Symposium: Reforming Eyewitness Identification: Convicting the Guilty, Protecting the Innocent

• Author: Barry C. Scheck
• Position: professor at Cardozo School of Law
• Pages: 233-238

Symposium: Reforming Eyewitness Identification: Convicting the Guilty, Protecting the Innocent^*

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Barry C. Scheck has been a professor at Cardozo School of Law for more than twenty-seven years. He is the co-founder and co-director of the Innocence Project, now an independent nonprofit organization affiliated with Cardozo School of Law. More than 175 people have been exonerated through DNA testing. The Innocence Project exonerates wrongly convicted people with post-conviction DNA testing and pursues policy reforms to prevent wrongful convictions.

Introductory remarks

The purpose of this symposium is to create a dialogue among people in law enforcement about the current eyewitness identification process and how it can be improved. We have tried to assemble social scientists and researchers who have been studying the issue of mistaken eyewitness identification for decades, as well as members of law enforcement and prosecutors who have been experimenting with, implementing, and exploring ideas and methods that can prevent mistaken eyewitness identification and maximize correct identifications. Our hope is that the law enforcement community will look back on this symposium five years from now and see it as a seminal event that helped reform the system in a way that prevents and corrects injustice.

The first segment of the symposium will feature two extraordinary women, Jennifer Thompson Cannino and Penny Beerntsen, who were victims of sexual assaults and mistakenly identified their attackers, and one man, Kirk Bloodsworth, who was mistakenly identified by five eyewitnesses and wrongfully sentenced to death. They will illuninate for you the devastating impact of misidentification, and the toll it inflicts on the accused and the victim's life. These remarkable, brave, and insightful speakers will put a human face on the problem of mistaken eyewitness identification.

The next group of speakers will focus on the science underlying the psychological process of eyewitness identification. They will share data about eyewitness performance levels, and describe the many variablesPage234 that affect witness performance. These variables are often isolated and manipulated in eyewitness identification experiments to study which factors influence or affect the witness's ability to correctly identify a suspect.

As a foundation for this discussion, it is crucial to understand some overarching principles of the...