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

a-8-08.opn.html
imperfect proxies for real-world conditions, certain data they have produced are
relevant and persuasive.
Critics, including the State, point out that most experiments occur on
college campuses and use college students as witnesses in a way that does not
replicate real life. Expert testimony, though, highlighted that college students
are among the best eyewitnesses in light of their general health, visual acuity,
recall, and alertness. But real eyewitnesses, the critics contend, act more
carefully when they identify real suspects. As the Special Master noted, it is
hard to credit that argument in light of archival studies and the exoneration
cases. Even with the best of intentions, misidentifications occur in the real
world.
A similar criticism suggests that lab experiments cannot replicate the
intensity and stress that crime victims experience, which leaves stronger
memory traces. But as discussed below, studies have shown consistently that
high degrees of stress actually impair the ability to remember. See, e.g.,
Kenneth A. Deffenbacher et al., A Meta-Analytic Review of the Effects of High
Stress on Eyewitness Memory, 28 Law & Hum. Behav. 687, 687, 699 (2004).
Finally, the State argues that lab studies are designed so that about half
of the participants will not be able to make an identification; a “base rate” of
50% is commonly used with half of the witnesses viewing a lineup with the
suspect and half looking at fillers only. The State argues those results cannot be
generalized to the real world, where the actual base rate may be much higher.
As Dr. Wells testified, statistical analysis permits researchers to
estimate the results under any base rate. That said, in reality, we simply cannot
know how often the suspect in an array is the actual perpetrator. But not
knowing real-world base rates does not render experimental studies
meaningless.
To be sure, many questions about memory and the psychology of
eyewitness identifications remain unanswered. And eyewitness identification
research remains probabilistic, meaning that science cannot say whether an
identification in an actual case is accurate or not. Instead, science has sought to
answer, in the aggregate, which identification procedures and external variables
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