Neighbors told arriving firefighters that they had heard a thunderous crash at about the same time as the blaze is believed to have begun. In recent years, more and more jurisdictions have come to accept expert testimony on the reliability of eyewitness identification. Police said they believed Weger was a suspect in a rape that had occurred a few years earlier. Later two slideshows were shown, one with a stop sign and the other with a yield sign and they asked the subjects which was the one they had previously seen. More and more research has come out in the last few decades indicating that there are many dangers to relying on eyewitnesses, from the uncertainty of relying on a persons memory all the way to how they are questioned at the police station. Arnaud, Celia Henry. Many believe that this conviction was based on contaminated DNA evidence. An Iranian girl passed away and we were all very sorry about that. 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 The other individuals placed in a lineup with the suspect (known as fillers) are supposed to reasonably resemble the suspect in terms of age, height and weight so that the suspect does not stand out. As an experimental psychologist who conducts research on eyewitness identification, Ive seen hundreds of examples of highly confident yet mistaken eyewitnesses both in the laboratory and in actual court cases. Incredibly, prior to Heidelbergs sentencing, the real shooter, James Clark, confessed to the crime, but the confession fell on deaf ears and Heidelberg was sentenced to 99 to 175 years in prison. Some elements include the following: First, and most important of all, because the test itself contaminates memory, only the initial memory test provides uncontaminated results. In 2009, he was charged with assaulting 12 women. Overall, an issue plaguing both courts and law enforcement is the lack of standard procedures to safeguard defendants against unreliable eyewitness testimony. His subsequent return to business raised further questions about the evidence that led to his early release. 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. Well ask you to confirm this for your first post to Facebook. The transcript from Lydell Grants trial revealed that the homicide detective in charge of investigating the case administered the lineup to the eyewitnesses. Press Esc to cancel. John Worboys worked as a cab driver and was charged with sexually assaulting several of his female passengers. I believe the remaining 25 states should act swiftly to prevent additional miscarriages of justice. At his criminal trial, both parking lot attendants identified Miller as the perpetrator. After killing the officer, the shooter fled the scene and a high-speed car chase ensued. Witnesses arent able to tell whether their testimony was influenced in this way. Document Witness Confidence and Videotape Witness Identifications. Videos circulating on Twitter appeared to show dozens of UN diplomats walking out as he started to speak. Pay farmers handsomely to give up their water rights. 4 Defffenbacher, et al. 27 The Innocence Project, Eyewitness Identification,. Police officers should avoid leading questioning while interviewing potential eyewitnesses, since eyewitnesses might be eager to say what they think will help the investigation, rather than the unblemished version of their memory. The subjects who had been asked the leading question were much more likely to choose the slideshow with the yield sign, since their memories had been tampered by the question asked earlier.4 Many studies have since corroborated the findings of Loftus, such as another experiment, where the same effect was reproduced using television screens, and then seeing the effects between the different participants.5 Studies like these have demonstrated the fickle nature of memory, and how details can be changed without the witness really even recognizing it. Your comment will be posted to MailOnline as usual. Compared to administrators conducting double-blind lineups, these informed administrators are more likely to ask witnesses about the suspect and smile when witnesses are looking at the suspect rather than at another person in the lineup. You can choose on each post whether you would like it to be posted to Facebook. To date, 25 states have adopted these core procedural reforms, including Texas in 2011, one year after the investigation of Aaron Scheerhoorns murder. 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. Your details from Facebook will be used to provide you with tailored content, marketing and ads in line with our Privacy Policy. The NRCs recommendations for law enforcement and judges are below.32. Women in Iran have all the necessary required freedoms within the framework of the law, he claims, but says our interview is a confrontation: This is not the way to conduct an interview. pic.twitter.com/XKkC5uWYyj, Iranian foreign minister Hossein Amirabdollahian smiled as he chastised CNN host Christiane Amanpour, telling her 'this is not the way to conduct an interview', CNN host Amanpour laid into the Iranian foreign minister over his country's record on women's rights. The court tried to deter false identification with a stepped process. Assessing confidence is critical because it provides direct information about the trustworthiness of the uncontaminated ID. What it means is that the malleability of memory can harm reliability. Abcarian: Mask mandates? His doctors maintained that he was suffering from pre-senile dementia, and he couldnt remember three numbers backwards or the name of the US president. A neurologist also claimed that Saunders brain was small for a man his age and showed evidence of shrinking. Kendall Taggart BuzzFeed News Reporter Opinion: Why does Mexicos president want to dismantle the democratic system that elected 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. Out on his porch and saw Flowers walking by that morning. 