I didn’t make it home in time to watch 60 Minutes, but thankfully found that Howard Wasserman watched for me (and anyone else so lacking in a desire to be “in touch” as to have missed it).
Tonight’s 60 Minutes featured a two-part story on the weakness of eyewitness memory and witness testimony, including demonstrations of some of the ways that memory can be wrong.
It also presented two good, paradoxical thoughts on how trials (and the law of evidence) operate. On one hand, the legal system is designed to (and perhaps does a decent job at) sorting those who tell the truth from those who lie (in the sense of deliberately misrepresenting) and who have motive to lie; it does not do as good a job of exposing honest mistakes or errors. On the other hand, the system could not function without eyewitness testimony.
Howard has put up videos of the segment at PrawfsBlawg for anyone who missed it. It’s not that it presents anything new to those of us following the debates, and disasters, derived from mistaken eyewitness IDs, but that one segment on 60 Minutes is worth far more than a never-ending discussion of the failings of eyewitness ID on every blawg ever created. Painful as this is to say, it has an even larger audience than Volokh Conspiracy, proving yet again that the blawgosphere is not the center of the universe.
Rather than steal Howard’s thunder by inserting the videos here as well, pop some corn, go over to PrawfsBlawg and give them a watch. Remember, this is what all those nice jurors are watching on TV when Family Guy isn’t on, so don’t let the melodramatic intro bother you. It’s just a hook for the public, who likes that sort of thing.
The important point is that a whole lotta people learned that mistaken eyewitness IDs, even in the face of certainty, really do happen. Spreading this message far and wide is critical to the public’s understanding of the problem, and the value of the evidence, and may well mean that another innocent person doesn’t spend a life in prison. Nothing wrong with that, right?
But having failed to include the significant 60 Minutes videos, I instead offer this:
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I thought the best lesson from the CBS videos was how important it is to use the best research and experimental methodologies when initially interviewing witnesses, and to take into account the properties of recall memory. It shows how easy it is to shift someone’s confidence in a mistaken memory; later that person will adamantly but mistakenly persist with a false identification.