In 2009, he was charged with assaulting 12 women. Women in Iran have all the necessary required freedoms within the framework of the law, he claims, but says our interview is a confrontation: This is not the way to conduct an interview. pic.twitter.com/XKkC5uWYyj, Iranian foreign minister Hossein Amirabdollahian smiled as he chastised CNN host Christiane Amanpour, telling her 'this is not the way to conduct an interview', CNN host Amanpour laid into the Iranian foreign minister over his country's record on women's rights. I believe the remaining 25 states should act swiftly to prevent additional miscarriages of justice. But a closer examination of those witnesses testimonies reveals a few disconcerting factors: the earliest testimony from a witness came a month after the murders, and other testimony came nine, twelve months later. The same is true of eyewitness memory: memory can be contaminated with the trace of an innocent person, but under proper testing conditions, eyewitness evidence is highly reliable. 'This is not the way to conduct an interview. A Man Was Jailed For 20 Years Due To A Single Eyewitness Who Now Wants To Recant Antonio Mallet's conviction rested on testimony from one eyewitness who, in a new court filing, now says NYPD detectives assaulted him and threatened to lock him up if he didn't blame Mallet for the murder. A judge can review the footage to see if claims of witness tampering are true, or if the witness shows significant doubt while identifying the suspect. Overall, an issue plaguing both courts and law enforcement is the lack of standard procedures to safeguard defendants against unreliable eyewitness testimony. In 1932, Yale University law professor Edwin M. Borchard documented nearly seventy cases of miscarriage of justice caused by eyewitness errors in his book, Convicting the Innocent.22 Daryl G. Kimball and Frank von Hippel | Opinion. Psychological experiments have shown that lineup administrators who know who the suspect is end up cuing witnesses toward that person. or debate this issue live on our message boards. Given the prevalence and impact eyewitness testimony can have within a criminal case, it is important to take steps to make it a more reliable practice. Andy Hale is a civil rights attorney, specializing in wrongful convictions in Chicago, Illinois. John Worboys was given an indeterminate prison sentence. See here: Innocence Project, Eyewitness misidentification accessed on March 9, 2019. Blood and fingerprint evidence, per se, would not be deemed unreliable. Harvard Univ Press; Cambridge, MA: 2011. In assessing the reliability of eyewitness identification, federal and state courts are still divided on (1) whether expert testimony on eyewitness identification should be allowed under either Daubert or Frye and (2) the proper exercise of trial court discretion when deciding whether to admit such expert testimony.18 Ernest Saunders, along with three other men, were part of the Guinness Four who were accused of being involved in ascheme to fraudulently increasethe price of Guinness shares. 5 Brewer & Treyens, Role of Schemata in Memory for Places, Cognitive Psychology 13.2 (1981). by TCR Staff, The Crime Report May 24, 2021, This and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.. It is used to establish facts in a criminal investigation or prosecution. For every one of those tests, the eyewitnesses were, at best, uncertain. (The Los Angeles Police Department does not conduct blind photo lineups, nor does it follow the commissions related recommendation that witnesses be shown photos one at a time. On the strength of six eyewitnesses lineup identifications, Lydell Grant was sentenced to life in prison in 2012 for the murder of a young Texas man, Aaron Scheerhoorn, who was stabbed to death outside a Houston nightclub in 2010. Compared to administrators conducting double-blind lineups, these informed administrators are more likely to ask witnesses about the suspect and smile when witnesses are looking at the suspect rather than at another person in the lineup. Medicolegal court reports are requested where expert witness evidence is required. After . document.getElementById( "ak_js_1" ).setAttribute( "value", ( new Date() ).getTime() ); This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. After killing the officer, the shooter fled the scene and a high-speed car chase ensued. Many believe that this conviction was based on contaminated DNA evidence. Noxious fumes wafted into their classrooms, causing some to need hospital treatment after complaining of headaches, heart palpitations, lethargy and being unable to move. 2023 Scientific American, a Division of Springer Nature America, Inc. Eyewitness memory is reliable when initially tested using proper procedures, but the legal system nonetheless habitually relies on unreliable (contaminated) eyewitness evidence from later IDs. Thanks for reading The Crime Report! And third, the confidence expressed by the eyewitness following an identification of someone