Eyewitness testimony and it's shortcomings
Our eyes deceive us. Social scientists have insisted for decades that our eyewitness-identification process is unreliable at best and can be the cause of grievous injustice. A study published last month by Gary Wells and Deah Quinlivan in Law and Human Behavior, the journal of the American Psychology-Law Society, reveals just how often those injustices occur: of the more than 230 people in the United States who were wrongfully convicted and later exonerated by DNA evidence, approximately 77 percent involved cases of mistaken eyewitness identification, more than any other single factor.
Wells has been studying mistaken identifications for decades, and his objection to the eyewitness-identification system is not that people make mistakes. In an interview, he explains that eyewitness evidence is important, but should be treated—like blood, fingerprints and fiber evidence—as trace evidence, subject to contamination, deterioration and corruption. Our current criminal-justice system allows juries to hear eyewitness-identification evidence shaped by suggestive police procedures.In a 1977 case, Manson v. Braithwaite, the Supreme Court held that such evidence could be used ifdeemed "reliable."Today we know you can have a good long look, be certain you have the right guy and also be wrong. But Manson is still considered good law
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