As part of its reporting of the Washington area sniper attacks, The Washington Post today explains why faulty eyewitness reports are not unusual. We spoke with one of the Post reporters this morning and some of our comments are included in the article.

"Criminal trial lawyers, former police officers and psychologists were disappointed but not that surprised yesterday when witness accounts from the latest serial sniper shooting -- thought to be the best descriptions yet -- turned out to be conflicting and imprecise."

"Up to 50 percent of the time, eyewitnesses are wrong," said Jeralyn Merritt, a Denver defense attorney and a member of a federal task force that studied problems with the reliability of eyewitness testimony. "They're not lying; they're mistaken."

"She cited a 1996 U.S. Department of Justice report that examined the cases of 28 people convicted of sexual assaults and murders who were released after post-conviction DNA tests proved they could not have committed the crimes. In 24 of the cases, eyewitnesses identified the defendant at trial as the assailant. The 28 inmates served a collective 197 years in prison before being exonerated."

"Hearing other witnesses talking about the event, reading about it in the newspaper or viewing accounts on TV can adversely affect the accuracy of memory or skew observations, Merritt and other legal experts warned."

You can read the 1996 study, Convicted By Juries, Exonerated by Science, here.

The task force we served on was the National Institute of Justice's Technical Working Group on Eyewitness Evidence which produced the 1999 publication, Eyewitness Evidence: A Guide for Law Enforcment, available here. The National Institute of Justice is the research arm of the Department of Justice, and the task force included police, psychological researchers, prosecutors and defense attorneys.

For more on how memory works and problems with eyewitness evidence in non-legalese, you can read our article What If This Happened to Your Spouse or Child: Wrongful Convictions and Eyewitness Evidence, published by Martindale-Hubbell and Lawyers.Com.

We also highly recommend the websites of Professors Gary Wells and Elizabeth Loftus, the leading national experts in the field.