IMPROVING EYEWITNESS TESTIMONY FEATURE
due, in part, to reputational damage and years of lost wages. Chances are high that his relationships with his family and friends will have dissolved. All of this leads to mental health issues, such as depression, anxiety, drug dependence, etc. It doesn’t stop with James and his loved ones. All involved are affected to some degree. How does that eyewitness feel about identifying the wrong person? How do the police investigators feel about investigating and charging the wrong person? How does the prosecution, judge, and jurors feel about sending the wrong person away? How do society members feel about the integrity of the criminal justice system? That’s a grim scenario. There is no way to know how many innocent people are wrongfully imprisoned but, according to the Innocence Project in the US, of those who have been exonerated by DNA evidence, eyewitness evidence played a role in over 70% of the cases. Can we reduce it? Research suggests that the answer is yes. Consider now going back to the identification
suite. Imagine if the eyewitness was allowed to express how confident they were in their identification of James. In this hypothetical scenario, James would have been identified with low confidence. Knowing and appreciating that information potentially could have saved James 15 plus years of turmoil and the taxpayers well over £500,000 for just this one case (not including the £1,000,000 compensation).
When we express low confidence in a memory,
we are effectively saying that there’s a good chance we’re not right. By ignoring this information, we may solve cases faster, but we’re creating greater chances for errors – for sending the wrong people away for crimes that they did not commit. It doesn’t
When we express low confidence in a memory, we are effectively saying that there’s a good chance we’re not right.
mean that the police need to stop investigating that person, but they need much more evidence and to keep pursuing other suspects.
On the other hand, when we express high confidence in a memory, the accuracy of that memory is usually high. If an eyewitness expresses high confidence in an identification, the police can have more certainty that their suspect is guilty and continue to find more evidence to support that case. The value of confidence is one of the conclusions drawn by the ESRC-funded project ‘Investigating New Ways to Improve Eyewitness Identifications Using Receiver Operating Characteristic Analysis.’ Importantly, it is only during the initial identification procedure where confidence tells us anything about accuracy. It loses diagnostic value months later in the court of law. Therefore, judges and jurors should be shown the videoed identification procedure and use that evidence to help make their decision about the defendant’s culpability. At trial it is too late, and all the forces that contort memory have been at play in the months between the time at the identification suite and the court case. So, the easy and inexpensive solution is for the
police to collect expressions of confidence at the initial identification procedure and for the courts to use it. Not only is this change negligible in cost, it has great potential to drastically reduce costs of a false identification. n
i
Laura Mickes is a Professor in the Department of Psychology at Royal Holloway, University of London. She also holds a Visiting Scholar appointment in the Department of Psychology at the University of California, San Diego. Telephone 01784 443711 Email
laura.mickes@rhul.ac.uk
SOCIETY NOW AUTUMN 2018 27
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