Clarkian Logic on Trial

Abstract

On the first day of April of 2012, an interesting trial took place in Wells County, exactly 103 years after the famous trial described by Wigmore (1909). The defendant, D, was charged with brutally stabbing a homeless man just after midnight on New Year’s Day. Before the police arrived on the crime scene, the perpetrator, rushing to flee the scene, knocked into a witness who had seen the stabbing, Miss Jane Takin. Three weeks after the crime, a detective called Jane and asked her to participate in a procedure to see whether she could identify the perpetrator. Detective Sy M. Taneous (whose friends call him Mel, which is his middle name) constructed a photo lineup using his standard procedure. He selected five foils and put D’s photo in Position #3. After looking over the photos for several minutes, Jane identified D as the criminal. During D’s trial, the prosecution put on their star witness, Jane, who testified that she had picked D out of the photo lineup, and she reaffirmed her identification of him in court. The defense put on an expert witness, a respected psychological scientist who studies eyewitness memory, Professor William S. Devlin (whose friends called him WSD). WSD testified for over an hour, primarily about the problems with the identification procedure. He took issue, in particular, with the fact that Detective Taneous had presented the photos simultaneously and administered the identification procedure being well aware of the identity of the suspect. In an unusual move, the prosecution, during rebuttal, put on a different eyewitness expert to counter WSD’s testimony. Their expert, Professor Cleve Stark, is a well-regarded psychological scientist who specializes in mathematical modeling of eyewitness identification. We obtained a transcript of Dr.Stark’s cross examination by the defense attorney and present portions of it in this commentary.