Yeah, That’s the One!

Imagine the following situation: you were just leaving a train station, and you heard some unusual noise behind you, but when you turned and looked, all you saw was a man running down the platform in the opposite direction. You headed on home, after a tiring trip, grabbed a drink and sank into that easy chair. A few days later, there was a banging on your door at six in the morning. You hobbled to the door, looked through the security viewer and saw a man with a badge at your door. You opened the door, heard your name, and the next thing you knew, you had been arrested for assault and robbery that happened at the train station at about the time you were there. Security cameras placed you at the scene, so your next step was a line-up before “eyewitnesses” who clearly identified you. They repeated their testimony at your trial, which sapped every penny of your savings, and you were convicted for a crime you know you did not commit. Your life fell totally apart.

“Every year, more than 75,000 eyewitnesses identify suspects in criminal investigations. Those identifications are wrong about a third of the time, a pile of studies suggest… Mistaken identifications lead to wrongful convictions. Of the first 250 DNA exonerations, 190 involved eyewitnesses who were wrong, as documented in ‘Convicting the Innocent,’ a recent book by Brandon L. Garrett, a law professor at the University of Virginia… Many of those witnesses were as certain as they were wrong. ‘There is absolutely no question in my mind,’ said one. Another was ‘120 percent’ sure. A third said, ‘That is one face I will never forget.’ A fourth allowed for a glimmer of doubt: ‘This is the man, or it is his twin brother.’

“In November, the Supreme Court will return to the question of what the Constitution has to say about the use of eyewitness evidence. The last time the court took a hard look at the question was in 1977. Since then, the scientific understanding of human memory has been transformed.” New York Times, August 22^nd. This is a serious problem that works an unforgivable injustice on the innocent. When you see an arrest, don’t you assume the worst… that the individual being taken away must be guilty? Picture what happens when that false arrest is backed up with absolutely certain witnesses.

One of America’s leading state authorities on such criminal matters is the New Jersey Supreme Court. “The New Jersey Supreme Court, acknowledging a ‘troubling lack of reliability in eyewitness identifications,’ issued sweeping new rules on [August 24^th] making it easier for defendants to challenge such evidence in criminal cases… The court said that whenever a defendant presents evidence that a witness’s identification of a suspect was influenced, by the police, for instance, a judge must hold a hearing to consider a broad range of issues. These could include police behavior, but also factors like lighting, the time that had elapsed since the crime or whether the victim felt stress at the time of the identification… When such disputed evidence is admitted, the court said, the judge must give detailed explanations to jurors, even in the middle of a trial, on influences that could heighten the risk of misidentification. In the past, judges held hearings on such matters, but they were far more limited…

“The State Supreme Court’s ruling was seen as significant because it was based in part on an exhaustive study of the scientific research on eyewitness identification, led by a special master, a retired judge, who held hearings and led a review of the literature on the issue. The special master, Geoffrey Gaulkin, estimated that more than 2,000 studies related to the subject had been published since the Supreme Court’s original 1977 decision, the court noted.

“‘Study after study revealed a troubling lack of reliability in eyewitness identifications,’ Chief Justice [Stuart] Rabner wrote. ‘From social science research to the review of actual police lineups, from laboratory experiments to DNA exonerations, the record proves that the possibility of mistaken identification is real… ‘Indeed, it is now widely known that eyewitness misidentification is the leading cause of wrongful convictions across the country.’” New York Times, August 24^th. While the ruling is limited to New Jersey, that court has influence across the nation as a standard-bearer in this field. Further, it has been 34 years since the U.S. Supreme Court addressed the standards to be applied for witness reliability, and since that court will face that issue in a new era of modern DNA science and statistical analysis, the New Jersey opinion is particularly timely and relevant.

I’m Peter Dekom, but this time, I will defer to the words of Martin Luther King: “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”