It should be revived and approved. U. L. Rev. 'In Iran we had an incident. The chance of a lifetime: Five friends ski the tallest mountain in Los Angeles, Shocking, impossible gas bills push restaurants to the brink of closures, Best coffee city in the world? What the cases of Miller and Heidelberg highlight is that witnesses are often wrong. Three of the eyewitnesses reported that the detective told them that they had picked the same person other people had, though the detective himself denied having made such statements. For example, in cases where a mental disorder is an issue, the evidence of a psychiatrist may influence the conduct of legal proceedings, it may help to adduce medical evidence relevant to trial and may be the deciding factor between imprisonment and mental health treatment. Harvard Univ Press; Cambridge, MA: 2011. It is used to establish facts in a criminal investigation or prosecution. What facts gave rise to the belief that Leiterman may have been wrongfully convicted based on contaminated evidence? John Worboys worked as a cab driver and was charged with sexually assaulting several of his female passengers. Therefore, when John Warboys applied for parole, an independent psychologist was instructed by his legal representative to assess his risk. Unfortunately for Lydell Grant, these reforms came a year too late. But if the six eyewitnesses chose Lydell Grant from the lineup only because they were cued to do so by the case detective, why were they so confident in their identifications? 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). 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. the time between the crime and the identification procedure. They found that the odds of a false identification were 1.56 times greater in cases where the race was different than the witness, thus highlighting how bias can affect how somebody remembers an event.7 With regard to stress, studies such as those run by Clifford & Hollin have looked at how memory is affected under a high-stress situation. These courts generally accept detailed descriptions of relevant scientific research findings to either attack or support eyewitness testimony.19 Other courts, meanwhile, leave the jury to determine the credibility of eyewitness testimony and insist that findings from scientific research in this area cannot help the jury to do so.20 Videotaping allows for review of eyewitness testimony later on in the trial if the reliability of eyewitness testimony is called into question. According to the prosecution on the day of the murder, at around 7 am, Flowers walked from his home on the West side of town all the way to a sewing factory parking lot on the East side of town, crossing Highway 51, one of the towns largest streets, while doing so. Speak to our experts today for advice. But a comparison of the pairs mugshots reveals that they bear little physical resemblance to one another beyond both being Black men. The perpetrator had a brief conversation with the parking lot attendants and then fled the scene. The Law Enforcement Command of the Islamic Republic of Iran claimed she had a heart attack at a police station, collapsed, and fell into a coma before being transferred to a hospital. First, another DNA profileone belonging to John Ruelas, who was just a four-year-old preschooler at the time of the murderwas found on a blood spot taken from the victims left hand. In this case, the defendant was charged with first degree murder and the only evidence against him was the testimony of two eyewitnesses. Once a suspect has established that he was the victim of suggestiveness, a pretrial hearing will be held in which the full range of reasons for possible misidentification are examined. First, the judge must determine whether the procedure used by law enforcement officials in obtaining the proffered eyewitness identification (e.g., photographic array or lineup) was unnecessarily suggestive.11 The judge must then weigh this determination against the following five factors to assess the reliability of the identification: In practice, therefore, the test is flexible. Your comment will be posted to MailOnline as usual. In contrast, a high-confidence ID is highly accurate, a surprising fact that has only recently come to be appreciated by experimental psychologists. Instead evidence collected at the contaminated crime scene would probably be declared inadmissible. Get in touch with our team of experts today! Few would doubt that under such conditions, DNA evidence is highly reliable. Ernest Saunders only served 10 months of his sentence before being released. Mugshots of Lydell Grant (left, in 2010) and Jermarico Carter (right, in 2007) show the men dont look very similar. The reliability of these alleged identifications was suspect, since the officers would have had only a fraction of a second to observe the driver whizz by them at a high rate of speed at night. Laura Mickes is an academic at Royal Holloway, University of London. My Blog cases where eyewitnesses were right. 9 According to the innocence project, mistaken identification is a leading factor in wrongful convictions. 