How eyewitness mis-identification can send innocent people to prison

The Innocence Project inspired docu-series on Netflix, The Innocence Files, has been a fascinating, and entertaining, watch for many during the long days and nights of lockdown.

Although concerned with the American experience, the issues examined have a resonance on this side of the Atlantic, where similar problems are all too easy to find in our own criminal justice processes.

The series is broken into three sections, dealing with three predominant causes of wrongful conviction: misuse of forensic evidence, false or unreliable eyewitness testimony and prosecutorial misconduct.

The Innocence Project is a New York – based non-profit organisation, founded in 1992 by lawyers Barry Scheck and Peter Neufeld. They work to overturn wrongful convictions which are, in their view, the inevitable consequence of the system, as designed. We share that view.

Their website, www.innocenceproject.org , currently carries an interesting and highly informative article examining the intrinsic unreliability of eyewitness identification. Well worth a read, it can be found HERE.