Supreme Court reluctant to create more barriers to witness testimony

[alp227]

Source: Wash. Post

The Supreme Court seemed reluctant Wednesday to create additional constitutional barriers to introducing some eyewitness testimony at criminal trials, despite a proliferation of studies showing that mistaken identity is the leading cause of wrongful convictions.

The court itself, in a 1967 decision, worried that eyewitness testimony could be particularly problematic and result in a “high incidence of miscarriage of justice.”

But New Hampshire public defender Richard Guerriero appeared to have a hard time convincing the justices that courts should institute added protections against testimony induced by police, or that more safeguards are needed against eyewitness accounts than other kinds of testimony.

“You have very good empirical evidence which should lead us all to wonder about the reliability of eyewitness testimony,” Justice Elena Kagan told Guerriero. “I’m just suggesting that eyewitness testimony is not the only kind of testimony which people can do studies on and find that it’s more unreliable than you would think.”

Read more: http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/supreme-court-reluctant-to-create-more-barriers-to-witness-testimony/2011/11/02/gIQA0fFpgM_story.html

[No Elephants]

1. 76% is a pretty high error rate for a criminal case, esp. if the death penalty is involved.

190 of the first 250 people exonerated by DNA evidence had been convicted because of eyewitness testimony.

[bemildred]

2. I guess unjust courts are better than no courts at all, or somethng like that.

What would US jurisprudence look like if it was ruled that uncorroborated eye-witness testimony was not worth a bucket of warm spit?