from the lineup must be recorded. My review of the transcripts from Grants trial suggests a simple explanation for these high-confidence mistakes: The police did not use scientific best practices for collecting the eyewitness identification evidence. Yet, based on, among other things, this powerful purported eyewitness evidence, Heidelberg was convicted. In this case, the defendant was charged with first degree murder and the only evidence against him was the testimony of two eyewitnesses. Until he was released on parole, the 81-year-old Weger ranked as the second longest-held inmate in Illinois prison system. His doctors maintained that he was suffering from pre-senile dementia, and he couldnt remember three numbers backwards or the name of the US president. A neurologist also claimed that Saunders brain was small for a man his age and showed evidence of shrinking. 28 Brandon L. Garrett, Convicting the Innocent: Where Criminal Prosecutions Go Wrong 6368 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011). It should be revived and approved. circuit court, the 29-year-old was convicted of a rape that he did not commit and was sentenced to five life sentences. Its a fact that eyewitnesses make mistakes. They were then asked a leading question about how fast the car was going when it passed the yield sign. Confidence reported at trial after the eyewitness has received confirmatory feedback is not. By the way, Weger signed EVERY SINGLE PAGE of the FIRST confession which was transcribed by a court reporter who testified under OATH Weger was not threatened or harmed when he made his damning statement. The sooner police, prosecutors and judges understand that fact, the better off we all will beincluding you, if you are ever incorrectly fingered by an eyewitness. Specifically, the eyewitness had identified the defendant from her window, as the defendant was standing in the dark next to a police officer; however, the eyewitness had pointed to the defendant spontaneously, without the police asking her to do so.16 The Court ruled that, because the police had not induced the identification under suggestive circumstances, the trial judge had not erred in admitting the eyewitness testimony without assessing its reliability under the second step of the Manson test.17 Most witnesses didnt come forward of their own accord, and often enough it was the lead investigator for the district attorneys office, John Johnson, who found the witnesses, and brought them in to testify. 'But foreign interference and the Persian-language media that are based in the United States and Britain focused their activities on encouraging and instigating the riots and acts of terror. Compiled by Ann Njarara, Bree Peilen, Daniel Neuman, Emory Cook, Linda Lin, and Perrin Lowrey, Introduction Do you ask other countries who are in our region but are allies of the United States the same kinds of questions that you're asking me about the women's hijab? The reliability of these alleged identifications was suspect, since the officers would have had only a fraction of a second to observe the driver whizz by them at a high rate of speed at night. 32 National Research Council, Identifying The Culprit: Assessing Eyewitness Identification 38, 4-8 (2014). Another way is through the misinformation effect, where something occurs between the event and the reporting of the event to muddy or confuse the witness. He served 47 years in prison before his conviction was vacated in 2018. Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment. Carter has now been indicted for the murder by a grand jury, and Lydell Grant was released from prison. Additional Reading: Truth, Lies and Police Lineups, The Crime Report, May 5, 2021. Expert Evidence In Family Cases Where Spouse Is Unable To Return To Work Due To Illness, The revised psychopathy checklist (PCL-R), Proving Automatism Defences In Criminal Cases, Understanding the Value of an Occupational Therapist Expert Witness, Causation in personal injury or medical negligence, Assessments of sexual offending, violent behaviour offending, arson, and stalking. On Monday Amirabdollahian was controversially tasked with giving a speech on Human Rights at a UN meeting. But theyve hit a snag. Continue reading with a Scientific American subscription. She was sentenced to life in prison. Despite the frequency of use, we have been confronted as a country with many incredible failures of eyewitness testimony such as misidentifications that led to convictions and sentences of people who were later discovered innocent.1 Science has played no small role: post-conviction DNA profiling made possible by the development of the polymerase chain reaction, which enables amplification of crime-scene DNA to quantities sufficient for forensic analysis have meant that DNA identification is becoming increasingly used even in cases where it was previously not viable: those where we have smaller samples.2 As of now, almost 350 people, many serving long prison sentences, have been