Transcription
[Music] Criminal cases often rely on eyewitness testimony. Sometimes it's the most damning evidence. But how reliable is it? See for yourself.
[Music] Time for your culprit. If you said any of these suspects, you were wrong. As is sometimes the case, no one in this lineup was the perpetrator.
For those that got it wrong, what happened? Did you just forget your glasses? Well, there are lots of psychological phenomena involved. Mistaken identification tends to result in the person, uh, actually believing and developing a memory that's consistent with the person they identify. So we trick ourselves into believing something that's based off an already unreliable memory.
This happens a lot. We actually have three kinds of, uh, evidence, uh, gathered over the years indicating that mistaken eyewitness identification is relatively common. One is lab studies where we create events and, uh, have people try to identify from lineups. Another is field studies where we examine how often witnesses pick fillers out of, uh, lineups in actual cases. And then the third is, uh, DNA exonerations where we know that, uh, three out of, uh, every four of the DNA exonerations involved mistaken eyewitness identification.
So if eyewitness testimony seems to be so unreliable, why use it? We need eyewitness identification evidence. Uh, eyewitnesses often get it right. We just want to make sure that we do things to, uh, increase that likelihood that they're getting it right, minimize the mistakes, and catch those mistakes when they do occur.
It sounds like eyewitness testimony isn't leaving the justice system. So what's being done to fix this crucial form of evidence? We've developed ways to improve how lineups are done so we reduce the chances of mistakes in the first place. And then also, we've been looking at what we call markers of mistaken identification at the time of identification. Their number of behavioral cues that witnesses, uh, give off, uh, or indicators. Uh, for example, they're slower to make the identification. They tend to compare one person to another and, uh, they do so with a lower level of confidence at the time of the identification. Capturing those is very important so the system can be improved upon based on this behavioral research.
What actions are police departments taking then? They have actually begun to use this research to good effect. There have been reforms made in a number of states that are based on this, uh, new science. The science can be integrated at the level of working with police so that they collect and preserve eyewitness evidence in ways that are more pristine. And it can work to the courts about how they can make, uh, decisions about whether an eyewitness is reliable or not in a given case.
[Music]