The Experts Aren’t Reliable Either: Why Expert Testimony on the Reliability of Eyewitness Testimony is Unwarranted in Alabama State Courts
Introduction
Over the past twenty years, the legal community and the American public have witnessed the exposure of several cases of wrongful convictions in the past through the use of DNA evidence and other modern scientific techniques exonerating the accused. This has lead to the founding of several organizations designed to combat wrongful convictions and to lobby for the correction of the factors contributing to such convictions, as well as investigations and recommendations concerning criminal procedural safeguards and other measures by federal and state authorities. One factor consistently identified as problematic is erroneous eyewitness testimony or identification, which is found to be a factor in over two-thirds of the documented cases of wrongful conviction in the United States. Commentators, courts, and others have offered several approaches to the problem of faulty eyewitness identifications, ranging from the exclusion of questionable eyewitness testimony altogether to the prohibition of any conviction based solely on uncorroborated eyewitness testimony. Another suggested solution and recent trend of the criminal...