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NATIONAL ACADEMY RELEASES REPORT ON EYEWITNESS IDENTIFICATION

 
On October 2, 2014, the National Research Council of the National Academy of Sciences released a report entitled Identifying the Culprit: Assessing Eyewitness Identification. This is an important document, but not because it breaks new ground. Instead, it does an excellent job of summarizing what we do and do not know about eyewitness identification testimony, and it offers recommendations on how to collect and use eyewitness identification evidence in cases in which a criminal's identity is in dispute.
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The care and detail of the Report, the distinction and the wide range of experience of the members of the committee that wrote it, together with the prestige of the National Academy, may make it uniquely influential.
 
The Report recommends that police use procedures designed to protect eyewitness memories from contamination, and to collect information about the reliability of witness identifications. Specifically, the Report recommends that police departments: 
  • Train all law enforcement officers in eyewitness identification, focusing specifically on factors that affect vision and memory, and on procedures to prevent contamination.
  • Implement "double-blind" identification procedures in which the officer who administers an in-person or photographic lineup does not know which of the people is the suspect, and thus cannot deliberately or unintentionally influence the witness.
  • Develop and use standardized witness instructions at identification procedures.
  • Document witnesses' level of confidence in their judgments at the time of the identifications. 
  • Videotape all identification procedures.
The Report also recommends that judges take steps to assess the value – and possible dangers – of eyewitness identifications by conducting pretrial inquiries about eyewitness identifications regardless of whether one of the parties raises an objection to the admissibility of the evidence.  In the same vein, the Report recommends that judges make juries aware of the pitfalls of eyewitness identification by admitting expert witness testimony, requiring detailed evidence of the circumstances of identifications, and giving jury instructions on how to evaluate eyewitness testimony.
 
 
Finally, the Report calls for better data collection and more scientific research. In particular, the Report finds that existing research does not support a conclusion one way or the other on the comparative value of sequential lineups – in which the people or pictures are presented one at a time – as compared to the older and more common practice of simultaneous lineups, in which a witness is shown a line of several people or an array of photographs all at once. The Report recommends additional and better studies comparing these two procedures. The Report also recommends the creation of a National Research Initiative on Eyewitness Identification to coordinate future research and help make use of its findings.
 
 
As of October 14, 2014, 35% of the exonerations in the Registry include mistaken eyewitness identifications, 509 cases out of 1446. The distribution of all known exonerations that include mistaken eyewitness identifications by category of crime is displayed in these graphs, and was discussed in a recent Registry newsletter.
 
 
 
-  Kaitlin Jackson & Samuel Gross
 
10/14/2014