research on how to better eyewitness testimony continues, we have seen the development of having a double blinded study. 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. 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. For every one of those tests, the eyewitnesses were, at best, uncertain. What would that mean for the reliability of the blood or fingerprint evidence, for example, collected at that scene? 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. Under the right circumstances, eyewitness testimony can be reliable. Eyewitness testimony can play a big part in criminal court cases. 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. Discover new insights into neuroscience, human behavior and mental health with Scientific American Mind. Second, the police lineup has to be fair (that is, the suspect should not stand out). Eyewitness testimony is an important area of research in cognitive psychology and human memory. Just because memory is malleable—for example, it can be contaminated with the trace of an innocent person—does not mean that it has to be unreliable. 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. 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