How many eyewitnesses make mistakes from real-world police lineups? In lab-based research?

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How many eyewitnesses make mistakes from real-world police lineups? In lab-based research?



Why did it take so long for this to happen? It took the right person to be falsely convicted before people started paying attention. Tom Sophonow was not the first man to be falsely convicted in the Canadian legal system. In fact, his conviction was probably not the most spectacular false conviction in Canadian history either. However, his conviction led to a judicial inquiry that changed how police do their investigation, and what kind of evidence they can use.

The following video is Dr. Elizabeth Loftus talking about her research on errors in memory in legal contexts. We will delve more into this throughout this module, but please watch it now for an overview:

As you should have taken from the video you just watched, eyewitness testimony is very compelling. Eyewitnesses are believed even when their evidence is discredited. People are not good at distinguishing between a correct and incorrect witness. Both correct and incorrect eyewitnesses are believed about 80% of the time.

In North America, around 80,000 eyewitness identifications are made every year. Some of them are wrong. It is impossible to know exactly how many are wrong, but there is evidence that gives us some ideas:

False identification rates in eyewitness lab experiments can vary dramatically: from as low as a few percent to well over 90% depending on the study conducted (Wells, 1993). Although actual rates of eyewitness errors in the real world are unknown, there is some evidence that shows that false identifications may be fairly common. As mentioned in the text, of 8,000 suspects arrested for sexual assault that had DNA samples tested by the US Federal Bureau of Investigation laboratory, over 2,000 (or about 25%) were excluded as the perpetrator. Typically these arrests were made based (at least in part) on eyewitness identification (see Scheck, Neufeld & Dwyer, 2001). Were it not for DNA testing, a large percentage of these individuals may have been convicted.

The Innocence Project, led by Barry Scheck and Peter Neufeld, has to date overseen the exoneration over 200 defendants in Canada and the United States (many on death row in the US) through the analysis of DNA evidence that was available but untested (or not testable) at the time of the original trial. In over 75% of the Innocence Project cases, erroneous identifications by eyewitnesses were a key factor in the conviction. You can explore these websites by going to www.innocenceproject.org. The results of the Innocence Project cases are consistent with the results of a study of over 1000 false convictions, where the majority of false convictions were primarily the result of mistaken identification (Brandon & Davies, 1973). You can also visit The Centre for the Defence of the Wrongly Convicted site which deals with a number of Canadian cases: http://www.aidwyc.org/. This site has a summary of important findings and cases.

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