Eyewitness Identification Under Review
During the early days of the U.S., eyewitness testimony was the primary tool used by police to catch criminals and prosecutors to convict them. It wasn’t until recently that researchers started to question the reliability of witness identifications. Today, even though law enforcement has the benefit of scientific techniques to determine the identity of criminals, authorities still often base entire cases on one person’s ability to ID a suspect.
In 1977, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Manson v. Brathwaite that eyewitness testimony is admissible. Brathwaite was convicted in Connecticut on drug charges. He then alleged that an undercover police officer’s identification of him was unnecessary and suggestive and that the officer’s testimony should be excluded. The high court disagreed, stating that the testimony did not represent “a very substantial likelihood of irreparable misidentification” and therefore should be allowed into evidence. However, the Supreme Court’s ruling focused on the admissibility of eyewitness testimony – not its reliability.
Later this year, the Supreme Court will take up this issue again when it examines Perry v. New Hampshire. The main dispute is whether a judge is required to determine whether an eyewitness identification that was made under so-called “suggestive circumstances” is reliable if those circumstances were not orchestrated by law enforcement authorities.
Over the past 34 years, numerous studies have demonstrated that eyewitness identifications are not as precise as they were once thought to be. Research has revealed the human memory to be malleable, unreliable, and distortable. As a result, innocent people have been convicted of crimes they didn’t commit largely (or completely) because someone falsely identified them as the culprit.
This misidentification often occurs under what are known as “suggestive circumstances.” Such circumstances are present when an eyewitness is subtly (or overtly) “coached” to provide a certain response. In the 1977 case, the police officer identified a suspect from a single photograph that was shown to him. He was not asked to pick the suspect out of a lineup or a photo array – two modern-day techniques which are designed to reduce the presence of suggestive circumstances and increase the accuracy of suspect identifications.
Given this new understanding of the (lack of) accuracy of eyewitness identifications, civil rights proponents are urging judges in criminal courts to exclude such testimony from trial proceedings if there were suggestive circumstances involved. In other words, these advocates want the question of eyewitness testimony reliability to be decided by the judge instead of by jurors. The question that the current Supreme Court case deals with is whether it’s okay for eyewitness testimony under suggestive circumstances to be admitted into evidence if the police were not involved in the questionable identification. (Remember, the reliability of the eyewitness testimony would still have to be decided by a jury.)
The high court is scheduled to hear the New Hampshire case in November. While the subsequent decision won’t affect the admissibility of the vast majority of witness identifications, it will reopen the discussion about the reliability of eyewitness testimony in criminal prosecutions.