False Eyewitness: “Who are you going to believe? Me or your lying eyes?”

By Douglas Starr

Late last year, psychologist Gary Wells was watching an oral argument before the United States Supreme Court. He wasn’t enjoying it.

Wells, who has the countenance of a boxer and the mind of a Talmudic scholar, had come with a group of scientists affiliated with the American Psychological Association, along with lawyers from the Innocence Project, for the appeal of a convicted New Hampshire burglar. The case involved a middle-of-the-night car break-in. Police had apprehended Barion Perry in a parking lot carrying a couple of car radio speakers. One officer stayed with him while another went upstairs to question a woman who had reported a “tall black man” peering into cars. Although she had identified Perry only from her distant vantage on a third-floor balcony, her testimony was used successfully to convict him.

To Wells and his fellow scientists and lawyers, the case illustrated the weakness of many eyewitness convictions. The woman saw the suspect only briefly and in the custody of police; naturally she would assume he was a criminal. The psychologists agreed with Perry’s attorney that the witness’s memory was so unreliable that the judge should have held a pretrial hearing to determine whether it should be admissible at all. Now they wanted to go much further: They hoped that the Supreme Court justices would use the case to reexamine the whole legal question of eyewitness memory—a question the court hadn’t considered since 1977.

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