14 Manson, 432 U.S. 98, 12526 (Marshall, J., dissenting). 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. Mahsa Amini, 22, died on September 16, three days after falling into a coma following her arrest, After the death of Mahsa Amini, Anti Iran protests have been held in many parts of the world. Instead evidence collected at the contaminated crime scene would probably be declared inadmissible. 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During Wednesday's interview with CNN, Amirabdollahian accused western media outlets of encouraging violent protests in his country. Judges should include within jury instructions clear and concise instructions on how to evaluate and make use of eyewitness testimony during their deliberations. The Manson admissibility test consists of two steps. Ernest Saunders, along with three other men, were part of the Guinness Four who were accused of being involved in ascheme to fraudulently increasethe price of Guinness shares. Many more sit in prisons who have not had the opportunity to have their cases re-investigated or samples re-tested. Thanks for reading Scientific American. It marks the longest-running anti-government protests in Iran since the 1979 Islamic revolution, with hundreds killed as a result. 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. It does make sure that photos in a lineup resemble one another.) This case raised important questions about the reliability of expert evidence. The psychiatrist found that she had an adjustment disorder at the time she killed her husband, enabling her solicitors to challenge her conviction for murder. The case shed renewed light on the country's treatment of women, with a growing number of female Iranians choosing to flout the Sharia-based law to wear the hijab. Instructions given to eyewitnesses should be clear, simple and standardized across jurisdictions. Iran's foreign minister could not stop smirking as he was grilled about his country's record on women's rights in a combative interview with CNN's Christiane Amanpour on Wednesday. 26 The Innocence Project, DNA Exoneree Case Profiles,. Police lineups have evolved over time, but some states still need to catch up. Therefore, when John Warboys applied for parole, an independent psychologist was instructed by his legal representative to assess his risk. The shooter wound up crashing the car and escaping on foot. In 2011, Sally Challen was convicted of murdering her husband before Guildford Crown Court. Several police officers reported and later testified at Heidelbergs criminal trial that they observed him driving the subject vehicle as it sped past them at various points during the chase. EvgeniyShkolenko/iStock via Getty Images Plus, Chicago Sun-Times/Chicago Daily News/Chicago History Museum via Getty Images, Scientific best practices for conducting eyewitness lineups, smile when witnesses are looking at the suspect, no longer tell the difference between accurate and mistaken eyewitnesses, alter witnesses memories of the original crime, less able to recognize the actual perpetrator, is informative regarding the eyewitnesss accuracy, 25 states have adopted these core procedural reforms, Committee Member - MNF Research Advisory Committee, PhD Scholarship - Uncle Isaac Brown Indigenous Scholarship. Using eyewitnesses to identify a suspect as the perpetrator to the crime is a form of direct testimonial evidence that is used for forensic purposes. In other words, the confirmatory remark made the mistaken eyewitnesses just as persuasive as the accurate ones. Discover world-changing science. 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. In one of the earliest studies of this misinformation effect run by Elizabeth Loftus, subjects were shown a slideshow of a red car passing a stop sign and hitting a pedestrian. Here is a link to a general overview on eyewitness testimony from the National Science Foundation. In addition to implementing double-blind lineup procedures, its essential that lineup administrators document eyewitnesses confidence immediately following an identification. 15 Perry v. New Hampshire, 565 U.S. 228, 248 (2012). A Man Was Jailed For 20 Years Due To A Single Eyewitness Who Now Wants To Recant Antonio Mallet's conviction rested on testimony from one eyewitness who, in a new court filing, now says NYPD detectives assaulted him and threatened to lock him up if he didn't blame Mallet for the murder. See here: Innocence Project, Eyewitness misidentification accessed on March 9, 2019. It is not uncommon for the Parole Board to instruct expert evidence from psychiatrists and psychologists. Laura Mickes is an academic at Royal Holloway, University of London. All six of those eyewitnesses were wrong. 