You seem to be insisting that in the majority of cases ("more often than not") eye-witness testimony is not informative at all ("wholly unreliable").
Well, they are unreliable. And you are once again, attempting to say I have declared something that I have not actually said in the past.
In cases where eyewitness testimony is to be presented before the court, lawyers, and even paralegals, will often interview the eyewitnesses. Why do you think that happens?
Look at the Brown case, that I presented earlier in this thread. Multiple eyewitnesses. Every single one of them, who saw the exact same event at the exact same time, described something different. Why do you think that happens? And would you consider them to be reliable witnesses?
I have lost count of the amount of times I have read statements given to the police initially, then to investigating detectives, and then to the DPP and discounted those witnesses, because each and every single time for the high majority of cases, those statements will differ. And I am not just talking about minor differences, but often, differences that show a level of embellishment that for the majority of the time, what they are claiming on their 3rd telling, does not even match any evidence found at the scene.
Eyewitness testimony is the leading cause of wrongful convictions in the US. Why do you think that is? Because it is so reliable?
Human memory is fragile and malleable. More than 2,000 studies on eyewitnesses in recent decades have determined that recollections are prone to decay, distortion, and suggestion. Honest, well-meaning people often simply misremember or misreport what they have seen. In one 1974 experiment, for example, more than two thousand people were shown a 13-second video clip of a mugging, followed by a six-man lineup. Just 14 percent of viewers correctly identified the perpetrator — a success rate lower than that of random guessing. In a 1999 study, 150 college students watched videos of a shooting and then of a five-man lineup. Every one of them identified a suspect, even though the culprit was not pictured. Factors such as fear, poor lighting, the presence of a weapon during a crime, and the passage of time have all been shown to cause mistakes in identifications — even when the witness is the victim of the crime. Witnesses are particularly inaccurate, studies show, when asked to remember the facial features of someone of a different race.
. But being a paralegal, you will already know what and why those 2,000 studies is important, yes?
The court in that instance, literally set a landmark decision in regards to eyewitness testimony, after studying 2,000 studies in a separate hearing by a Special Master was conducted, where many scientists, legal scholars and psychologists testified about the veracity of eyewitness testimony. The studies mentioned above in the quote, were looked at by the Special Master. That landmark decision literally altered the legal landscape of New Jersey and in many areas of the US legal community, and recommended that not only should police change procedure in how eyewitnesses are to be spoken to, interviewed, do line-up's, time, distance.. It also required that judges now have to instruct juries on the fact that eyewitness testimony they may hear during a trial, may not be reliable and explain why and it also set standards for how judges are to assess eyewitness testimony.
As a paralegal, you will,
of course, know the case of which I speak. In case you are unaware of it, I am talking about
State v. Henderson, 208 N.J. 208, 287 (2011).
Chief Justice Rabner, as you should know as a paralegal (especially if you were interviewing eyewitnesses), after commenting on the prevalent of eyewitness misidentification, noted that eyewitness misidentification were a contributing 3 out of 5 cases of DNA exoneration's in New Jersey alone. But as he also noted, DNA exoneration's are quite rare and the Special Master also looked at studies to try to gauge how often innocent people were wrongly identified. So they looked at 4 different experiments that had been conducted through the course of the 80's and 90's.. 3 of which involved clerks in small stores and one, bank tellers:
Across the four experiments, researchers gathered data from more than 500 identifications. Dr. Penrod testified that on average, 42% of clerks made correct identifications, 41% identified photographs of innocent fillers, and 17% chose to identify no one. See Brigham et al., supra, at 677; Krafka & Penrod, supra, at 64-65; Pigott et al., supra, at 86-87; Platz & Hosch, supra, at 978. Those numbers, like the results from the Sacramento and London studies, reveal high levels of misidentifications.
In two of the studies, researchers showed some clerks target-absent arrays -- lineups that purposely excluded the perpetrator and contained only fillers. See Krafka & Penrod, supra, at 64-65; Pigott et al., supra, at 86. In those experiments, Dr. Penrod testified that 64% of eyewitnesses made no identification, but 36% picked a foil. See Krafka & Penrod, supra, at 64; Pigott et al., supra, at 86. Those field experiments suggest that when the true perpetrator is not in the lineup, eyewitnesses may nonetheless select an innocent suspect more than one-third of the time.
Any one of the above studies, standing alone, reveals a troubling lack of reliability in eyewitness identifications.
[State v. Henderson, 208 N.J. 208, 287 (2011)]
