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criminal cases often rely on eyewitness testimony sometimes it's the most damning evidence but how reliable is it see for yourself time for your culprit if you said any of these suspects you were wrong as is sometimes the case no one in this lineup was the perp for those that got it wrong what happened did you just forget your glasses weather lots of psychological phenomena involved mistaken identification tends to result in the person actually believing involving memory that's consistent with the person they identify so we trick ourselves into believing something that's based off an already unreliable memory this happens a lot we actually have three kinds of evidence gathered over the years indicating that mistaken eyewitness education is relatively common one is lab studies where we create events and have people try to identify from lineups another is field studies where we examine how often witnesses pick fillers out of lineups in actual cases and then the third is DNA exonerations where we know that three out of every four of the DNA exonerations involved mistake and eyewitness identification so if eyewitness testimony seems to be so unreliable why use it we need I wouldn't identification evidence eyewitnesses often get it right but we just want to make sure that we do things to increase that likelihood that they're getting it right minimize the mistakes and catch those mistakes when they do occur it sounds like eyewitness testimony isn't leaving the justice system so what's being done to fix this crucial form of evidence we've developed ways to improve how lineups are done so we reduce the chances of mistake in the first place and then also we've been looking at what we call markers of mistaken identification at the time of identification there are a number of behavioral cues that witnesses give off or indicators for example they're slower to make the identification they tend to compare one person to another and they do so with a lower level of confidence at the time of identification capturing those is very important so the system can be improved upon based on this behavioral research what actions are police departments taking then they have actually begun to use this research to good effect they're bitten reforms made a number of states that are based on this new science the science can be integrated at the level of working with police so that they collect and preserve eyewitness evidence in ways that are more pristine and it can work to inform the courts about how they can make decisions about whether night witness is reliable or not a given case you