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This is Jennifer Alexander with ID ME Series 1 episode one. Today I am going to talk about eyewitness and how I feel that using them should not even be an option anymore. Before I start, I want you to put an image in your head of the last stranger you saw, could have been at the grocery store, gas station, Starbucks, you pick. Take a mental note of it and we will go back to it later.
Eyewitnesses have a significant impact on criminal conviction outcomes. Sometimes these eyewitnesses are there for murder trials, this is someone life at risk here and we are relying on a human person capable of making human errors to tell us that this person may have been at a crime area. I say may because we have all heard of a story where someone was ID as being the person in a crime and years later, we find out this was not even the person. The New York Times wrote an article in November 2,2011 about the reliability of eyewitness statements. Justice Kagen noted in the New York Times article that eyewitness testimonies should be held by the same standards as anything else unreliable. The head attorney on this case Richard Guerriero agreed and remarked that eyewitness testimonies are “the leading cause of miscarriages of justice”, yet we continue to rely on them. But why is? Why is there so much pressure put on eyewitness to come forward when there have been proven studies on how unreliable they actually are. An eyewitness is put under so much stress to remember what happened when they are already under stress because of what happened. A Journal written by Gary Wells titled psychological science on eyewitness identification and its impact on police practices and policies, goes in detail of the hundreds of wrongful convictions that have been exonerated in US prisons. Moreover, among the eyewitness identification cases that were proven false via forensic DNA testing, 66.4% are cases in which the misidentified person was African American. This is a whole other topic that we will have to talk about in another series but for now we will focus on eyewitness in general. A publication done called Social Action and the Law Newsletter by Robert Buckhout, a professor at Brooklyn College studies eyewitness and is shocked to see how unreliable they are especially when showing the cross-race effect in eyewitness identification in which it is more difficult to identify someone of another race than someone of one’s own race.
Unreliable seems to be a common word we keep hearing through this series. The justice system knows that eyewitness are unreliable but are they so focused on getting their cases solved that they would do anything to meet their quotas. It is shameful that the US justice system has not done nothing to change it. Human beings are capable of error especially when put in a stressful situation as being an eyewitness. Now I want you to now think about at that person in your head again, can you describe them in detail for me. All their characteristics, what where they are wearing, their eye color, hair color, skin color. Tell me if you are capable of ID them in a line up based on your memory, probably not enough to put someone away for a theft or even a murder. Characteristics play a huge role when you are trying to ID someone but most of us are not capable of describing in enough detail another human being. Often this is what happens, we are asked to ID a person when we only got to look at them once. Furthermore, that one time was probably a stressful situation given that you are now being asked to be a witness to a crime. I can only hope that our justice system will see the hundreds of innocent lives that are on the line as a result of eyewitness testimony and make changes to better the system. With that, I would like to thank you for taking the time to listen till the next time. Be safe.
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