What Can Psychology Say About the Neil v. Biggers Criteria for Judging Eyewitness Accuracy?

In an influential case (Neil v Biggers, 1972), the U S Supreme Court identified five catena to be considered m judging eyewitness identification evidence The Court's intuitions may need reassessment m light of recent psychological research evidence Especially in need of review is the assumption that eyewitness certainty and eyewitness identification accuracy are usefully related Under a variety of procedures that mimic the real-world environment, experiments have found the relationship between eyewitness accuracy and confidence to be of little or no practical use In addition, the Court's assumption that the degree of the eyewitness's attention is cntical to judging the accuracy of the eyewitness can be refined for the trier of fact. Psychological research can also bear directly on refining the Court's reference to the witness's opportunity to view the criminal, especially with regard to systematic biases in witnesses' estimations of temporal duration The Court's reference to an eyewitness's accuracy of prior description as a cue to accuracy of identification is questionable Finally, the Court's reference to decay of memory across time should be refined to include concepts of interference (1 e , consideration of retention interval events rather than time, per se) Although the Court's intuitions about eyewitness identification are not unreasonable, the recent growth of a literature using forensically relevant procedures has increased the gap between experimental evidence and the Biggers criteria