This study, which was funded by the Laura and John Arnold Foundation and which I chaired, together with Judge Jed Rakoff of the US District Court for the Southern District of New York, focused on three areas of interest: ( i) scientific evidence for limits on visual perception and memory, which in turn place constraints on the veracity of eyewitness reports ( ii) eyewitness identification practices used by law enforcement for criminal investigation and prosecution and ( iii) legal standards and practices for use of eyewitness evidence in the courtroom. In light of these concerns, the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) recently assembled a committee of experts from fields of cognitive and neural science, statistics, law enforcement, and the courts, to undertake a comprehensive study of the causal factors behind eyewitness misidentification. Moreover, these outcomes risk undermining public trust in the criminal justice system, which can lead to social unrest and enmity directed at law enforcement and the courts. Hundreds of innocent people have spent many years of their lives behind bars while the perpetrators remain at large, the latter often committing additional crimes ( 3). The consequences of erroneous convictions based on flawed eyewitness accounts are profound and multifaceted. In ∼70% of these cases, misidentification by one or more eyewitnesses contributed significantly as evidence for conviction ( 2).
To date, nearly 350 people, many serving lengthy prison sentences, have been exonerated because their own DNA was discovered to be incompatible with evidence long ago collected from the crime scene. Of particular note are findings from the era of postconviction DNA profiling made possible by the development of the polymerase chain reaction, which enables amplification of crime-scene DNA to quantities sufficient for forensic analysis. Despite this value, our society has been confronted in recent years with many egregious failures of eyewitness testimony in the form of misidentifications that led to convictions of innocent people ( 1). Eyewitness identification has a long history of use in this capacity by law enforcement and the courts, in the United States and elsewhere, and has played a valuable role in both convictions and acquittals. The identification of a criminal suspect by an eyewitness to the crime constitutes a form of direct testimonial evidence that may be used for forensic purposes: that is, for the establishment of facts in a criminal investigation or prosecution.
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