Unreliable Eyewitness Identification

"Suggestively obtained eyewitness testimony is excluded because of its unreliability and concomitant irrelevance," Thurgood Marshall.

Eyewitness identifications are the least reliable and most influential type of evidence. When a jury hears that a witness under oath is positive that the defendant is the man he saw, a verdict of guilty is almost guaranteed. Therefore, the harvesting of this evidence should be done with the utmost care. Unfortunately this is often not the case.
In a study done by The Innocence Project, 84% of wrongful convictions rested on mistaken identification by a victim or eyewitness.

Line-ups and photo spreads produce such important evidence in determining guilt. However, a long history of social science research tells us that memory is both malleable and fallible. "We assume these risks derive from the dangers inherent in eyewitness identification and the suggestibility inherent in the context of the pretrial identification," Justice Brennan.

Because there was no physical evidence, eyewitness testimony proved pivotal in Dror’s case. Eyewitness identification was unreliable in Dror’s case.

All three witnesses gave varying descriptions of the assailant. The one witness who testified to be 100% certain, only did so after seeing Dror on television, in the newspaper, and in the courtroom – wearing a prison jumpsuit. The witness who testified to be 80% positive, had seen Dror on numerous occasions at his workplace. Botched photo and video line-ups biased the witnesses. Dror was the only man featured in both line-ups. Dror was the only man in the video line-up who remotely matched the description of the assailant.