Science
Overcoming Societal
Problems
How the science of perception can help keep innocent people out of jail .
People wrongfully accused of a crime often wait
years - if ever- to be exonerated . Many of these wrongfully accused cases stem from unreliable eyewitness testimony .
In the United States , nearly 70 percent of DNA exonerations are due to misidentifications by eyewitnesses , according to the Innocence
Project . To overcome this societal problem , research has focused on factors that influence the likelihood that a witness will identify the correct person .
Salk Professor Thomas Albright
One key factor is the way individuals are presented to the eyewitness during the lineup , says Salk Professor Thomas Albright , who cochaired a National Academy of Sciences committee to examine the validity of eyewitness identification . Albright , an expert in the fields of visual perception and recognition , taps into decades of research suggesting that people commonly misperceive visual events , and memories of those events are continuously augmented and deteriorate over time .
Salk Staff Scientist Sergei Gepshtein
Currently , the two most common lineup methods used by law enforcement are known as simultaneous and sequential lineups . In the simultaneous method the eyewitness views six photographs of individuals at the same time ; in the sequential method the eyewitness views six photos , one at a time . The witness then either identifies a suspect or rejects the lineup if no face matches their memory of the crime scene . Recently , Albright and Salk Staff Scientist Sergei Gepshtein published a report in the journal Nature Communications describing a new way of presenting a lineup to an eyewitness that could improve the likelihood that the correct suspect is identified and reduce the number of innocent people sentenced to jail .
“ Misidentification by eyewitnesses is a long-standing problem in our society . Our new lineup method uncovers the structure of eyewitness memory , removes decision bias from the identification process , and quantifies performance of individual witnesses ,” Albright shared with GB Magazine . “ This study is a
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