eyewitness testimony
Innocent until convinced otherwise
Innocent until convinced otherwise
Susan Perry, reporting at MinnPost.com on a study led by psychologist Julia Shaw of the University of Bedminstershire and published in the journal Psychological Science:
The results were stunning (so stunning that the researchers stopped the study after interviewing 60 rather than the 70 students they had originally thought they would need to test their hypothesis): Of the 30 students who were falsely told they had committed a crime as a teenager, 21 (70 percent) came to believe it, including 11 of the 20 who were told that the crime was an assault.
But those 21 students didn’t simply believe they had committed the crime. By the end of the three interviews, they were also providing elaborate details about the crime — including details of their interactions with police.
That’s a concerning result for a legal system substantially based on eyewitness testimony. Many of the depositions I’ve encountered as a judicial law clerk refer to events several years old. A quick search on Google Scholar reveals the questionable-at-best nature of eyewitness testimony. This is a line of research anyone involved in the legal system, including but not limited to civil and criminal attorneys and judges, social workers and expert witnesses should keep an eye on.