Eyewitness Testimony Not Always Reliable

I recently came across an interesting article in the Baltimore Sun that addressed the issue of eyewitness testimony. According to a lawyer who works for the Innocence Project – a group of lawyers who work to reopen cases to introduce DNA evidence – seventy percent of successful exonerations involved convictions based on eyewitness testimony.

This does not mean that eyewitness testimony is always bad – it does mean that there are legitimate grounds (and perhaps reasonable doubt) to challenge a case when the only evidence is eyewitness testimony.

[tags] eyewitness identification, reasonable doubt, DNA evidence [/tags]