You have just been robbed or raped, and the perpetrator’s face is burned into your memory. “That face! I’ll never forget that face!” you tell friends and family and cops. You pick the attacker out of an array of mug shots, then out of a lineup, absolutely certain you’ve fingered the low-life that did this.
But science shows that even when we’re positively slam-dunk sure of an identification, we’re often wrong. How do we know? Because DNA has saved hundreds of wrongly convicted defendants railroaded by faulty eyewitness identifications. There is no conclusive test to determine if an identification is accurate.
Our minds are imperfect machines and we’re influenced by many factors, and sometimes don’t even realize it.
The conspirators: faulty memories, lousy eyesight, peer pressure, fear or nervousness during the crime that made a victim focus on a weapon instead of a face — even a rigged lineup. When fingering someone of a different race, mistakes are even more common.
Eyewitness misidentification is the single greatest cause of wrongful convictions nationwide, according to the Innocence Project, a New York legal center that has freed hundreds of people wrongly convicted of serious crimes, including murder.
That’s why a recent ruling by the state Supreme Court is so important. And so necessary. The high court, reacting last week to a report by special master and retired judge Geoffrey Gaulkin, set up a new procedure to catch the mistakes. The court found that the current trial guidelines on eyewitness accounts are unreliable, they fail to guard adequately against police misconduct, and they rely too heavily on a jury’s ability to evaluate an eyewitness account.
Under the new rules, when a defendant can show evidence of suggestiveness by police, a pretrial hearing must be held. The admissibility of the identification will be evaluated like a weapon, fingerprint or any other piece of evidence.
The court also wants better safeguards against tainted lineups and wants juries to be better instructed on potential flaws with eyewitness identifications.
New Jersey’s often maligned Supreme Court is the nation’s first to make this change. And because this court has a long tradition of blazing new trails with courageous rulings such as this, the impact is likely to be felt nationwide.
Such reforms are long overdue. Along with DNA, eyewitness accounts have been the gold standard for evidence. Even when other evidence points toward innocence, an eyewitness account can put a defendant away for a long time.
That’s why it’s important to get it right.