Eyewitness accounts are the backbone of evidence; we trust few things more than what appears before our very eyes. But how do you know if you're right and if what you're seeing is accurate? And what if you're wrong? (article available here).
A review of wrongful convictions, many involving eyewitness testimony, has sparked some serious heart-searching as well as a slew of bills aimed at preventing faulty testimony behind them.
Anyone who works in the courtroom knows that eyewitness testimony can be a powerful weapon for justice or the jester in a comedy of errors. Several recent high-profile stories show you just how badly things can go when mistakes happen. We read statistics like this:
Eyewitness misidentifications are known to have played a role in 70 percent of the 349 wrongful convictions which were overturned based on DNA evidence.
There's another wild card: the malleability of memory. Research has shown that, in certain circumstances, a person can falsely remember committing a crime that was actually committed by someone else. Memory can be contaminated by a number of things—suggestion, time, erroneous information, drugs/alcohol.