exonerated because their own DNA was discovered to be incompatible with evidence long ago collected from the crime scene. The subjects who had been asked the leading question were much more likely to choose the slideshow with the yield sign, since their memories had been tampered by the question asked earlier.4 Many studies have since corroborated the findings of Loftus, such as another experiment, where the same effect was reproduced using television screens, and then seeing the effects between the different participants.5 Studies like these have demonstrated the fickle nature of memory, and how details can be changed without the witness really even recognizing it. Many more sit in prisons who have not had the opportunity to have their cases re-investigated or samples re-tested. It is important to strive to continue to conduct social science research on the nature of eyewitness and the efficacy of potential reforms like the ones above in order to create effective safeguards against unreliable eyewitness testimony. Working closely with our specialist human resource colleagues, we offer a holistic advisory and support service for employers encompassing both the legal and people risks of workforce management. But studies demonstrate that a variety of factors can lead to the misidentification of criminals. Ruling in the case of a man convicted of manslaughter and aggravated assault, the court noted that several variables can produce mistaken eyewitness testimony. In the United States, more than 300 exonerations have resulted from postconviction DNA testing since 1989.26 According to the Innocence Project, at least one mistaken eyewitness identification was present in almost three-quarters of DNA exonerations.27 In many of these cases, eyewitness identification played a significant evidentiary role, and almost without exception, the eyewitnesses who testified expressed complete confidence that they had chosen the perpetrator. Why are we still having these debates? Subsequent memory tests, including the dramatic one that occurs in court in front of the jury, constitute contaminated evidence. A full and fair examination of all the circumstances of the subject crime, and all the evidence involved, is necessary. In 1932, Yale University law professor Edwin M. Borchard documented nearly seventy cases of miscarriage of justice caused by eyewitness errors in his book, Convicting the Innocent. 24 Federal Bureau of Investigation, Crime in the United States 2012: Persons Arrested,. Using eyewitnesses to identify a suspect as the perpetrator to the crime is a form of direct testimonial evidence that is used for forensic purposes. 'Do you ask other countries? The NRC found that police officers and detectives are frequently uninformed of what the best practices concerning gathering eyewitness testimony are. While his potential release faced intense scrutiny, it demonstrates how influential an expert witness report can be. Dan tries to find out more about Mustafa . The murder victims cold case evidence was there because the case had recently been reopened; the 1969 preschoolers DNA sample was there as part of an active murder investigation, and Leitermans DNA sample was there because he had recently been arrested for forging a prescription. There have been hundreds of cases in which mistaken eyewitness identification testimony led to the conviction of innocent people. Therefore, when John Warboys applied for parole, an independent psychologist was instructed by his legal representative to assess his risk. The Law Enforcement Command of the Islamic Republic of Iran claimed she had a heart attack at a police station, collapsed, and fell into a coma before being transferred to a hospital. A meta-analytic review of the effects of high stress on eyewitness memory, Law and Human Behavior 28.6 (2004), 687-706. Hossein Amirabdollahian told the host 'this is not the way to conduct an interview' after he insisting women in Iran had 'all the necessary, required freedoms' and accused Western media of fueling protests there. Please send suggestions to Mind Matters editor Gareth Cook. Psychologists have learned a lot about why such errors happen. I can vouch for the truth of his observations, having been involved in several cases dealing with witness misidentifications while representing both plaintiffs and defendants. Farm Heroes Saga, the #4 Game on iTunes. Get in touch with our team of experts today! (Joshua Boucher/The State/AP) Pictured: Protestors take part in an anti-Iran demonstration on December 24, 2022 in Istanbul, Turkey, Women burned their headscarves in Kurdish-controlled north-east Syria in September 2022. Confidence collected at the time of an identification during a double-blind lineup procedure is informative regarding the eyewitnesss accuracy. In 1999, Sally Clark, a solicitor, was convicted of murdering her two infant sons (one in 1996 and the other in 1998) at Chester Crown Court. Scientific best practices for conducting eyewitness lineups require that the person