Eyewitness Identification: Get Rid of It

Arkansas Voluntarily Uses Procedures For Better Eyewitness Testimony

Dr. Walker explains, "Eyewitness reports are important for generalized things they can give you an idea of what happened, but when you start getting into the particulars how tall a person is what they were wearing you start to loose the ability to be true across everyone."

To be brutally honest, I think they ought to outlaw the use of eyewitness testimony as an identification tool, altogether. Human beings are fallible, especially in times of stress. As Stanley Cohen stated in The Wrong Men:

While honest eyewitness testimony, offered freely, can nonetheless send innocent people to prison, testimony that is perjured or compelled can appear to a jury to be even more convincing, for it is apt to have been carefully crafted and well rehearsed.

And the Innocence Project states on their web site:

Eyewitness misidentification is the single greatest cause of wrongful convictions nationwide, playing a role in more than 75% of convictions overturned through DNA testing.

An Pat Priest mentions on the State Bar of Texas Web Site:

The U.S. Supreme Court recognized in a familiar triumvirate of cases on the law of eyewitness identification, all handed down on the same day in 1967, that eyewitness identification is unreliable...

I'm just not sure then, why it is still in use at all. I don't think there needs to be reforms in place to heighten the accuracy of eyewitness identification. I don't think we want the accuracy rate of eyewitnesses to be raised a little. Unless something is 100% transparently true, I don't think it ought to be used as evidence in any way, to send a man to his death or life in prison. All data on eyewitness identification shows it is faulty at best. Why then, do we continue to send men and women to prison based on it?

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