Time to exonerate eyewitness memory

Abstract

Understandably enough, most people are under the impression that eyewitness memory is unreliable. For example, research shows that memory is malleable, so much so that people can come to confidently remember traumatic events that never actually happened. In addition, eyewitness misidentifications made with high confidence in a court of law are known to have played a role in more than 70% of the 358 wrongful convictions that have been overturned based on DNA evidence since 1989. However, recent research demonstrates that eyewitness confidence is highly indicative of accuracy on an initial, uncontaminated, properly administered photo lineup. In other words, low confidence indicates that the test result (i.e., the ID) is inconclusive, whereas high confidence indicates that the test result is far more conclusive. Critically, for the DNA exonerees who were misidentified by an eyewitness in a court of law, in every case where their initial confidence can be determined, the eyewitness appropriately expressed low confidence. For any other kind of evidence (e.g., DNA, fingerprints), an inconclusive test result like that would have been the end of it. By contrast, in the case of eyewitness evidence, investigators repeatedly tested (and therefore unwittingly contaminated) memory until a seemingly conclusive high-confidence ID could be presented to the jury. Blaming eyewitness memory for the failure of the criminal justice system to accept the inconclusive nature of the initial (uncontaminated) eyewitness evidence seems misguided. In addition to exonerating the innocent defendants who were wrongfully convicted, the time has come to exonerate eyewitness memory too.