administering the lineup not know who the police suspect. As an experimental psychologist who conducts research on eyewitness identification, Ive seen hundreds of examples of highly confident yet mistaken eyewitnesses both in the laboratory and in actual court cases. Editorial: Los Angeles County bus riders get no shelter from the storm, Before and after photos from space show storms effect on California reservoirs, Dramatic before and after photos from space show epic snow blanketing SoCal mountains, Yet more rain expected to hit California in March. This helps to safeguard against overly eager police officers who might implicitly encourage eyewitnesses (with tone of voice, body language, etc.) In other cases, the circumstances of a purported witness identification may be flimsy; yet the prosecutors still rely on that identification, which is then presented as rock-solid evidence at trial. Most recently, in 2012, the Supreme Court clarified that the Due Process Clause does not require judges to assess the reliability of eyewitness identifications made under suggestive circumstances when the circumstances are not created by law enforcement officials.15 In other words, in cases where the proffered identification does not result from suggestive police procedure, the judge need not consider whether the identification also passes the second step of the Manson test. In one of the earliest studies of this misinformation effect run by Elizabeth Loftus, subjects were shown a slideshow of a red car passing a stop sign and hitting a pedestrian. Readers speculate why, Letters to the Editor: Serious about the drought? Instrumental to the prosecutions theory was the testimony of at least twelve witnesses, each placing Flowers along a discrete portion of the route he was supposed to have traveled that day. Gareth, a Pulitzer prize-winning journalist, is the series editor of Best American Infographics and can be reached at garethideas AT gmail.com or Twitter@garethideas. Similarly, a witness may mistakenly perceive the circumstances of a crime or event, such as a car accident. One might assume that Grant was the murderers unlucky doppelganger. Opinion: Why does Mexicos president want to dismantle the democratic system that elected him? 27 The Innocence Project, Eyewitness Identification,. Taken together, each witnesses testimony fits within the cohesive whole, tied together into a description of the route Flowers had to have taken that morning. Nonetheless, the attendants mistakenly identified Miller in a subsequent police lineup. Abcarian: Mask mandates? Noting a victims initial confidence level at the initial identification can be important, so as to track if the witness grows more or less confident with the identification over the course of the trial, which might be an indicator of eyewitness unreliability. Nevertheless, these subtle behavioral cues affect eyewitnesses decisions by making them more likely to choose the suspect. The chance of a lifetime: Five friends ski the tallest mountain in Los Angeles, Shocking, impossible gas bills push restaurants to the brink of closures, Best coffee city in the world? (Sometimes there is an issue of racial bias connected with eyewitness misidentification, but this was not a factor as the parking lot attendants were also African American.). Create your free account or Sign in to continue. Thus, Chester was charged with three separate felonies as a way to overwhelm him and break him down. In a recent review of the literature, the authors reported across 15 experiments, suspect identifications made with high confidence were, on average, 97 percent accurate! Its a stain on our justice system. After she had spent several years in prison, an independent consultant psychiatrist was instructed as an expert witness. Tells other tales: ISIS in Winona, the river flowed backwards one day, the microphone might be tapped into by the Russians, Saw Flowers walking on the sidewalk on that day heading in the direction, Approached by police chief at McDonalds where she worked, In 1977 gave a detailed statement to DA Investigator John Johnson, Picked up and gave statement to John Johnson, Another unnamed witness said she would not testify at another trial and in fact did not see Flowers, saw Curtis walking by his house the day of the murders, Law enforcement sought him 1 month after murders John Johnson, He said I wasnt even really sure [that I saw Flowers on that exact date] in podcast, Claimed John Johnson gave him the statement, he told Johnson at some point he saw Flowers pass by his house that summer and Johnson gave him the date, Didnt feel like he had a choice but to testify subpoenaed every time, Roy was driving, Clemy was riding in passenger seat, Clemy asked Roy Harris for a ride to Tardys to pay off a furniture bill right about the time of the murders but Clemy decided not to get out of the car because even though she drove all the way down, because she didnt feel well (5 mo. 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