The Trouble with Eyewitness Testimony

by Sandra Parshall

Why do we continue to give so much weight to eyewitness testimony?

Again and again in the past few years, we’ve seen wrongly convicted people – usually men, usually serving time for rape or murder – freed by DNA evidence after losing years or decades of their lives because a jury believed an eyewitness’s testimony. In some cases, victims and even prosecutors have continued to insist that these people are guilty. They were seen committing the crimes. They must be guilty. 


 
The truth is that the human brain is lousy at remembering details, especially in emotionally charged events. Witnesses and victims remember the emotions far more clearly than they recall the perpetrator’s appearance. As time goes on, the brain alters memories in subtle ways, making them even less unreliable.

The fallibility of eyewitness accounts has been demonstrated in numerous controlled scientific studies and proved in the real world by DNA tests. Police and prosecutors know that five witnesses to the same crime may give five contradictory descriptions of the perpetrator. Yet eyewitness accounts remain the most common “evidence” used to convict people. Despite the popularity of forensics, nothing is more compelling to a jury than a seemingly credible witness on the stand during a trial, pointing at the defendant and declaring, “It was him. He’s the one who did it.” Sometimes, though, it wasn’t him, and he didn’t do it. Sometimes the guilty person goes free while someone who’s innocent goes to prison.

A lot has been written on this subject, with little effect. The latest book about our flawed criminal justice process is In Doubt (Harvard University Press), by Dan Simon, a professor of law and psychology at the University of Southern California. He says that if you use only exonerations in capital murder cases as an indicator, the false conviction rate is around five percent, but he believes that’s a mere fraction of the number of wrongful imprisonments.
 
Simon uses research into the workings of the human brain to prove his conclusions about the destructive use of eyewitness testimony when the future of a human being is at stake. Studies have shown, for example, that our memories are highly selective in what they notice and retain and are not good at registering details of strangers’ faces. In a criminal case, witnesses may unconsciously alter their memories to conform to what they believe the police and prosecutors want – or to fit their own personal bias. Yet even when their recollections change over time, witnesses usually remain convinced that they have an accurate mental picture of what and who they saw.
Simon proposes that all interviews with witnesses, victims, and suspects be recorded and that jurors receive instruction from judges on the possibility that bias may affect testimony. Since prosecutors rely heavily on eyewitness  testimony, they’re not likely to welcome such a warning from the bench.
 
Personally, I’ve read too many stories of innocent people spending half their lives in prison to ever trust eyewitness testimony. If I were on a jury and the only “evidence” presented came from a so-called eyewitness, I would probably not vote to convict because I would still have that all-important shadow of a doubt in my mind.

What about you? Could you send someone to prison for ten, twenty years, for life, on the strength of a witness’s declaration that “It was him. He’s the one who did it”?

Why are so many people in prison?

Sandra Parshall


Did you know that one out of every 31 adults in the U.S. is either in prison or jail or on supervised release from incarceration?

That startling statistic is in an article by Senator James Webb of Virginia that appeared in last Sunday’s Parade Magazine. I don’t usually regard this newspaper supplement as a source of sociological wisdom, but Webb’s piece is worth every citizen’s attention. Reform of the criminal justice system and our overburdened prisons is one of his keenest interests, and he has the facts, supplied by the Department of Justice, to back up his call for change.

The prison population in this country is up to 2.3 million. Another 5 million adults are on probation, parole, or other correctional supervision. The U.S. has only 5% of the world’s population but nearly 25% of its prisoners – 756 inmates per 100,000 residents, almost five times the worldwide rate of 158 per 100,000. As Webb says, “Either we are home to the most evil people on earth or we are doing something different – and vastly counterproductive.”

What we’re doing differently is putting a lot of people in prison for relatively minor and nonviolent offenses. According to the DOJ, fully one-third of all prisoners are incarcerated for drug offenses. Almost half of all drug arrests in 2007 involved marijuana rather than “hard” drugs. Almost 60% of those imprisoned for drug offenses have no history of violence or involvement in major drug sales. Four out of five drug arrests are for possession; only one in five is for dealing. While marijuana users are serving prison sentences, the Mexican cartels that bring drugs across our borders and into our communities, at an estimated annual profit of $25 billion, flourish unimpeded, and gangs from other parts of Latin America, Asia, and Europe are getting in on the action. Imprisoning users does nothing to stem the drug trade.

Our prisons are overcrowded and dangerous. People who commit offenses that other countries would treat as medical, mental, or social problems are thrown into institutions where violence is a constant threat and diseases such as HIV/AIDS and hepatitis are rampant. Being caught with even a small amount of an illegal drug is enough to ruin a person’s entire future, if he survives prison. According to the DOJ, more than 350,000 adult prisoners are mentally ill. This is some of what we’re getting for the $68 billion we spend on corrections in this country every year.

