NJ: State Supreme Court Rules on Identifications
In an unanimous opinion in late May, the New Jersey Supreme Court has ordered trial judges to inform jurors of the unreliability of eyewitness identification testimony before jury deliberation begins. The decision stipulates that judges should specify that even the most confident witnesses could still present unreliable testimony.
Studies have shown that juries find eyewitness identification one of the most compelling types of evidence, but mistaken eyewitness identifications played a part in more than 75% of wrongful convictions later overturned based on DNA evidence. Three of these exonerations took place in New Jersey, where the convicted were sentenced to between thirty and sixty years in jail. In 1991, for example, John Dixon was picked out of a photo array twice by a woman who had been attacked and raped several days prior. The woman stated that throughout the attack she had stared at the face of the assailant, which was marked with numerous sores. Nonetheless, after ten years in jail, Dixon was proved innocent by DNA testing. The defendants involved in the other two DNA exonerations from New Jersey, David Shephard and McKinley Cromedy, were convicted through similar mistaken eyewitness identifications.
