Yesterday, the NJ Supreme Court released its opinion on Henderson v. State.  In this case, the police used an independent administrator to administer the photo lineup, but after the witness could not make a definitive identification, the officers who worked on the case and knew who the suspect was, came into the witness room and interacted with the witness in manner that would make it more likely the witness would make an identification.

The Court was faced with the issue of how to properly evaluate the reliability of an eyewitness identification in order to determine whether it would be admitted in trial.  The trial court, relying on the Manson standard used nationwide since the Manson opinion was issued by the United States Supreme Court in 1977, determined that the identification in this case was not even suggestive and that it, therefore, was admissible.  The Appellate Division reversed citing a violation of a mandatory eyewitness identification guideline issued by the NJ Attorney General, which rendered the ID per se inadmissible.  The State appealed and, because this case relied heavily on social scientific studies of this issue, the NJ Supreme Court referred the case back to a Special Master in order to make findings of fact regarding the status of scientific consensus on myriad facets of eyewitness identification research and make a recommendation on what framework should be used moving forward when trying to assess the reliability of an eyewitness ID.

The Special Master heard ten days of testimony from various experts and considered over 200 published, peer-reviewed studies. The Innocence Project appeared as amicus curiae. The Special Master issued an 85-page report last year rejecting almost all of the State’s contentions and adopting the Innocence Project’s proposed factual and scientific findings as well as its proposed framework for assessing the reliability of IDs.  That report was sent to the NJ Supreme Court and then we all waited for some action.

Yesterday, not to be outdone, the NJ Supreme Court issued a 142-page opinion rejecting the outmoded Manson standard and adopting, for New Jersey courts at least, most of what the Innocence Project wanted and 30 years of scientific science supported.

The opinion is long, but it is easily the most comprehensive take-down of the position on eyewitness ID reform most often represented by law enforcement and prosecutors.  They generally dispute science that is consensus and undisputed.  They often argue that misidentification is an overstated problem.  They always argue that the court system is equipped to deal with the problem, so reform is not necessary.  They argue that the problem is vastly overstated by people like us and defense attorneys. Yet this opinion put all those strawman arguments to bed, completely rejecting them as not supported by the evidence in the case.  The State had 10 days to prove the worth of the arguments, putting forward their own experts and their best advocacy, and they failed on the merits on almost every count.

The opinion dismantles the Manson legal architecture for determining the admissibility of an eyewitness identification and replaces it with a new evaluation that considers both system and estimator variables and which does not rely on false assumptions that have been undermined by scientific advancements in this area.

This is the result we want to see in Florida if we have coordinated, consistent, high-level advocacy from defenders at all stages of the criminal process.  Kudos to all the folks who worked tirelessly on this case to achieve this result.  With your lead, you have made all of our jobs a bit easier.