Your Lying Eyes

I don’t know, just as you don’t know, whether Troy Davis is innocent. I do suspect that his conviction would, in this country, be considered unsafe. Not that this, or anything else, matters to the Georgia Board of Pardons who have denied Davis’s last appeal for clemency. No-one should be surprised by that. Nevertheless, the case highlights a major problem in criminal trials: eye-witness testimony is often unreliable. According to the University of Virginia’s Brandon Garrett:

The federal court that finally reviewed evidence of Davis’ innocence agreed “this case centers on eyewitness testimony.” Yet that court put to one side the fact that seven of the nine witnesses at the trial have now recanted, and new witnesses have implicated another man. The court did so while failing to carefully examine how eyewitnesses ultimately came to identify Davis as the man who shot a police officer intervening in a fight at a Burger King parking lot.