The Unreliability of Human Perception -- also in the Practice of Science -- as Evidenced by the Problems of Eyewitness Identification in Law Enforcement

Eyewitness Identification is to be reviewed by the U.S. Supreme Court for the first time in 34 years, in the case of Perry v. New Hampshire, No. 10-8974, as reported at the New York Times by Adam Liptak in 34 Years Later, Supreme Court Will Revisit Eyewitness IDs.

See Questions Presented.

I was for a short time on the staff of the Project on Law Enforcement Policy and Rulemaking (POLEPAR) at Arizona State University Law School, a joint project with the Police Foundation of the United States. See Gerald M. Caplan, The Case for Rulemaking by Law Enforcement Agencies, Law and Contemporary Problems, Vol. 36, No. 4, Autumn, 1971. Caplan initially headed the POLEPAR project.

Our job was to draft model rules for law enforcement, and one of those model rules was on Eyewitness Identification.

Those model rules are cited e.g. in Gary L. Wells, et seq., Eyewitness Identification Procedures: Recommendations for Lineups and Photospreads, Law and Human Behavior, Vol. 22, No. 6, 1998. Six Model Rules for Law Enforcement by POLEPAR are listed in the Library of Congress Online Catalog, including Eyewitness Identification.

The Model Rules were recently cited (2011) by the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts in the case of Commonweatlh vs. Gerald Eddington (and six companion cases).

I have written ever since this project about the unreliability of the manner in which evidence is viewed and interpreted, not only in the law generally, but also in diverse academic disciplines, where many scholars are not even remotely aware of how much their observation is colored by all kinds of extraneous factors.

Eyewitness and similar personal observation of "facts" can be quite faulty.

"Beauty" may be in the eye of the beholder, but the "truth" may not be.