28 Brandon L. Garrett, Convicting the Innocent: Where Criminal Prosecutions Go Wrong 6368 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011). To many Americans including many jurors eyewitness testimony is the gold standard when it comes to evidence. 4 Defffenbacher, et al. What law enforcementand the publicneeds to know. Women in Iran have all the necessary, required freedoms within the framework of the law,' he added. While his potential release faced intense scrutiny, it demonstrates how influential an expert witness report can be. Here is a link to a general overview on eyewitness testimony from the National Science Foundation. Instructions given to eyewitnesses should be clear, simple and standardized across jurisdictions. Finally, a witness may have more difficulty making a correct identification when he and the suspect are of different races. The victim, a white female, parked her car in that garage every day and the attendants noticed that as the car approached there was an unknown black male driving the car. Assistant Professor of Psychology, Arizona State University. . Are you a scientist who specializes in neuroscience, cognitive science, or psychology? You can choose on each post whether you would like it to be posted to Facebook. Not only do such statements inflate eyewitnesses confidence in the accuracy of their identification, but they lead them to falsely remember having been that confident all along. Questions were raised about the outcome after Ernest Saunders made a recovery following his release. In much the same way, an eyewitness can be led to falsely remember someone committing a crime that was actually committed by someone else. Two other eyewitnesses, a couple, remembered discussing their selection with one another and confirming each others decisions. Pregnant), Left and got about 1-2 blocks away and saw a man running west, away from downtown, it was her neighbor Flowers, Clemy pointed it out to Roy but Roy did not recognize him, Couldnt remember his clothes or shoes, did not describe seeing blood on him, Latarsha, Clemys cousin, remains convinced that Clemy made up the story because she felt pressured by law enforcement and because she might be able to get money Latarsha was also taken by the police at 19 to be asked questions and Johnson implied that she might get some of the reward money (30k) if she corroborated, Saw a man running across the street 1-2 blocks away that day of the murders, he was alone (not with Clemy) and it was earlier in the morning and when he was with Clemy later, they did not see anybody running, Law enforcement came and found Roy and he ended up giving a statement to John Johnson, Was shown Flowers picture (school picture) ONLY Flowers asked if that was the person Roy saw running Roy said no and John Johnson pushed Roy that it was Flowers and that Clemy was with him when it happened eventually Roy said he broke down and agreed to the story because he wanted to get out of there (he was afraid of Johnson), After that, Johnson recorded Clemy telling her story of seeing Flowers running away from downtown. A new version of that legislation, AB 308, is pending in the state Senate, though passage in this session is unlikely. The way to avoid these problems with eyewitness testimony is for police to adopt best practices based on the psychological research. The prosecutor, Doug Evans, tried Curtis Flowers, a former employee at Tardy, six times for the crime.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.30 Alex Murdaugh's defense attorneys will deliver their closing arguments in his murder trial on Thursday as they seek to raise reasonable doubt about whether he killed his wife and son in 2021. Miller was placed in a lineup and one of the parking lot attendants positively identified Miller; the other parking lot attendant tentatively identified him. document.getElementById( "ak_js_1" ).setAttribute( "value", ( new Date() ).getTime() ); This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. John Worboys was given an indeterminate prison sentence. Do not sell or share my personal information. Andy Hale is a civil rights attorney, specializing in wrongful convictions in Chicago, Illinois. She questioned the statistical basis of Professor Meadows evidence, which had led to Sally Clark being sentenced to life in prison. The lineup photo from one of these lineups shows how suggestive it was: The other four men in the lineup were much older and bigger than Chester. But when the witnesses had received a simple reinforcing comment following their identification (Good job, you got the guy), the mock jurors could no longer tell the difference between accurate and mistaken eyewitnesses. 