Comment on Eyewitness testimony no longer a gold standard

By NIGEL DUARA, Associated Press, San Antonio Express-News: World
Fri, 04/18/2014 - 10:55am

Eyewitness testimony no longer a gold standard

(AP) — The American legal system offers few moments as dramatic as an eyewitness to a crime pointing his finger across a crowded courtroom at a defendant. The problem is that decades of studies show eyewitness testimony is only right about half the time — a reality that has prompted a small vanguard of police chiefs, courts and lawmakers to toughen laws governing the handling of eyewitnesses and their accounts of crimes. Reform advocates say procedures long regarded as solid police work, from bringing a witness to a crime scene where he might see a suspect in handcuffs to the subtle encouragement of a detective during a police lineup, can fundamentally alter what someone believes they saw. Burns said criminal defense attorneys, groups that try to get wrongful convictions overturned and the American Civil Liberties Union are part of a bloc that is selecting outlier cases of prosecutorial misconduct or witness mishandling and applying that to the entire system. Law enforcement agencies must either adopt the Law Enforcement Management Institute of Texas' guidelines for lineups composed of people or photographs, or submit their own plan that conforms to the law. [...] the girls hadn't given any indication of their confidence in their choice of suspect initially, so it was impossible to later judge its value against their later certainty. Multnomah County, Ore., district attorney Rod Underhill said as a prosecutor, he's prepared to embrace the reforms but worries that the realities for small departments could turn a good law into a logistical nightmare.

 

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