The author focuses on the judicial blindness of eyewitness misidentification of innocent defendants in the U.S. Judicial blindness refers to how the system refuses to initiate a proposal for reform of police procedures, that could in-turn minimize identification error. Viewed in this research are methods such as having lineups and photo arrays to be conducted in person by experts who do not know the suspect, thus minimizing suggestion. What goes un-noticed by the system is that eyewitness confidence levels can be boosted by even the slightest confirmatory action. The cases studied in this research include those where identification was important, defendants used their right to a trial and challenged the identification process, and also where the defendant appealed their accusers’ identification of them.
Discussed in the article are social science findings on eyewitness identification and presents the findings of an empirical study of appellate court decisions which involved cases within April 8, 2008, and April 8, 2009. As stated, constitutional challenges to eyewitness testimony have been rejected in 100% of cases, even when those challenges have proved to be useless in rummaging out erroneous …show more content…
Studies showed within the twelve-month period that there were 128 cases challenged, 31 were excluded and therefore leaving 96 for the author to analyze. There are various amounts of data regarding the relation to the number of cases and the percentage of the crime and weapon use in each case, in the data set. Weapons played a role in 65.7%, poor lighting was 43%, and the use of other estimator variables were included at about 11%, also shown is that 88% of the cases reviewed involved serious violent crimes. The likelihood of the identification in any of these cases to be reliable and accurate is very
Discussed in the article are social science findings on eyewitness identification and presents the findings of an empirical study of appellate court decisions which involved cases within April 8, 2008, and April 8, 2009. As stated, constitutional challenges to eyewitness testimony have been rejected in 100% of cases, even when those challenges have proved to be useless in rummaging out erroneous …show more content…
Studies showed within the twelve-month period that there were 128 cases challenged, 31 were excluded and therefore leaving 96 for the author to analyze. There are various amounts of data regarding the relation to the number of cases and the percentage of the crime and weapon use in each case, in the data set. Weapons played a role in 65.7%, poor lighting was 43%, and the use of other estimator variables were included at about 11%, also shown is that 88% of the cases reviewed involved serious violent crimes. The likelihood of the identification in any of these cases to be reliable and accurate is very