Eyewitness Testimony
EYEWITNESS TESTIMONY....Jeff Miller is the 200th person to be exonerated by DNA testing after being wrongfully convicted. According to the Innocence Project, he's not unusual:
Of those exonerated after a rape conviction, 85 percent were black men accused of assaulting a white woman. In contrast, black men are accused in 33.6 percent of rapes or sexual assaults of white women, according to a 2005 Bureau of Justice Statistics study of victims.This is all part of the dirty little secret of the criminal justice system: eyewitness testimony is close to useless. And it's especially useless when identifying a person of a different race, when the light is bad, and when you're under stress — all of which usually come into play in violent crimes. What's more, it doesn't matter if the person making the identification is really, really, sure: the confidence of the ID is pretty much uncorrelated with whether the ID is actually correct. Not quite like Law & Order.