Eyewitness testimony has been called out for being questionable for more than a decade now. So have the less reliable aspects of forensic “science.” Courts have made progress in addressing both through jury instructions and gate keeping on expert testimony through the Daubert process.
> People have the ability to recognize others they have seen and to accurately identify them at a later time, but research and experience have shown that people sometimes make mistakes in identification.
> The mind does not work like a video recorder. A person cannot just replay a mental recording to remember what happened. Memory and perception are much more complicated.[a] Remembering something requires three steps. First, a person sees an event. Second, the person's mind stores information about the event. Third, the person recalls stored information. At each of these stages, a variety of factors may affect -- or even alter -- someone's memory of what happened and thereby affect the accuracy of identification testimony.[b] This can happen without the witness being aware of it.
Eyewitness testimony also just matters less these days. Today, the trial would have involved cell phone location tracking from the accused showing he wasn’t in the area at the time.
For example, here is the current Massachusetts model jury instruction on eyewitness testimony: https://www.mass.gov/info-details/model-jury-instructions-on...
It mentions, for example:
> People have the ability to recognize others they have seen and to accurately identify them at a later time, but research and experience have shown that people sometimes make mistakes in identification.
> The mind does not work like a video recorder. A person cannot just replay a mental recording to remember what happened. Memory and perception are much more complicated.[a] Remembering something requires three steps. First, a person sees an event. Second, the person's mind stores information about the event. Third, the person recalls stored information. At each of these stages, a variety of factors may affect -- or even alter -- someone's memory of what happened and thereby affect the accuracy of identification testimony.[b] This can happen without the witness being aware of it.
Eyewitness testimony also just matters less these days. Today, the trial would have involved cell phone location tracking from the accused showing he wasn’t in the area at the time.