Eyewitness Testimony on Trial: New Research and DNA Exonerations Call Fresh Attention to an Old Problem, Article Critique Example

With today’s advancement in technology, DNA testing in processing a crime scene has greatly helped numerous prosecutors around the world put suspects in jail. This is when samples are efficiently handled, and results come out accurately. However, the certainty of DNA testing has put into question whether prosecutors are always accurate in their findings. This puts a focus on the accuracy of other methods of processing evidence.

One form of evidence which has been proven to be inaccurate a large portion of the time is eyewitness testimony. Prosecutors and criminologists put a great importance on testimonies, defense attorneys sometimes base their whole case on an eyewitness. This is problematic because third parties can also introduce false witness to a case; lawyers and police officers should be well aware of this. Psychologists as well as criminologists have devoted some studies towards the inaccuracy of some people’s memory. This was done with a sample of college students asked to identify a criminal from a video tape in a line of pictures presented to them. Out of 206 students, 173 of them were wrong.

This is because the human memory, as psychologists have analyzed has a time limit. There is something called a “Forgetting Curve” which psychologists believe account for the inaccuracy of some incorrect eyewitness testimonies. This is when an eyewitness claims that from his memory a certain individual is in fact the perpetrator of the crime, when the suspect is actually falsely accused, due to a fault in their memory. However, this does not mean that eyewitness reports are entirely inaccurate; they still remain a large part of the criminal justice system, and still do help placing suspects in a certain crime scene.

In the year 1982, a man was convicted of a rape he did not commit; he was sentenced to serve five life sentences. Julius Earl Ruffin was only able to prove his innocence twenty one years later through DNA evidence (Reiss, 2008). Ruffin’s case is not one of a kind, this happens on numerous events where the innocent are wrongfully accused due to inaccurate eyewitness testimonies. Mistaken eyewitnesses contribute to over 75% of wrongfully convicted people in the United States (Reiss, 2008). Ruffin wrote a book after his experience entitled “Why Me? When it Could’ve Been You!” Ruffin is not the only one who has served time for a crime he did not commit. There is probably a significant percentage of those incarcerated who were wrongfully accused due to inaccurate eyewitness testimonies.

A similar case happened to Dean Cage of Chicago in 1994. He was wrongfully convicted of a crime he did not commit – the rape of a 15 year-old girl. This happened because of very inaccurate eyewitnesses from third parties which lead to misidentification. The police as assisted the victim with a sketch of the “offender” which then circulated the neighborhood. The victim then identified Cage at a local meat market, and claimed that it was him even by the sound of his voice. Cage was only released in 2008 after being found innocent with the help of DNA testing.

There have been studies and past cases which have proven that eyewitness testimonies have been faulty in the past, and they have lead to the convictions of innocent people. Research suggests that there is a need to re-evaluate how the eyewitness testimony is conducted in regards to a suspect line-up. This issue has revived media interest in eyewitness testimonies, and hopefully the attention directed towards it will lead lawmakers and those within the criminal justice system to rethink about how they go about the eyewitness testimony procedures to avoid the incarceration of innocent people.

References

Reiss, R. (2008) Wrongfully Convicted by Inaccurate Eyewitness. ABC News. Web. Retrieved from http://abcnews.go.com/Primetime/WhatWouldYouDo/story?id=4521253&page=1