In the United States legal system, suspect misidentification is among the leading causes of wrongful convictions. As such, witnesses' accuracy and reliability to identify the suspects are rarely considered sufficient for convicting suspects. The Jennifer Thompson vs. Ronald Cotton case in 1985 is a classic illustration of a suspect misidentification case that resulted in the sentencing of Ronald for eleven years. Jennifer Thompson made three claims with absolute totality in different times, identifying Ronald Cotton as her assailant. However, a decade later, it emerged that Ronald Cotton was utterly innocent of the crime based on DNA tests, and he was immediately pardoned. At the time, the Supreme Court was operating on a faulty admission of eyewitness identification policy and procedures. This essay focuses on the factors that resulted in the contamination of Jennifer Thompson’s eyewitness account. Finally, a set of pristine and accurate witness identification procedures and policies are recommended.
The primary driver for Jennifer’s suspect misidentification was psychological-based factors. She imperfectly processed the visual information she managed to gather about the assailant during the raid when asked to identify the raider through the photo lineup and the live lineup. The human memory is characterized by malleability in the processes of storage, retention, and retrieval of the information stored therein (Schaefer, 2017). The degree of malleability varies according to various factors such as stress, fear, and several other cognitive factors that distort its standard functionality. According to recent research by Greenspan (2020), factors such as difficulty identifying a person from another racial group and inadvertently relating the assailant’s features with the features of another person familiar to the witness are psychological impediments. Notably, Jennifer Thompson spent a considerable amount of time studying her assailant features; however, she identified the wrong individual during the photo lineup, live lineup, and trial. Later, when she physically met the actual perpetrator, Bobby Poole, she revealed that she had never seen him before in her life. Human memory is always susceptible to volatility and malleability. The incompetence significantly contributes to the misidentification of suspects during pickups.
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Secondly, Johnson Thompson’s exuded a high level of confidence and absoluteness that directly contributed to her inconclusive and incorrect judgment of the suspects during the lineups. Wixed and Wells (2017) indicate that it later emerges that the suspect wrongly identified despite the high levels of confidence in the witnesses. During Jenifer’s initial identification of Ronald from the photo lineup, she was notably hesitant and inconclusive for nearly five minutes. After that, she said, “I think that’s him” (Weir, 2016, p. 40). Arguably, the remark portrays low confidence and some degree of uncertainty. Later she revealed that she believed that the perpetrator had to match one of the individuals in the six photo lineup. After the identification, one of the police informed her that her selection matched the highly suspected individual. The officer's response increased her confidence and certainty in the suspect she had identified, though she had unconsciously misjudged the individual. The experience gave her complete confidence and absolute certainty during the final trial, which led to Ronald Cotton's conviction. From this perspective, witness memory can indeed be unreliable and inaccurate due to external feedback and biased lineup composition.
Further, the police identification procedures' design also reinforced and exacerbated some of the flaws that Jenifer innocently made in the identification process. Firstly, in that identification process, administrators failed to include fillers in the set presented to Jenifer for the suspect identification. Instead, the set was composed of only potential suspects. Standard procedures required five out of the six individuals to be innocent individuals to offer control against guessing (PERF, 2014, p. 29). After her second identification, one of the officers gave her positive feedback on her selection which was unfairly suggestive and violated the defendants' protection policies. Thirdly, in the live lineup, the administrators presented Ronald Cotton, who was the only participant in the set who was in the photo lineup. As such, Jennifer was apt to retain her selected assailant's image in her memory instead of focusing on the features she had gathered during the raid. The latter reduced the trustworthiness of the subsequent lineup identification. The act was unfairly suggestive, and his repeated exposures significantly contributed to her certainty that he was the actual assailant.
Based on the legal system's flaws during the Jenifer and Ronald case, several reforms are necessary to adjust the laws that determine how lineup eyewitness identification procedures are administered and the admissibility at trial of eyewitness identifications. Firstly, the changes include the adaption of the reasonable-suspicion model that eliminates the need for lineups when probable that the suspect is the culprit. Applying the sequential instead of the simultaneous lineup will also mitigate the witness's possibilities of relative judgment. Further, the identification administrators should inform witnesses that the perpetrator might not be in the set. Also, the legal system should utilize the reliability of psychology in improving the accuracy of the eyewitness identification process. Correspondingly, the changes in the lineup procedures and policies should proceed on a jurisdiction-by-jurisdiction flow, mainly by the process of persuasion.
Overall, Jenifer Thompson and Ronald Cotton's case exemplified the systemic flaws in the U.S. Supreme Court legal procedures and policies that failed to protect the defendants and convicted most of them on false accusations. The unreliability of eyewitness identification policies and procedures has been mainly realized after the advent of technological systems such as DNA sequencing, through which many wrongfully convicted individuals have been exonerated. As illustrated, appropriate reforms are necessary to streamline eyewitness identification and the witness's admissibility at the trial. The reforms' primary focus should be to increase the accuracy and reliability of the eyewitness identification process. Notably, it is the legal system's role to ensure the eyewitness identification procedures' accuracy and reliability.
References
Greenspan, R. L. (2020). Eyewitness confidence malleability: Misinformation as post-identification feedback. Law and Human Behavior, 44 (3), 194. https://escholarship.org/content/qt4ch0x8wg/qt4ch0x8wg.pdf
Police Executive Research Forum (PERF). (2014). A National Survey of Eyewitness Identification Procedures in Law Enforcement Agencies. https://www.ojp.gov/pdffiles1/nij/grants/242617.pdf
Schaefer, N. R. (2017). The malleable brain: plasticity of neural circuits and behavior790-811–a review from students to students. Journal of Neurochemistry, 142(6), 7, 142 (6), 790-811. https://doi.org/10.1111/jnc.13815.
Weir, K. (2016, February). Mistaken identity. Monitor on Psychology , 47 (2), 40.
Wixted, J. T. (2017). The Relationship Between Eyewitness Confidence and Identification Accuracy: A New Synthesis. Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 18 (1), 10-65. https://doi.org/10.1177/1529100616686966
