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

a-8-08.opn.html
reviewed journals.
Although one lab experiment can produce intriguing results, its data set
may be small. For example, if only twenty people participated in an experiment,
it may be difficult to generalize the results beyond the individual study. Metaanalysis
aims to solve that problem.
“A meta-analysis is a synthesis of all obtainable data collected in a specified
topical area. The benefits of a meta-analysis are that greater statistical power
can be obtained by combining data from many studies.” Id. at 15. The more
consistent the conclusions from aggregated data, the greater confidence one can
have in those conclusions. More than twenty-five meta-analyses were
presented at the hearing.
Despite its volume and breadth, the record developed on remand has its
limitations. Results from meta-analysis, for example, still come mostly from
controlled experiments. See State v. Marquez, 967 A.2d 56, 75 (Conn. 2009)
(noting lack of “real-world data” in certain research areas (citation omitted)). 6
To determine whether such experiments reliably predict how people behave in
the real world, researchers have tried to compare results across different types
of studies.
Dr. Penrod presented data from a meta-analysis comparing studies in
which witnesses knew they were participating in experiments and those in
which witnesses observed what they thought were real crimes and were not told
otherwise until after making an identification. See Ralph Norman Haber & Lyn
Haber, A Meta-Analysis of Research on Eyewitness Lineup Identification
Accuracy, Paper presented at the Annual Convention of the Psychonomics
Society, Orlando, Florida 8-9 (Nov. 16, 2001). The analysis revealed that
identification statistics from across the studies were remarkably consistent: in
both sets of studies, 24% of witnesses identified fillers. See id. at 9 (also finding
34% filler identification rates when witnesses observed slideshows or videos of
crimes). Those statistics are similar to data from real cases. As discussed in
section III above, in police investigations in Sacramento and London, roughly
20% of eyewitnesses identified fillers. See Behrman & Davey, supra, at 482;
Behrman & Richards, supra, at 285; Valentine et al., supra, at 974; Wright &
McDaid, supra, at 77. Thus, although lab and field experiments may be
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