When eyewitnesses are wrong

Few courtroom events are more dramatic than when a witness points to a defendant and announces, "That's the person I saw do it!" When delivered in confident tones, juries are apt to weigh heavily that kind of eyewitness testimony in rendering a verdict. Yet, far more often than is generally supposed, such eyewitness identifications can be dead wrong — even when the accuser fully believes he or she saw what happened — and an innocent person is falsely convicted of a crime.

Late last month, in acknowledgment of the growing body of scientific evidence calling into question the reliability of eyewitness identifications, the New Jersey Supreme Court moved to drastically reform how and when such evidence can be presented to jurors. The ruling is only binding in New Jersey, but because that state's highest court has long been a leader in criminal law, the decision is likely to influence how police and prosecutors across the country handle such testimony.

In Maryland, for example, there is no uniform standard of how police lineups and photo arrays are presented, even though studies have shown that witnesses often are influenced by subtle cues from the officers conducting the procedures. The cues may not even be intentional, but combined with the fallible, suggestible character of human memory and the pressure witnesses often feel to pick someone, a surprising number of people misidentify what they saw or heard. Of the first 250 cases of people freed from prison after being exonerated by DNA evidence, 190 had been convicted on the basis of false identifications. Researchers estimate that as many as a third of the 75,000 witness identifications made annually in this country are incorrect.

Professional organizations such as the International Association of Chiefs of Police and the National Institute of Justice have issued guidelines for changing lineup procedures to reduce the possibility of false identifications, but only a handful of police departments across the country have fully implemented them. The guidelines call for so-called "blind" lineups, in which the officers conducting the lineup or presenting the photo array are not the investigators working the case. They also recommend that pictures of potential suspects be presented individually and in sequence rather than being shown to the witness all at once. Both changes have been shown to help protect the integrity of the identification process.

The Baltimore Police Department, for example, has a policy of presenting photo arrays sequentially, and it also follows the guidelines' recommendation to record the entire process so that the witness' level of certainty about the identification can later be reviewed. But the officers conducting the process are the same ones involved in investigating the case, and there is no specialized central unit devoted solely to presiding over lineups. Other jurisdictions in the state vary widely in how closely they adhere to the model procedures.

Introducing those procedures uniformly across the state almost certainly would require a ruling by Maryland's highest court along the same lines taken by the court in New Jersey, but currently there is no comparable case pending before the Court of Appeals, and it is unclear whether the General Assembly or the state attorney general could unilaterally impose the guidelines' recommendations on local police departments and prosecutors.

What is certain is that this is an area of the law that cries out for reform, and that the demonstrable risks of sending innocent people to prison based on false identifications, amply documented in the New Jersey court ruling, are unacceptable in a nation that prides itself on the fairness of its criminal justice system.

Reforming the procedures police use to identify suspects won't weaken prosecutors' ability to win convictions against people guilty of serious crimes. But it will help protect innocent people from being convicted and going to prison in their place.