Study Of Houston Robberies Finds That Eyewitnesses Are Surprisingly Reliable

Over the last couple of decades, as DNA testing has freed hundreds of Americans who were wrongfully convicted of murder and sex crimes, eyewitnesses have gotten a bad rap — and rightly so. Their misidentifications played a role in more than 70% of the 336 wrongful convictions that have been overturned with DNA evidence since 1989.But the problems surrounding eyewitness memory have more to do with police procedures than the witnesses themselves. According to a study out this week, a large proportion of misidentifications could be avoided if police investigators paid attention to one key factor: how confident witnesses say they are at the time of initial identification.“A high-confidence initial identification is surprisingly strong evidence,” John Wixted, a psychology professor at the University of California, San Diego, and lead author of the new study, told BuzzFeed News. “And if you ignore that, you’re also going to increase the odds that a guilty person is going to go free.”Read more at...BuzzFeed News, December 2015.