State v. Henderson and the New Model Jury Charges - New Jersey ...

a-8-08.opn.html
of an identification, the Innocence Project argues that the judge should give a
cautionary instruction to treat that evidence with great caution and distrust.
The State argues that the Innocent Project’s proposal would invite an
unnecessary pretrial fishing expedition in every criminal case involving
eyewitness evidence. Instead, the State contends that the initial burden should
remain on defendants to show some evidence of suggestiveness, which the State
claims is not an onerous threshold.
IX. Legal Conclusions
A. Scientific Evidence
We find that the scientific evidence presented is both reliable and useful. See
Moore, supra, 188 N.J. at 206. Despite arguments to the contrary, we agree
with the Special Master that “[t]he science abundantly demonstrates the many
vagaries of memory encoding, storage, and retrieval; the malleability of
memory; the contaminating effects of extrinsic information; the influence of
police interview techniques and identification procedures; and the many other
factors that bear on the reliability of eyewitness identifications.”
The research presented on remand is not only extensive, but as Dr. Monahan
testified, it represents the “gold standard in terms of the applicability of social
science research to the law.” Experimental methods and findings have been
tested and retested, subjected to scientific scrutiny through peer-reviewed
journals, evaluated through the lens of meta-analyses, and replicated at times
in real-world settings. As reflected above, consensus exists among the experts
who testified on remand and within the broader research community. See
Chun, supra, 194 N.J. at 91; see also Frye, supra, 293 F. at 1014.
Other courts have accepted eyewitness identification research pertaining to a
number of the variables discussed. See, e.g., United States v. Bartlett, 567 F.3d
901, 906 (7th Cir. 2009) (confidence-accuracy relationship and memory
decay), cert. denied, U.S. , 130 S. Ct. 1137, 175 L. Ed. 971 (2010); United States v.
Brownlee, 454 F.3d 131, 142-44 (3d Cir. 2006) (“inherent unreliability” of
eyewitness identifications and accuracy-confidence relationship); United States
v. Smith, 621 F. Supp.2d 1207, 1215-17 (M.D. Ala. 2009) (cross-racial
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