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Key Words witness, testimony, lineup
* Abstract The criminal justice system relies heavily on eyewitness identification for investigating and prosecuting crimes. Psychology has built the only scientific literature on eyewitness identification and has warned the justice system of problems with eyewitness identification evidence. Recent DNA exoneration cases have corroborated the warnings of eyewitness identification researchers by showing that mistaken eyewitness identification was the largest single factor contributing to the conviction of these innocent people. We review major developments in the experimental literature concerning the way that various factors relate to the accuracy of eyewitness identification. These factors include characteristics of the witness, characteristics of the witnessed event, characteristics of testimony, lineup content, lineup instructions, and methods of testing. Problems with the literature are noted with respect to both the relative paucity of theory and the scarcity of base-rate information from actual cases.
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Eyewitnesses are critical in solving crimes, and sometimes eyewitness testimony is the only evidence available for determining the identity of the culprit. Psychological researchers who began programs in the 1970s, however, have consistently articulated concerns about the accuracy of eyewitness identification. Using various methodologies, such as filmed events and live staged crimes, eyewitness researchers have noted that mistaken identification rates can be surprisingly high and that eyewitnesses often express certainty when they mistakenly select someone from a lineup. Although their findings were quite compelling to the researchers themselves, it was not until the late 1990s that criminal justice personnel began taking the research seriously. This change in attitude about the psychological literature on eyewitness identification arose primarily from the development of forensic DNA tests in the 1990s. More than 100 people who were convicted prior to the advent of forensic DNA have now been exonerated by DNA tests, and more than 75% of these people were victims of mistaken eyewitness identification (Wells et al. 1998, Scheck et al. 2000). The apparent prescience of the psychological literature regarding problems with eyewitness identification has created a rising prominence of eyewitness identification research in the criminal justice system (Wells et al. 2000).
Because most crimes do not include DNA-rich biological traces, reliance on eyewitness identification for solving crimes has not been significantly diminished by the development of forensic DNA tests. Interestingly, research on...