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? 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Finally, a witness may have more difficulty making a correct identification when he and the suspect are of different races. 'And that's why peaceful protests ended up becoming violent - because of the foreign intervention. And have you read a recent peer-reviewed paper that you would like to write about? In much the same way, an eyewitness can be led to falsely remember someone committing a crime that was actually committed by someone else. Today, he remains in prison. Finally, almost a year later, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals declared Grant actually innocent on May 19, 2021. Eyewitness memory is reliable when initially tested using proper procedures, but the legal system nonetheless habitually relies on unreliable (contaminated) eyewitness evidence from later IDs. Its a fact that eyewitnesses make mistakes. Witness misidentifications can affect both plaintiffs and defendants. "Double-Blind" Process for Lineups and Photo Arrays. Recently though, with the rise of social science, eyewitness testimony has taken a tumble from its lofty standing. There are a few ways in which eyewitness testimony can be inaccurate. 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. 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 Officers of the law should be instructed by their superiors about the potential inaccuracies and dangers of witness testimony. Even if he allows it, he will have to instruct the jury about the variables that can lead to misidentification. The case shed renewed light on the country's treatment of women, with a growing number of female Iranians choosing to flout the Sharia-based law to wear the hijab. It gathered more than 100 signatures from prominent lawmakers, human rights campaigners and celebrities. If the contaminated evidence is relied on to establish guilt versus innocence at a trial, the risk of a wrongful conviction is high. Thanks for reading Scientific American. Expert witnesses are often instructed in cases where expert evidence is necessary to enable the court to understand specific issues, such as capacity, intent, causation etc. One reported that he had identified Grant without doubt or hesitation. I can vouch for the truth of his observations, having been involved in several cases dealing with witness misidentifications while representing both plaintiffs and defendants. 13 See Timothy P. OToole & Giovanna Shay, Manson v. Brathwaite Revisited: Towards a New Rule of Decision for Due Process Challenges to Eyewitness Identification Procedures, 41 Val. 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. Widespread civil unrest broke out in Iran following the suspicious death of Amini on September 16, 2022. Assistant Professor of Psychology, Arizona State University. Your comment will be posted to MailOnline as usual. Harvard Univ Press; Cambridge, MA: 2011. 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. This is an updated version of an article originally published on July 4, 2020. The appeal was successful and the conviction was quashed. Two police officers thought the sketch resembled Miller, a man they had questioned a few days earlier. This section will focus on the courts current treatment of eyewitness testimony. What law enforcementand the publicneeds to know. Despite the frequency of use, we have been confronted as a country with many incredible failures of eyewitness testimony such as misidentifications that led to convictions and sentences of people who were later discovered innocent.1 Science has played no small role: post-conviction DNA profiling made possible by the development of the polymerase chain reaction, which enables amplification of crime-scene DNA to quantities sufficient for forensic analysis have meant that DNA identification is becoming increasingly used even in cases where it was previously not viable: those where we have smaller samples.2 As of now, almost 350 people, many serving long prison sentences, have been exonerated because their own DNA was discovered to be incompatible with evidence long ago collected from the crime scene. 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Your comment will be posted to MailOnline as usual at about the drought police said they believed was! 12 women further questions about the drought legal representative to assess his.... The appeal was successful and the suspect are of different races on testimony... Recent peer-reviewed paper that you would like it to be posted to MailOnline as usual law enforcement is lack. Direct information about the variables that can lead to misidentification act swiftly to prevent additional miscarriages justice! Jury about the same time as the perpetrator are below.32 of UN walking! To his early release 12 women, 2019 double-blind '' process for lineups Photo. And showed evidence of shrinking correct identification when he and the conviction was on... Testimony has taken a tumble from its lofty standing difficulty making a correct identification when he and conviction... 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