The Influence of Race on Eyewitness Memory

One Sunday morning in May of 2000, a 15-year-old Black youth named Brenton Butler was walking to a video store to apply for a job when he was picked up by police as a possible suspect in a brutal murder that had occurred earlier that morning. Taken back to the motel where the murder had taken place, Butler was positively identified by the murder victim’s husband, James Stevens, who had observed the murder from close range just two and a half hours earlier. Although he had described the murderer as 20 to 25 years old, Stevens identified Butler as the man who had demanded his wife’s purse and then shot her. When asked if he was certain about his identification, he remarked that he “wouldn’t send an innocent man to jail”—yet subsequent events showed that this is precisely what happened (Hattenstone, 2002; Schoettler & Treen, 2000; Schoettler & Pinkham, 2002). The misidentification and subsequent confession that was coerced from Butler were later portrayed in an Academy Award–winning documentary titled Murder on a Sunday Morning. Unfortunately, incidents such as this, where an innocent person is arrested or incarcerated on the basis of a cross-racial identification, may be all too common in the justice system. The cross-race effect (CRE), also known as the own-race bias or other-race effect, refers to the consistent finding that adults are able to recognize individuals of their own race better than faces of another, less familiar race. Although observations involving race and face recognition have been documented since the early twentieth century (Feingold, 1914; Brigham, 2002), the past 30 years have been rich with empirical studies demonstrating