Today is an excellent day. Ascheman & Smith had another victory at court this morning (several in a row now I believe). On the drive back to the office I was listening to NPR as usual. Today they had an excellent story regarding the questionable reliability of eyewitness testimony – I couldn’t find the exact article online – but I believe it was based off of “Troy Davis Execution Fuels Eyewitness ID Debate” an older article that was also similar is “Reliability Of Eyewitness Testimony Under Scrutiny.”
I wish that I was able to play that story to each and every juror that relies on witness testimony for the purpose of identification. Eyewitness identification is flawed. We rely on it, we trust it, because we have to. We have to trust what we remember seeing every day. But that doesn’t make it the truth, and it’s not what we should rely on when deciding to sentence an individual to prison.