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

a-8-08.opn.html
court failed to instruct the jury that people may have greater difficulty in
identifying members of a different race. See State v. Cromedy, 158 N.J. 112, 121-
23, 132 (1999) (citing social science studies). After the decision, DNA tests led
to Cromedy’s exoneration.
But DNA exonerations are rare. To determine whether statistics from such
cases reflect system-wide flaws, police departments have allowed social
scientists to analyze case files and observe and record data from real-world
identification procedures.
Four such studies -- two from Sacramento, California and two from London,
England -- produced data from thousands of actual eyewitness identifications.
See Bruce W. Behrman & Sherrie L. Davey, Eyewitness Identification in Actual
Criminal Cases: An Archival Analysis, 25 Law & Hum. Behav. 475 (2001)
(compiling records from fifty-eight live police lineups from area around
Sacramento); Bruce W. Behrman & Regina E. Richards, Suspect/Foil
Identification in Actual Crimes and in the Laboratory: A Reality Monitoring
Analysis, 29 Law & Hum. Behav. 279 (2005) (assessing 461 photo and live
lineup records from same area); Tim Valentine et al., Characteristics of
Eyewitness Identification that Predict the Outcome of Real Lineups, 17 Applied
Cognitive Psychol. 969 (2003) (analyzing 584 lineup records from police
stations in and around London); Daniel B. Wright & Anne T. McDaid,
Comparing System and Estimator Variables Using Data from Real Line-Ups, 10
Applied Cognitive Psychol. 75 (1996) (evaluating 1,561 records from same area).
For the larger London study, 39% of eyewitnesses identified the suspect, 20%
identified a filler, and 41% made no identification. See Wright & McDaid, supra,
at 77. Thus, about one-third of eyewitnesses who made an identification (20 of
59) in real police investigations wrongly selected an innocent filler. The results
were comparable for the Valentine study. See Valentine, supra, at 974. Across
both Sacramento studies, 51% of eyewitnesses identified the suspect, 16%
identified a filler, and 33% identified no one. See Behrman & Davey, supra, at
482; Behrman & Richards, supra, at 285. In other words, nearly 24% of those
who made an identification (16 of 67) mistakenly identified an innocent filler.
Although the studies revealed alarming rates at which witnesses chose
innocent fillers out of police lineups, the data cannot identify how many of the
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