“They all look alike” August 10, 2008
Posted by Brendan in Life in America.trackback
Is it old fashioned racism or new fangled science?
The American Bar Association, meeting in New York, is considering whether to recommend that judges use their discretion to make juries aware of the problems that can plague cross-racial identifications.
California, Massachusetts, New Jersey and Utah already employ such instructions in some cases.
“The majority race is not as good at identifying minorities as it is its own race. This is hard-wired in some way that we don’t completely understand. But the phenomenon should be presented to the jury,” said Barry Scheck, co-founder of The Innocence Project.
Well it may be true, as Mr. Scheck suggests, that “the majority race is not as good at identifying minorities as it is its own race” but I’d bet that a Korean would have an equally difficult time picking one Swede out of a line-up of twelve.
But I digress:
Some criminal justice experts believe that mistakes are so pervasive that nothing short of wholesale reforms in identification procedures will fix the problem.
This year, North Carolina became the first state to standardize identification procedures. That includes preventing the police officer who is investigating the crime from conducting photo identifications with witnesses and requiring that lineup photographs be shown one after another rather than in groups of six.
New software that was on display at the ABA’s annual meeting allows witnesses to use police laptop computers to identify photos of suspects in programs that do not vary from investigator to investigator or witness to witness.
We’ll have a national DNA database within ten years…
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