That is not what I was saying. What I was saying there was the matter of exactly which cause is #1 and which is #2 hardly seems all the important. What if Vandy, or whomever, said mistaken/wrong eyewitness testimony was the leading cause of wrongful convictions, causing 36.8% of them; but then you bring evidence that it’s not the leading cause because prosecutorial misconduct is actually 37.2%, how dare you misrepresent the facts! I think that would be a trivial point. I did not mean to side-step any points of yours, perhaps I did not understand you correctly.

I do not think eyewitness testimony should be tossed out. Rather, I would endorse the recommendations of the Innocence Project and other legal experts in advising things like double-blind lineups, sequential not group, public and jury education, crackdowns on witness coaching, etc.., I also think that we need much more research here.

The evidence I know about persuades me that eyewitness testimony is a leading cause of wrongful convictions. The national exoneration registry indexes 1427 exonerations. These are mostly non-DNA-related exonerations. Since that is a fairly large number and it covers all sorts of crimes, it seems a reasonably representative sample in most respects. Mistaken witness ID was a factor in 35% of those. The registry counts perjury and false accusation separately and it is a factor in 56% of cases, but I wonder if they separated out the cases where the accuser’s testimony was the “eyewitness testimony” or wasn’t. Those numbers give me pause.

I thought the larger point of the blog (and the blogsite) was to call down misleading information, wherever one finds it?

Of course not. I’m suggesting that you’ll get a lot further if you don’t act like an ideological asshat who missed the point of the piece. Like it or not, that’s exactly how you come off.

If the poster is making claims in buttressing a point, those claims should be subject to discussion I would think. Suggesting (as she did in the evidence presented) that 97% of defendants are guilty is just as absurd as believing that about half of eyewitness testimony is. Using such a misleading statistic in order to suggest that the justice system may not be “broken” seems to me uncalled for.

And while the other issue was not “raised” by the article writer, it certain was included in her quote and allowed to pass without comment. If anything, it’s a *far larger* issue if one is truly interested in problems with the way we handle criminal matters.

I thought the larger point of the blog (and the blogsite) was to call down misleading information, wherever one finds it? Are you suggesting that certain matters get a pass in order to prove some more interesting–to you–problem (and again, since you seem to have missed it, I agree the author’s overall point is important). I applaud all efforts to make the justice system more accurate in every sense…perhaps when we get there, we won’t continue to have absurd situations like the one we find ourselves in today, where we incarcerate more people on an absolute basis than does a country with 4 times our population (China). Getting eyewitness evidence right should be one of those efforts..

There are many others…

And this:

… I’d guess a person with time to blog wouldn’t appreciate this point.

Is simply uncalled for and presumptuous.

If you have something to say that actually relevant to the discussion of eyewitness testimony/memory…

First, using DOJ stats showing that 97% of convictions where do to defendants pleading guilty ignores another very large (and largely ignored, particularly by institutions like the DOJ) problem of gross over-charging by prosecutors in the US. Harsh mandatory minimum laws, and the fact that fighting criminal charges brought by the state can lead to immediate financial ruin absent any court result, very often force defendants to plead out. The lower on the socio-economic totem pole you find yourself, the more likely this is to be a proble, which is why I’d guess a person with time to blog wouldn’t appreciate this point.

Second, while it wasn’t raised by you…does any informed adult actually think the pervasive problem of prosecutorial misconduct is actually well-appreciated? There is little evidence to suggest this. Prosecutors caught red-handed in all sorts of terrible conduct are very rarely reprimanded by name, making it impossible to hold repeated offenders to account. Lock-em-up judges often overlook egregious behavior that to a less biased eye might lead to different outcomes at trial. And as we have seen time and again from such cases of pathological “justice” as the day care center and recovered memory scares, and incidents like the Central Park Five jogger case, out-of-control prosecutors will very often double down on their initial terrible decisions to pursue weak or otherwise dodgy cases, for the basest of reasons…in losing, their careers would be tarnished. This does not even begin to address such abused practices as bribing so-called “jailhouse snitches” with favors, reduced sentences and even money in order to drum up testimony.

There seems to be plenty of room in our current justice system for observing “BS”; perhaps a blog dedicated to flailing that sort of thing should ignore a few of these (there are several others)as well.