Using confidence scores with eyewitness testimony would reduce wrongful convictions

[True Earthling]

this should be mandatory...

Eyewitness testimony may only be credible under these circumstances

http://news.sciencemag.org/brain-behavior/2015/12/eyewitness-testimony-may-only-be-credible-under-these-circumstances

Overall, the eyewitnesses fingered the suspect about one-third of the time, positively identified one of the five innocent people used to fill up the photo lineup one-third of the time, or decided that the perpetrator was not in the lineup at all one-third of the time. But factoring in the confidence of the eyewitness painted a different picture. Highly confident eyewitnesses fingered the suspect about 75% of the time, and falsely accused one of the five innocent people less than 20% of the time. And when the police had ample corroborating evidence against the suspects, the rate of positive identification by confident eyewitnesses shot up to 90%, the team reports online today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

In the majority of cases where DNA evidence has exonerated someone wrongly convicted, the initial eyewitness identifications were made with low confidence, not high confidence, Wixted says. If confidence scores were incorporated into the evidence, not only might fewer innocent people get accused but more guilty people might be convicted, he says. The results of the study make sense, says Aaron Benjamin, a psychologist at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, because disregarding eyewitness confidence is "dramatically inconsistent with widely accepted views about memory." The justice system should reconsider how eyewitness testimony is used, he says, because "there's a lot at stake here." Courts may be "leaving more criminals on the streets and putting more innocent people behind bars than they should be."

But many researchers are calling for caution before changing the system. The study shows that there is real information to be gained from the initial confidence level, says Craig Stark, a psychologist at UC Irvine. But he worries that police, jurors, and even judges will misinterpret eyewitness confidence levels. In order for jurors to accurately weigh the value of testimony by its initial confidence, they will need to use sophisticated statistical reasoning, he says. "Can those subtleties be applied in a balanced way in people who are coming in with clear biases and preconceived notions?"

[GeorgeGist]

1. How confident are you that

this should be mandatory?

[True Earthling]

2. The mind is easily fooled and this should be recognized not only in the courts but also by police

in the initial stages of an investigation. I doubt that very few police depts would establish such a policy voluntarily.

It may require a state law to instigate.

[True Earthling]

3. recommendations from the Innocence Project...

http://www.innocenceproject.org/causes-wrongful-conviction/following-the-science