Some Things Never Change but Need to

This excerpt appeared in Criminal Justice Journalists News and is from a Dallas Morning News article.
If you click on the article, there is a chance to watch a video from the office of the prosecutor about
eyewitness testimony

Police, Prosecutors Still Rely On Unreliable Eyewitness Accounts

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The fallibility of eyewitness testimony shown by DNA exonerations is not a relic of the past.
Police and prosecutors still depend on the same discredited identification procedures
to ensure convictions today, reports the Dallas Morning News in the third
of a 3- part series.

Police use these techniques in a variety of crimes from murders to robberies.
The difference between today's cases and the 19 exonerations involving
sexual assaults is that often there is no DNA to ensure guilt or innocence.
"We've shown how unreliable eyewitness testimony is in sexual assault cases,"
said Rob Warden of the Center on Wrongful Convictions at Northwestern University
law school. "But now the system itself is pretending that all of these armed robbery
cases are just hunky dory when we know, if anything, it's no doubt less reliable
in an armed robbery case than in a sexual assault case."

There are some good videos about this if you click on the first three.

It's impossible to estimate how many wrongful convictions might be occurring

in cases without genetic evidence. "There is no question that there are many

more mistakes that we will never know about because there is no DNA in those cases,"

said Edwin Colfax, an Austin researcher with the nonprofit reform group

The Justice Project. The Morning News examined robbery trials in Dallas County

from 2006 and 2007. Eyewitness testimony is the most crucial element in robbery cases.

The newspaper found that law enforcement still relies heavily on eyewitness testimony,

even if corroborating evidence is weak and despite decades of research showing

its shortcomings. Eyewitness testimony can be unreliable for a variety of reasons.

Victims often get only a brief look at their attackers, especially in robberies,

and they tend to focus on the gun rather than the face. Accurately identifying

strangers, especially of a different race, is difficult, and the stress

of being a crime victim can distort memories.

Why do you think that jurors put so much emphasis on eyewitness testimony when they

deliberate?