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

a-8-08.opn.html
suspects actually selected were the real culprits. See Behrman & Davey, supra,
at 478. Researchers have conducted field experiments to try to answer that
more elusive question: how often are innocent suspects wrongly identified?
Three experiments targeted unassuming convenience store clerks and
one focused on bank tellers. See John C. Brigham et al., Accuracy of Eyewitness
Identifications in a Field Setting, 42 J. Personality & Soc. Psychol. 673 (1982);
Carol Krafka & Steven Penrod, Reinstatement of Context in a Field Experiment
on Eyewitness Identification, 49 J. Personality & Soc. Psychol. 58 (1985);
Stephanie J. Platz & Harmon M. Hosch, Cross-Racial/Ethnic Eyewitness
Identification: A Field Study, 18 J. Applied Soc. Psychol. 972 (1988); Melissa A.
Pigott et al., A Field Study on the Relationship Between Quality of Eyewitnesses’
Descriptions and Identification Accuracy, 17 J. Police Sci. & Admin. 84 (1990)
(bank teller study).
Each study unfolded with different variations of the following approach:
a customer walked into a store and tried to buy a can of soda with a $10
traveler’s check; he produced two pieces of identification and chatted with the
clerk; and the encounter lasted about three minutes. See, e.g., Krafka & Penrod,
supra, at 62. Two to twenty-four hours later, a different person entered the
same store and asked the same clerk to identify the man with the traveler’s
check; the clerk was told that the suspect might not be among the six photos
presented; and no details of the investigation were given. Ibid. Only after
making a choice was the clerk told that he or she had participated in an
experiment. Id. at 63.
Across the four experiments, researchers gathered data from more than 500
identifications. Dr. Penrod testified that on average, 42% of clerks made correct
identifications, 41% identified photographs of innocent fillers, and 17% chose to
identify no one. See Brigham et al., supra, at 677; Krafka & Penrod, supra, at 64-
65; Pigott et al., supra, at 86-87; Platz & Hosch, supra, at 978. Those numbers,
like the results from the Sacramento and London studies, reveal high levels of
misidentifications.
In two of the studies, researchers showed some clerks target-absent arrays --
lineups that purposely excluded the perpetrator and contained only fillers. See
Krafka & Penrod, supra, at 64-65; Pigott et al., supra, at 86. In those
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