{"id":15687,"date":"2015-02-01T12:33:38","date_gmt":"2015-02-01T17:33:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/?p=15687"},"modified":"2015-02-01T12:33:38","modified_gmt":"2015-02-01T17:33:38","slug":"wapo-eyewitnesses-arent-as-reliable-as-you-might-think","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/?p=15687","title":{"rendered":"WaPo: Eyewitnesses aren\u2019t as reliable as you might think"},"content":{"rendered":"

WaPo: Eyewitnesses aren\u2019t as reliable as you might think<\/a> by Thomas Albright and Jed Rakoff:
\nThomas Albright is a professor at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies. Jed Rakoff is a federal district judge in the Southern District of New York.<\/p>\n

Over the past quarter-century, more than 1,400 people convicted of serious crimes have been proved innocent, according to the University of Michigan Law School\u2019s National Registry of Exonerations. But why were these people wrongly convicted? In a great many cases, one significant factor was faulty eyewitness identifications.<\/p>\n

Eyewitness testimony can be extremely powerful. When a witness with no motive to lie swears under oath that he or she personally saw a defendant commit a crime, it is hard not to believe the testimony. But in recent decades, extensive scientific research \u2014 which we reviewed while co-chairing the National Research Council committee that wrote the recent report \u201cIdentifying the Culprit: Assessing Eyewitness Identification\u201d \u2014 have identified a number of factors that can lead an eyewitness to make a mistake. It is time our legal system started making use of this knowledge.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

WaPo: Eyewitnesses aren\u2019t as reliable as you might think by Thomas Albright and Jed Rakoff: Thomas Albright is a professor at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies. Jed Rakoff is a federal district judge in the Southern District of New … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-15687","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15687","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=15687"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15687\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15688,"href":"http:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15687\/revisions\/15688"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=15687"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=15687"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=15687"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}