I have long believed that eyewitness identification is extraordinarily unreliable. This is not a sudden epiphany that I had when I became a defense attorney. To the contrary, my opinion is largely due to my former work as a prosecutor.
I intend at some point to write about several cases that I dealt with as a deputy district attorney when I was handling appeals and habeas corpus petitions. In each case, evidence came to light after the defendant's conviction that either proved his innocence conclusively, or made it so unlikely that the defendant committed the crime that any ethical prosecutor would agree to set aside the conviction.
But nothing I could write about the problems of eyewitness testimony could be nearly as persuasive or informative as the video posted below, which I saw this morning on Washington D.C. attorney Jamison Koehler's terrific blog.
Mr. Gurwitz:
Thank you for the mention and the link. I should credit with Gideon of A Public Defender for alerting me to it.
I don't know how you can possibly feel the same about eyewitness identification after you have watched the video. I did show it to my two sons who, without giving anything away, said they were wise. But then both admitted they had actually seen it before. As my older son said, I have seen LOTS of things on the Internet. This makes me think he may not be studying hard enough at college.