Some state governments are beginning to realize that their corrections systems have to be fixed – if only because state budgets can’t continue to fund ever-increasing prison populations. Last week, Gov. David Patterson of New York announced plans to roll back harsh sentences for nonviolent offenses. Across the country, leaders are pushing sentencing reform to reduce prison populations and costs. Of course, opponents claim that this amounts to coddling criminals and that we must build more prisons.

Senator Webb proposes a national commission that would take a comprehensive approach to corrections reform and provide guidance to states dealing with overburdened prisons and court systems. Like so many other problems we face in this country, the chaos in our prisons seems overwhelming, and plenty of people will throw up their hands and say it can’t be fixed. But it must be fixed, whether at the federal level or state by state. We can’t look the other way and allow this mess to get worse.

What approach do you favor? Do you believe nonviolent offenders should be given lighter sentences, or probation and community service instead of prison terms?

Do you believe nonviolent offenders should be incarcerated with those convicted of violent crimes?

Do you think drug use should be treated as a crime or a medical problem?

Do you believe marijuana use should be decriminalized?

Read Senator Webb’s article here:
http://www.parade.com/news/2009/03/why-we-must-fix-our-prisons.html

Memories of Prison

Sandra Parshall

The Maryland House of Correction in Jessup is closed at last. The 129-year-old building is empty of inmates, and its long history of riots, attacks on correctional officers, escapes and violence among prisoners has come to an end.

Years ago, when I was a young reporter on the Baltimore Evening Sun, I visited Maryland prisons to report on health care for inmates. I had been inside a prison before -- the federal facility for women in Alderson, West Virginia, made famous recently by Martha Stewart’s brief residence there. I realized that not all prisons were like Alderson, with its lovely campus in the mountains, pleasant buildings, and semi-private rooms, but I was completely unprepared for the reality of places like the HOC at Jessup.

I knew that I would be leaving whenever I wanted to, but the sound of doors clanging shut behind me, locking me in, brought on a rush of panic. When I was escorted past a row of locked cells where inmates were segregated from the general prison population, I felt like a visitor at a particularly grim zoo. A couple of the men caught my eye through the bars of their cell doors, and I had to look away because I felt ashamed and embarrassed that they were being shown off for my benefit.

Jessup was the dreariest of the institutions I visited, but the penitentiary in Baltimore made an equally deep impression. I can still see the tier upon tier of cells, and the only color I remember is gray, although I doubt the walls were actually painted that color. My strongest memory is of the noise, an overwhelming drone punctuated by shouts and the clank of metal on metal as doors opened and closed. I would have gone out of my mind from the racket alone if I’d stayed there more than a couple of hours.

I was allowed to speak to individual inmates, question them and record their complaints about medical care in the prison. The men were polite, respectful, and voiced their opinions in reasonable tones. One young man apparently hadn’t seen a female in a while, and he asked personal questions about my life, but I never felt threatened. When I began receiving letters from him shortly after my visit, I was sorry I had to wound his feelings by telling him I couldn’t visit or write to him.

At the prison near Hagerstown, where I ate lunch in the cafeteria with inmates, I perceived the atmosphere as markedly different. The noise level was low, the buildings appeared well-maintained, and the setting was beautiful. I thought this was a “good” prison. Yet it has also been the scene of violence and riots, and charges of brutality have been made against the guards. I was there for part of one day. I saw what I was allowed to see. In other prisons, despair couldn’t be hidden. I felt it before I walked through the doors, and I saw it all around me when I was inside. In Hagerstown, for some reason, I was blind to it, yet the history of the place proves it was ever-present.

Our nation’s prisons are overflowing with inmates, and the closing of one antiquated, unsafe facility in Maryland isn’t the hopeful sign it might appear to be. All of the Jessup prisoners had to go somewhere. Hundreds were transferred to distant parts of the state or to prisons in other states, without notification to their families beforehand. Now separation from family will add a new layer of frustration and loneliness to the inmates’ lives.

I’m not a Pollyanna who wants all the prison doors flung open and the inmates set free. I want dangerous criminals locked up, and I am appalled when anyone receives a light sentence for killing or maiming another person. So how am I to reconcile my desire for justice with the terrible sadness I feel when I think of people shut up in massive, dismal institutions where enforced idleness and loneliness destroy what’s left of their humanity? Why is our society incapable of addressing the underlying causes of crime? How long will we go on building more and more super-max prisons and believing that if we lock up our problems we have solved them?