Eyewitness testimony and identification can be some of the most persuasive pieces of evidence presented in court. They are used to help recreate events from the past for a jury and identify a possible suspect. It is understandably difficult for a jury to go against what someone close to a crime said they witnessed, especially since they are sworn in under oath. However, there can be many issues with eyewitness testimony and identification, stemming from the fallibility of human memory, how easily memories can be manipulated, and how memories change with time.
One factor that can lead to eyewitness misidentification is the cross-race effect, or the phenomenon wherein people are generally worse at remembering the faces of people of a race other than their own. The exact psychological reason for why this occurs is still being investigated, but researchers have developed several theories as to the cause of this phenomenon. The first is that people spend more time with people of their own race, and therefore are able to encode subtle differences between people of their own race, thereby making it easier to distinguish individuals from one another. However, if they don’t spend significant time with people across other races, they will not develop those same cognitive maps for people of other races. The second is that when looking at someone who is a different race than us, our minds register the racial difference by tracking the race-specific features, but do not register the more minor details that distinguish one individual of another race from another. This again leads to difficulty in identifying people of other races than one’s own.
For example, in 2011 a Black man named Otis Boone was sentenced to 25 years in prison for a robbery based solely on the white victim’s eyewitness testimony. Boone maintained his innocence and eventually brought his case to the New York Court of Appeals, where he was granted a retrial and eventually exonerated. The court also ruled that juries must be educated about the cross-race effect when an eyewitness and defendant are of different races. After that ruling, New York joined Massachusetts and New Jersey as the only states with rules about the cross-race effect in legal proceedings. This is just one of many examples of how false eyewitness testimonies can lead to wrongful convictions, and shows the urgency of enacting rules surrounding how eyewitness testimony and identification are used in court.