ABSTRACT
Eyewitness identification is often critical in the arrest and conviction of criminals (Greenwood, Chaiken, Petersilia, & Prusoff, 1975; Welford & Cronin, 1999), but eyewitnesses may also make identification errors, by failing to identify the guilty or by falsely identifying the innocent. False identification errors, in particular, have received considerable attention in recent years, through hundreds of documented cases in which false identifications have led to false convictions (Gross & Schaffer, 2012). In many cases these errors went undetected for years or decades until innocence was established through DNA or other evidence. From these exoneration cases, there is a consensus among researchers and legal scholars that false identifications are a primary cause of false convictions in the United States (e.g., Garrett, 2011; Wells, Small, Penrod, Malpass, Fulero, & Brimacombe, 1998).
