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SALT LAKE CITY — How accurate is eyewitness testimony? A Weber State University professor's research sheds some light on how racial bias may weigh in to the mistakes eyewitnesses make.
Weber State University Communications professor Sheree Josephson saw data compiled from the Innocence Project that surprised her. It mentioned that out of all the people exonerated of crimes they had been convicted of since 1991, more than 75 percent of the convictions used mistaken identities to win the case.
So, she and researchers from Ball State University made two mock crime videos to study how these mistakes may be made. The videos were practically identical, except for one major difference. One showed a Caucasian male committing a staged crime in a school parking lot.
"Then we created the same video with an African-American actor doing the same thing in a college parking lot," Josephson said.
The test subjects were asked to watch the videos, wait 24 hours, and then try to identify the "criminal" in a photo lineup.
Josephson says they tracked the eye movements of the test subjects. Looking at the findings, they grouped the test subjects into three clusters. The first cluster contained mostly Caucasian test subjects looking at a Caucasian "criminal." This cluster had the highest amount of accuracy in identifying the man they saw in the video.
Correct identifications of the suspect's photo were made by only 40 percent of the participants.
–Sheree Josephson
"They tended to be able to make a quick and confident identification of the suspect," she said.
Cluster three (we'll get to cluster two in a minute) contained mostly African-American test subjects looking at an African-American "criminal" in the video. Josephson says this group took the longest to make a decision, and the decisions were not as accurate.
"It's often times a ‘failure to identify.' It's not that they identify the wrong person. It's just that they said, ‘I don't know if the person is there or not.'"
But, cluster two led to some interesting findings. This contained people who watched the video of the "criminal" outside of their own ethnicity.
"[They] tended to take longer. They spent more time on that task, and in that cluster, we had the highest percentage of misidentifications," Josephson said.
She says this "cross-race recognition deficit" happened in both directions.
But, the eyewitness testimony wasn't all that reliable to begin with.
"Correct identifications of the suspect's photo were made by only 40 percent of the participants," she said.
Here findings were recently published in the Visual Communication Quarterly Journal.
