Month: March 2022
Public support grows for reducing low-level traffic stops
Each day in the United States, police officers initiate an estimated 50,000 traffic stops, which amounts to 20 million stops per year. If you’ve interacted with a police officer in the past few years, it was most likely during a traffic stop. Some stops, for offenses like speeding and suspected...
How much should we trust eyewitness testimony? Part II
In our last post, we began a discussion about the problems of eyewitness testimony in criminal cases. Juries and the public in general tend to give a lot of weight to eyewitness testimony, but numerous studies have shown that these accounts are often far less accurate than we’d like to...
How much should we trust eyewitness testimony? Part I
For much of human history, the best way to prove someone’s guilt was to seek testimony from someone who saw the crime occur. In fact, before forensic evidence came into its own, eyewitness testimony was sometimes the only way to secure a conviction. To this day, juries find eyewitness testimony...