Jost, Kenneth. Eyewitness Testimony: Could new safeguards prevent misidentifications?. CQ Researcher October 14, 2011. Eyewitness testimony is often essential to criminal prosecutions, but witnesses sometimes misidentify an innocent person. Misidentifications played a part in three-fourths of the 273 wrongful convictions confirmed over the past two decades by DNA exonerations. Eyewitness scientists have long known of the unreliability of witness identifications, as confirmed through experiments dating back to the early 20th century, but police have been slow in changing ID procedures. The Supreme Court established limited safeguards against unreliable identifications in the 1960s and '70s, but experts say the rulings have had little impact and may actually mislead jurors in determining the accuracy of an identification. Now, the New Jersey Supreme Court has ordered stricter standards on identification testimony in the state's courts, including special instructions on the risk of misidentification even by witnesses who are absolutely certain. And the U.S. Supreme Court will hear arguments in November in a case that could allow the justices to revisit the issues. From the CQ Researcher. Reprinted with permission from CQ Press.
More Articles:
EBSCOhost
ProQuest -
(witness* or eyewitness*) and (false or wrongful or memory or mistak*) - 600+ full text articles from newspapers, magazines, and journals
Albany Law Review, Volume 74 Issue 3 (2011). Special issue on innocence, includes several relevant articles such as:
BooksEbrary:
eyewitness and (false OR error OR wrongful) - Ebooks, many from scholarly/University presses, arranged in relevance order (the most occurences of the keywords at the top)
WebKnown Sites: If I perform a general internet search I am obliged to further research the publisher and authors of each webpage I want to use in order to evaluate their credibility. The
CQ Researcher issue listed above provides specific websites to search, such as that of the Innocence Project, which publishes a page:
"
Understand the Causes: Eyewitness Misidentification."
Specific Domains: Since it is government agencies that seek eyewitness testimony I can also target a web search to just government sites - the .gov
domain. Here is a Google
Advanced Search limited to
government websites with the word 'eyewitness' in the page title:
allintitle: eyewitness site:.gov. This provides webpages such as
United States. Dept. of Justice. Natl. Institute of Justice.
Eyewitness Identification. 30 Sep. 2011
