John Wixted

And this is where things start to get interesting.

About 10 years ago, work from my lab, published in strong, high-impact scientific journals, first reported that a confident identification of a suspect from an initial photo lineup is highly reliable.

Big surprise.

Not unreliable.

For a scientific field that has spent decades cautioning the legal system about the unreliability of eyewitness memory,

These findings were not easy to enthusiastically embrace.

But almost all of the recent science finds that an initial confident identification is much more reliable than the field previously thought.

Not infallible, of course, but certainly not unreliable.

These new scientific findings raise an interesting question about the DNA exoneration cases that I told you about earlier, the ones where we know that

On the last test of their memory at the criminal trial, witnesses confidently misidentified an innocent person contributing to a wrongful conviction.

The question is, what did those witnesses do the very first time their memory was tested for that same person?

And when you look into that, you find they usually did not confidently misidentify the innocent suspect at that time.

The problem is nobody listened to them.

Remember Jennifer Thompson?

She struggled with the initial photo lineup a few days after the crime, narrowing it down to two pictures, wavering hesitantly between them for literally minutes before finally landing on Ronald Cotton's face and saying, I think it's him.

It was an obviously inconclusive identification full of doubt and indecision.

by the time of his criminal trial.

After much memory contamination, better doubts were gone, and she became absolutely, positively, without a doubt certain that Ronald Cotton was the man who raped her.

If they had known then what we know now, focus on the first test, where in this case you find a completely inconclusive identification, it seems likely that Ronald Cotton never would have been wrongfully convicted in the first place.

And that's the point.