Eyewitness Identification and the English Courts: A Century of Trial and Error*

Abstract

A review is presented of over a century of identification practice in England and Wales and describes some illustrative cases of persons innocent of the crime, but who were nevertheless convicted on the basis of honest but mistaken identification. The review demonstrates that despite changes to procedure instituted by the Devlin Report in 1976 and developments in the use of video parades as an alternative to the traditional live parade, miscarriages of justice still occur. The authors argue that, in the light of developments in CCTV and DNA profiling and of what is now known about the inherent fallibility of human identification processes, it is timely to look again at the rule embedded in English common law that a single confident identification of a suspect by a credible witness is sufficient to convict an accused.

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