Improving juror sensitivity to specific eyewitness factors: judicial instructions fail the test

Abstract

A recent New Jersey Supreme Court decision recognized the difficulty jurors have with evaluating eyewitness evidence. This decision resulted in the development of instructions that highlight factors affecting identification accuracy. Research has explored the efficacy of eyewitness instructions for improving jurors’ decision-making. Jurors in these studies are typically presented with identifications that manipulate multiple witnessing and identification conditions simultaneously, making it difficult to ascertain whether instructions help jurors evaluate any one eyewitness factor. We conducted two experiments to examine how jurors evaluate eight individual eyewitness factors with and without instructions. Across both experiments, none of the individual eyewitness factors nor instructions influenced jurors. Instructions only assisted jurors when multiple eyewitness factors were collapsed to create either extremely good or poor-quality identifications. These findings contribute to the long history of jurors remaining largely insensitive to the nuances of witnessing and identification conditions. Current safeguards may only assist jurors under limited circumstances.

Keywords:

• eyewitness identification
• judicial instructions
• New Jersey v Henderson
• safeguard
• wrongful convictions

Ethical standards

Declaration of conflicts of interest

Angela Jones has declared no conflicts of interest

Amanda Bergold has declared no conflicts of interest

Steven Penrod has declared no conflicts of interest

Ethical approval

All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional and/or national research committee and with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards.

Informed consent

Informed consent was obtained from all individual participants included in the study

Notes

1 Please see https://osf.io/kx3dw/?view_only=44d16ae1de0542089a2aebb9927f7df3

2 Due to experimenter error, we inadvertently left off manipulation check questions regarding race, weapon presence and lineup type. Similar weapon and lineup type manipulations have been successfully used in previous studies (Jones et al., 2017).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Science Foundation [grant number 1228497].