Essentially, it says that jurors who can see an actual video of the witness attempting to describe the witness and then attempting to identify via a lineup can compare that initial perspective with the witness testimony in court. When they have a pre/post video, jurors are more able to identify who is an accurate eye witness and who is not. It’s an interesting idea–rather than simply giving them the (almost always) confident trial witness, we give them the process and let them assess credibility.

One can ask the judge to let you sit the defendant in the audience (preferably with an investigator or family member of the same ethnicity and build), but that means rigorously keeping the witnesses from seeing the defendant during pre-trial and trial, AND if it goes wrong, it is going to be much worse than if the witness makes the expected pick at counsel table.

The big NJ case, State v. Henderson, 208 N.J. 208, 264, 27 A.3d 872 (2011) talks about conteporaneous cautiouary instructions — one could ask a judge to say something like “You should bear in mind that in-court identifications are generally less reliable than other identifications because they occur furthest in time from the incident, the witness has most likely already seen the defendant in an earlier procedure, and they are inherently suggestive, as the person in the courtroom suspected of having committed the offense is usually self-evident to even the casual observer.” (Based on the Innocence Project model ID isntructions)