NJ judges to caution jurors about eyewitness testimony.
Almost a year after the New Jersey Supreme Court made a sweeping ruling aimed at resolving the “troubling lack of reliability in eyewitness identifications,” it issued instructions on Thursday for judges to give jurors to help them better evaluate such evidence in criminal trials.
A judge now must tell jurors before deliberations begin that, for example, stress levels, distance or poor lighting can undercut an eyewitness’s ability to make an accurate identification.
Factors like the time that has elapsed between the commission of a crime and a witness’s identification of a suspect or the behavior of a police officer during a lineup can also influence a witness, the new instructions warn.
And in cases involving cross-racial identifications, judges were directed to tell jurors that “research has shown that people may have greater difficulty in accurately identifying members of a different race.”
“You should consider whether the fact that the witness and the defendant are not of the same race may have influenced the accuracy of the witness’s identification,” the instructions say.
The new instructions caution jurors that eyewitness testimony must be scrutinized carefully.
“Human memory is not foolproof,” the instructions say. “Research has revealed that human memory is not like a video recording that a witness need only replay to remember what happened. Memory is far more complex.”
The new instructions, which take effect on Sept. 4, address the problems the State Supreme Court identified last August in a unanimous ruling that concluded that the traditional test for reliability of eyewitness testimony, which the United States Supreme Court set out in 1977, was outdated and should be revised.
Although it applies only in New Jersey, the ruling was widely heralded for containing the most exhaustive review of decades of scientific research on eyewitness identification.
The new instructions are expected to be influential as other state courts look to revise their approach to eyewitness identification, several legal experts said.
“These instructions are far more detailed and careful than anything that exists anywhere in the country,” said Brandon L. Garrett, a law professor at the University of Virginia and the author of “Convicting the Innocent,” a book that includes a study of eyewitness misidentifications, which was cited by the New Jersey court in its decision.
“These instructions are far from perfect,” he added, “but they are a remarkable road map for how you explain eyewitness memory to jurors.”
Barry C. Scheck, co-director of the Innocence Project at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law, which had filed a friend-of-the-court brief in the New Jersey case, called the changes “critically important” and predicted the new instructions would not only affect how juries are instructed, but would also influence trials themselves and the evidence-gathering that precedes them, since both sides will know that such instructions will be given.
“It changes the way evidence is presented by prosecutors and the way lawyers defend,” he said, adding, “The whole system will improve.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/20/nyregion/judges-must-warn-new-jersey-jurors-about-eyewitnesses-reliability.html?_r=2&smid=pl-share
http://failedevidence.wordpress.com/2012/07/20/resistance-overcome-new-jersey-and-eyewitnesses/?goback=.gmp_62979.gde_62979_member_137280275
Eyewitness testimony: non-party brief of the Wisconsin innocence project (PDF)
"Every study to date has demonstrated that eyewitness error is the leading cause of wrongful convictions. In the first study of postconviction DNA exonerations, the U.S. Department of Justice examined 28 cases and found that every one involved eyewitness error. U.S. Dep’t of Justice,
Convicted by Juries, Exonerated by Science: Case Studies in the Use of DNA Evidence to Establish Innocence after Trial 15 (1996). A subsequent study of the first 67 DNA exoneration cases revealed that 84% involved eyewitness error..."
http://law.wisc.edu/fjr/clinicals/ip/ipnews/dubosebrief.pdf
National Registry of Exonerations website:
http://www.law.umich.edu/special/exoneration/Pages/about.aspx
The psychology of eyewitness testimony (PPT)
http://www.docstoc.com/docs/59200209/The-Psychology-of-Eyewitness-Testimony
Hardcover: http://www.amazon.com/Psychology-Eyewitness-Testimony-Daniel-Yarmey/dp/0029358604