This paper examines the ethical responsibility of law enforcement to prevent wrongful convictions, with a focus on the role of eyewitness testimony in contributing to miscarriages of justice. Drawing on the National Research Council Report and Innocence Project data, the paper explains how both system variables — such as lineup procedures and investigator questioning — and estimator variables rooted in eyewitness bias can distort testimony. The paper argues that because human memory is malleable and unreliable, it should not serve as the primary basis for implicating a suspect. It concludes that law enforcement agencies must adopt evidence-based, blindly administered interview protocols to reduce wrongful convictions.
Law enforcement has a direct ethical responsibility to prevent wrongful convictions, no matter how heavy the political pressure for a conviction may be. Wrongful convictions represent a miscarriage of justice and draw attention to procedural problems in law enforcement. One of the problems shown to lead to wrongful convictions is the method by which eyewitness testimony is secured. Recent criminal justice policy and procedure have changed somewhat to prevent problems with false eyewitness testimony, but these changes have been irregularly implemented (Norris, Bonventre, Redlich, et al., 2017). Therefore, the onus remains upon individual departments to develop an ethical culture that prevents wrongful convictions.
As helpful as eyewitness accounts have been in securing rightful convictions, "eyewitnesses make mistakes and their memories can be affected by various factors including the very law enforcement procedures designed to test their memories" (Committee on Scientific Approaches to Understanding and Maximizing the Validity and Reliability of Eyewitness Identification in Law Enforcement and the Courts, 2014, p. 1). Some of the processes used by law enforcement in the identification of suspects may lead to the planting of false memories in eyewitnesses being interviewed, or mislead eyewitnesses in ways that cause them to implicate an innocent person.
The Innocence Project, for example, cites cases in which witnesses were shown photographs of only the primary suspect, in which photographs of the prime suspect were marked, and in which eyewitness accounts actually changed after police interviews ("Eyewitness Identification," n.d.). Lineups are only one of many ways law enforcement solicits information from eyewitnesses; interviews and other methods also need to be governed by a much stricter set of rules and guidelines than has been used in the past.
Thankfully, there have been meaningful changes to the ways law enforcement collects and uses eyewitness testimony, due in part to the prevalence of wrongful convictions (Desai, 2017). Wrongful convictions are not only unethical; they are also costly and do a great disservice to the victims of crimes who expect that the real perpetrator has been convicted. Misidentification by eyewitnesses is responsible for the vast majority of wrongful convictions — up to 72% of them (Norris, Bonventre, Redlich, et al., 2017). Research on eyewitness testimony has not been scarce; psychologists have been studying the perception and cognition of eyewitnesses both under the duress of law enforcement questioning and in controlled clinical conditions. Human memory is malleable and unreliable, should not constitute the primary means of implicating a suspect, and should not substitute for harder forms of evidence.
"Controllable vs. uncontrollable factors in witness accounts"
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