Eyewitness testimony can be blurry, so juries must weigh it carefully, says New Jersey’s top court, citing such research findings as the following:
A report by the Innocence Project at the Benjamin Cardozo School of Law that out of 254 persons wrongfully convicted but later exonerated by DNA evidence, 75 percent had been found guilty on the basis of faulty eyewitness identification.
A British study of 3,100 lineups found that 35 percent of witnesses had mistakenly fingered lineup “fillers.”
An experiment involving a staged crime and 500 unwitting bank tellers and store clerks found that nearly one-half later made mistakenly identified “perpetrators.”
A university study in which students made computer “composites” of their professor found that only 3 percent of other students in the experiment who knew him could match him to the composites.
Numerous studies reported that identification accuracy deteriorates sharply under stress and additionally with the distracting presence of a gun.
Identification accuracy starts to degrade significantly within two hours of an incident, multiple studies have concluded.
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