Eyewitness fallibility and “thousands” of wrongful convictions

See, I told you there was so much I had missed in just one day.

EyeID points to this article about two upcoming studies on wrongful convictions:

The first, “Judging Innocence”, is soon-to-be-published in the Columbia Law Review, conducted by University of Virginia Professor Brandon Garrett. Professor Garrett’s study systematically examined all of the DNA exonerations and concluded that “the leading cause of the wrongful convictions was erroneous identification by eyewitnesses, which occurred 79 percent of the time. In a quarter of the cases, such testimony was the only direct evidence against the defendant.” Other leading causes of wrongful convictions were faulty forensic evidence, unreliable snitch testimony and false confessions.

You must read the study [pdf] to get the full sense of the various problems found. Here’s a sample:

There were false confessions in 16 percent of the cases, with two-thirds of those involving defendants who were juveniles, mentally retarded or both.

Here’s the zinger:

Garrett’s study strongly suggests, then, that there are thousands of people serving long sentences for crimes they did not commit but who have no hope that DNA can clear them.

The second is by Professors Samuel Gross at Michigan Law School and Barbara O’Brien of Michigan State. It, too, reached similar conclusions. Specifically:

“The main thing we can safely conclude from exonerations is that there are many other false convictions that we have not discovered,” the Michigan study said. “In addition, a couple of strong demographic patterns appear to be reliable:

Black men accused of raping white women face a greater risk of false conviction than other rape defendants; and young suspects, those under 18, are at greater risk of false confession than other suspects.”

CapDefWeekly has more. Grits has a lot on snitching. Scott Greenfield feels vindicated. I will have more on this later.