Gary Wells

"During Williams’s trial, the victim was asked, on a scale of one to a hundred, how sure she was that Williams assaulted her." “One hundred and twenty,” she testified. Williams served 21 years in prison before DNA tests cleared him.

EYEWITNESSES TO CRIME: THE PHENOMENON OF MISIDENTIFICATION
Although psychological scientists have been studying human memory for over 100 years, not until the mid 1970's that a focus was directed to eyewitness memory. The importance of such research is easily substantiated because mistaken identification is the largest single cause of false conviction, accounting for more criminal convictions of innocent people than all other causescombined (see Wells, Small, Penrod, Malpass, Fulero, & Brimacombe, 1998). My eyewitness research program was launched in 1974 while still a graduate student. It is directed at discovering the causes of mistaken identification from police lineups and photo spreads with a particular emphasis on how to prevent these errors. Numerous successful interventions have been developed, such as: Improved instructions to eyewitnesses Improved techniques for structuring lineups and photo spreads Safeguards for insuring the integrity of the administration of lineups and photo spreads. This research has produced a large number of advances, such as developing a better understanding of the tenuous link between confidence and accuracy in eyewitness identification, describing the origins of false confidence, defining the domain of variables that control accuracy, and proposing and developing new lineup procedures, such as the dual-lineup procedure as well as the sequential-lineup procedure.

EYEWITNESSES TO CRIME: THE PHENOMENON OF MISIDENTIFICATION

Although psychological scientists have been studying human memory for over 100 years, not until the mid 1970's that a focus was directed to eyewitness memory. The importance of such research is easily substantiated because mistaken identification is the largest single cause of false conviction, accounting for more criminal convictions of innocent people than all other causescombined (see Wells, Small, Penrod, Malpass, Fulero, & Brimacombe, 1998).

My eyewitness research program was launched in 1974 while still a graduate student. It is directed at discovering the causes of mistaken identification from police lineups and photo spreads with a particular emphasis on how to prevent these errors. Numerous successful interventions have been developed, such as:

Improved instructions to eyewitnesses
Improved techniques for structuring lineups and photo spreads
Safeguards for insuring the integrity of the administration of lineups and photo spreads.

This research has produced a large number of advances, such as developing a better understanding of the tenuous link between confidence and accuracy in eyewitness identification, describing the origins of false confidence, defining the domain of variables that control accuracy, and proposing and developing new lineup procedures, such as the dual-lineup procedure as well as the sequential-lineup procedure.