Police Lineups Start to Face Fact: Eyes Can Lie

[cory777]

Source: New York TImes

The decision by New Jersey’s Supreme Court last week to overhaul the state’s rules for how judges and jurors treat evidence from police lineups could help transform the way officers conduct a central technique of police work, criminal justice experts say.

In its ruling, the court strongly endorsed decades of research demonstrating that traditional eyewitness identification procedures are flawed and can send innocent people to prison. By making it easier for defendants to challenge witness evidence in criminal cases, the court for the first time attached consequences for investigators who fail to take steps to reduce the subtle pressures and influences on witnesses that can result in mistaken identifications.

“No court has ever taken this topic this seriously or put in this kind of effort,” said Gary L. Wells, a professor of psychology at Iowa State University who is an expert on witness identification and has written extensively on the topic.

Read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/29/us/29witness.html?_r=1&smid=tw-nytimes&seid=auto

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Activist News http://activistnews.blogspot.com/

[Newest Reality]

1. How does it go?

We all have our own, internal maps of reality. Those maps are not the territory.

Yet, the map we create by way of culture and experience is the territory. The map is all we ever get. What a paradox, huh? Yet, we seldom get to see into that very essential conundrum and understand it for what it is.

A creature is having an experience of reflexive, self-awareness and finds itself between the material and abstract aspects of its own, internal construction of reality via the limits and capacities of a survival-oriented organism that has a mind/brain that can conceptualize immortality, eternity, infinity, etc.

We are all getting into that kind of concept space now. We may all consider it and deal with what it presents, above and beyond the map makers who want to influence our way of navigating the uncharted space to come.

[snagglepuss]

2. A very interesting and thought provoking post. "All we get is the map" just

blows me away.

[Newest Reality]

3. Well, it blew me away, too!

That could be the point ;) Being blown away by any idea or concept is about ideas and concepts acting upon themselves and, perhaps, freeing us from a comfortable and convincing prison that, for the sake of comfort and safety, helps us get by with minimal pain and ostracism in a social sense, while divorcing us from what is most essential and meaningful about being.

What a trade-off/predicament, yet here we are. We should give-up, as J. Krishnamurti said, trying to measure our own mental health by ways of comparing it to a sick and unhealthy society. That pursuit could be more insane than insane if you continue along that route too long. Being unsane seems more reasonable these days. If you can postulate and comprehend a society that has gone, or is close to being totally insane, while still continuing to decided and dominate what sanity is, it is not at all difficult to discern your own place and necessary reaction to such a situation. Yes, it may be a case where the true nuts have taken over the insane asylum and then continue to do what people in that situation do: draw us into their reality in often charismatic ways and convince us that it is reasonable, that we are a part of it, and then determine what we should think, do and believe. That's the path and the problem we are facing, all of us.

I mean, if we get to the point that there is no map and there is no territory, that would also have a great impact for those who understand the nature of subjective versus the idea of the objective. That was meant to be a hyperbolic contrast.

[jberryhill]

4. Thinking about whether there is an objective reality...

...always makes me feel hungry.

[Celefin]

5. That made my day

Beautiful line of thought, really.
Thanks for sharing. Is there a link or (gasp) book reference to what you're quoting?
Or should that be your own thinking?
:)

[Newest Reality]

6. Were you referring to my previous post or

the response of jberryhill to it?

[Celefin]

7. To yours, obviously :)

Me like philosophy on an early monday morning in rainy Aberdeen. Goes really well with the coffee.

[Newest Reality]

8. Ah, I see.

Well then, thank you for your comment!

Philosophy is one of the more convincing and distracting of the many illusions we are made to endure. Chess can be the same.

Gee, I wish that I could site you a source for a quote, but, like the rest of them, I am a plagiarist with short-term memory who has managed to forget many of my sources in order that I might conflate your impression of me with those who have come before. I would call it my own personal synthesis, and would hope that would sufice in a way that underscores my personal veracity.

Really, there are far too many resources that have now become references along the way, to the point that I would have a very hard time picking one out in respect to the others and contrasting them to the others. The verbosity of such a response would probably be so overwhelming that you would regret the casual request you made.

I do have a few notables I could relate to you, but would that support my personal perspective to any degree that would make it more real and concrete? Well, a discussion on abstraction and how it functions would probably do, in that respect.

However, being titillated by philosophical discourse, (as a mental sport) you could PM me and I could drop a few names that might be of interest, even though I was quoting nobody, (myself) in my post, though everything I have to say might be some form of paraphrasing since I only deal with and relate to what has been given to me from birth and I only create new permutations of what was given and I did not originally create.

Thanks again for your notable and valued response.

[bemildred]

11. Here:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=103&topic_id=621721

May your pasta always cook fasta ...

[No Elephants]

9. Eyewitness reports and lineup ID's have been proven to be lies or mistakes in many cases.

Another reason why we should not impose the death penalty.

[dipsydoodle]

10. Maybe ok if they do at least look similar to each other

[Overseas]

12. K&R.

Glad to hear of all attempts to make our legal system more fair.

[saras]

13. They'll come to a bad end...

"No court has ever taken this topic this seriously or put in this kind of effort..."

because they know perfectly well - the studies have been around since the Forties - that "eyewitnesses" are nearly worthless in criminal law. They are desperately trying to understate the magnitude of the problem. We refuse to admit it because we have no alternative, and will have none until we finally have the security state that records everybody on camera all the time.

Just look at DNA evidence, for example. It is many orders of magnitude more accurate than previous techniques, but it makes the whole justice system look terribly incompetent and unfair, to the point where there's a lot of controversy about letting it override more traditional ways of deciding who to believe.