25 Years of Eyewitness Science……Finally Pays Off

Abstract

research-article2013 PPSXXX10.1177/1745691613500995Loftus25 Years of Eyewitness Science 25 Years of Eyewitness Science……Finally Pays Off Perspectives on Psychological Science © The Author(s) 2013 Reprints and permissions: sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/1745691613500995 pps.sagepub.com Elizabeth F. Loftus University of California, Irvine When I stumbled into psychology and law research back in the mid 1970s as an outgrowth of my basic memory research, hardly any psychologists were working in that area. A psychology professor at Brooklyn College, Bob Buckhout, was doing the odd study here and there on eyewitness testimony, mostly describing them in his own in-house journal called Social Action and the Law. I remember one fascinating piece from those early years entitled “Nearly 2,000 Witnesses Can be Wrong.” It described a finding of an unusual study in which a TV station staged a mugging for the nightly news. The announcer showed a lineup of six men and viewers called in to register their choice as to which person was the criminal. Only 14% were correct, not very different from chance. Although not well known today, Buckhout’s role in launching an interest in eyewitness research was important, and for posterity it is ably recounted in attor- ney James Doyle’s (2005) wonderful history called “True Witness.” By 1988, when APS was born, there were a number of serious researchers doing far more sophisticated studies and publishing them in the major psychology journals (e.g., Cutler, Penrod, & Martens, 1987; Wells & Turtle, 1986). By then, I and my collaborators had published scores of studies, and I had testified on the science of eyewitness testimony in over l00 trials. But psychologists were also frequently not permitted as experts on this topic. Judges ruled that the expert testimony on memory would invade the province of the jury. That is, it is up to the jury to decide whether a particular witness was in a position to see and to faithfully remember what was being claimed. Another concern from judges was that the proposed testimony was common knowledge to the jury and was therefore not a proper subject matter for expert testimony. Early on, the eyewitness research was embraced pri- marily by criminal defense attorneys who knew the perils of trying a case that included prosecution eyewitness evi- dence along the lines of “that’s the man, I’ll never forget that face as long as I live.” But the work was largely ignored or dismissed by prosecutors, many courts, and legislatures. The mid l980s did see one important event (for the field and for me personally) involving a criminal case decided by the Arizona Supreme Court (State of Arizona v. Chapple, 1983). Dolan Chapple had been convicted of murder based largely on the eyewitness evi- dence of two individuals who had identified Chapple’s photograph more than a year after the murder. The defense had tried to introduce expert testimony on eye- witness issues but the judge refused to admit it claiming that the proffered testimony was all within the common experience of jurors. The Supreme Court reversed the criminal conviction because an eyewitness expert had been excluded. Over the next two decades, a string of other higher courts would similarly reverse criminal con- victions on this basis. And a smattering of trial courts clearly reacted more favorably to this type of expert opinion. For example, People of New York v Jeffrey Williams (2006) dealt with a case of robbery in which the defendant sought to introduce expert testimony regard- ing a number of issues, such as double-blind lineups, confidence malleability, and cross-racial identification. The court ruled that the testimony was grounded in sci- entific research that was generally accepted by the rele- vant scientific community. Moreover, it was likely to benefit jurors by providing them with “a better perspec- tive and significant information beyond their common knowledge and experience.” But the biggest boost to public appreciation of eyewit- ness research came as a result of progress in forensic DNA testing. It was DNA that helped exonerate many wrongfully convicted individuals in the mid 1990s, and today over 300 innocent people owe their freedom to that testing (Innocence Project, 2013). These cases taught us that faulty eyewitness testimony was a major factor in wrongful convictions, present in roughly three quarters of those cases (see Garrett, 2011). It was getting nearly impossible for law enforcement and the legal community to ignore these wrongful convictions. U.S. Attorney Corresponding Author: Elizabeth F. Loftus, University of California, Irvine, 2393 Social Ecology 2, Irvine, CA 92697 E-mail: eloftus@uci.edu