This motion relies on social science demonstrating the unreliability of witness attempts to identify people from surveillance videos/photographs and argues that due process and the evidence rules (Rules 602, 701, and 403) require exclusion of a police officer’s attempt to identify the defendant from a surveillance video.
Pages 2-4: Discuss studies showing that humans are bad at matching people to images in photos/videos
Pages 4 –9: Discuss studies showing that image quality (resolution, distance from subject, and moving versus still images), camera angle and viewpoint, lighting conditions at the time of the video or image capture, the presence or absence of obstructions to the camera’s view, and the size of the image captured all affect reliability
Pages 9 – 13: Discuss how situational factors including a lack of prior familiarity, cross-racial identification problems, and time delays between a prior exposure and the viewing of a surveillance photo/video all contribute to mistaken non-eyewitness identifications
Pages 15-16 – Discuss how these studies could also be used to (a) limit or prevent the prosecution from asking the judge/jury to compare a surveillance video/photo to the defendant, (b) obtain favorable expert testimony about the problems of non-eyewitness identification; (c) get the court to take judicial notice of these problems; (d) obtain favorable jury instructions about the problems with non-eyewitness identification testimony; (e) cross-examine non-eyewitnesses more effectively.