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. Chester Weger was convicted in 1961 of the notorious Starved Rock Murders, in which three women were brutally killed and their bodies left in a park located in LaSalle County, Illinois about two hours southwest of Chicago. Some courts have held it as an abuse of discretion for a trial judge to bar the defense from admitting expert testimony on eyewitness identification. Improper lineup procedures can also lead to witness misidentifications. Guidance can help jurors who might not know what to make of conflicting testimony. Nationally, more than 75% of convictions that have been overturned because of DNA evidence involved erroneous eyewitness testimony. Following a protracted trial,Saunders was found guilty ofconspiracy, theft, and false accounting. This allows jurors to make more informed decisions while evaluating particular eyewitness testimony. He did it and was fortunate not to be sentenced to death in that era. Its a fact that eyewitnesses make mistakes. In the Miller case, a woman was raped in her car in a parking garage in downtown Chicago. Nevertheless, these subtle behavioral cues affect eyewitnesses decisions by making them more likely to choose the suspect. Law enforcement officers, prosecutors, attorneys, and jurors need to realize that just because a witness says so does not make it so. Just because memory is malleablefor example, it can be contaminated with the trace of an innocent persondoes not mean that it has to be 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). For every one of those tests, the eyewitnesses were, at best, uncertain. We will automatically post your comment and a link to the news story to your Facebook timeline at the same time it is posted on MailOnline. The puzzling question in this case, though, is why did six eyewitnesses independently identify Lydell Grant as the killer and then confidently testify in court? In Winona, Mississippi on July 16, 1996, four people were shot and killed at Tardy furniture store. Imagine if police let unauthorized people have willy-nilly access to a crime scene that is under investigation. Taken together, each witnesses testimony fits within the cohesive whole, tied together into a description of the route Flowers had to have taken that morning. 31 Elizabeth Loftus, Eyewitness Science and the Legal System, 14 Annual Review of Law and Social Science 110 (2018). Confidence collected at the time of an identification during a double-blind lineup procedure is informative regarding the eyewitnesss accuracy. But faith in eyewitnesses runs so deep that despite the overwhelming proof of Grants innocence, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals initially refused his exoneration request. During Wednesday's interview with CNN, Amirabdollahian accused western media outlets of encouraging violent protests in his country. Press Esc to cancel. Instead, they asked that the six eyewitnesses who originally testified against Grant respond to his claims of innocence. The involvement of expert witnesses in famous expert witness cases often leads to changes in how expert evidence is formulated and the effect it may have on the outcome of the proceedings. The appeal was successful and the conviction was quashed. Second, the police lineup has to be fair (that is, the suspect should not stand out). In assessing the reliability of eyewitness identification, federal and state courts are still divided on (1) whether expert testimony on eyewitness identification should be allowed under either Daubert or Frye and (2) the proper exercise of trial court discretion when deciding whether to admit such expert testimony.18 The murder victims cold case evidence was there because the case had recently been reopened; the 1969 preschoolers DNA sample was there as part of an active murder investigation, and Leitermans DNA sample was there because he had recently been arrested for forging a prescription. Juries are particularly prone to being swayed by eyewitness testimony, as evidenced in the Curtis Flowers case. Continue reading with a Scientific American subscription. In an effort to overwhelm Chester and break him down, he was placed in a lineup regarding two incidents that took place in 1959 in a nearby State Park called Deer Park, one of which was that rape case and the other was a purse snatching. John Worboyss victims alleged that he assaulted them after offering them champagne which he had spiked with drugs. 22 Years later, in 1967, the U.S. Supreme Court highlighted the danger of erroneous eyewitness identification in United States v. Does Irans Foreign Minister accept women can peacefully protest for change in Iran? The NRC found that police officers and detectives are frequently uninformed of what the best practices concerning gathering eyewitness testimony are. Noxious fumes wafted into their classrooms, causing some to need hospital treatment after complaining of headaches, heart palpitations, lethargy and being unable to move. It is important to strive to continue to conduct social science research on the nature of eyewitness and the efficacy of potential reforms like the ones above in order to create effective safeguards against unreliable eyewitness testimony. The processes at play in Lydell Grants case are predictable and unfortunately common. It comes just two days after diplomats walked out of a speech given by the Iranian minister to the UN's Human Rights Council in Geneva. 'You're supposed to interview me but you're actually having a confrontation with me,' he told Amanpour. Many more sit in prisons who have not had the opportunity to have their cases re-investigated or samples re-tested. Attributing that error to the unreliability of eyewitness memory is, in our view, pointing the finger of blame in the wrong direction. 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