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The Innocence Project of Minnesota, a founding member of the Innocence Network, works to exonerate innocent people who have been incarcerated in Minnesota, North Dakota, and South Dakota, and to bring about reforms to the justice system to prevent wrongful convictions. Protesters march in Minneapolis after the death of George Floyd. The death of George Floyd in police custody on May 25 has put a spotlight on Minnesota, where the police force in its largest city, Minneapolis, has long faced accusations of racism. Tim Walz signed bipartisan legislation requiring law enforcement to adopt statewide best practices for lineup procedures. The ways that law enforcement agencies conduct photo arrays (which are now the more commonly used method) and live lineups can have a huge impact on eyewitness identification, and on May 16, Minnesota Gov. Renewed efforts have been made to correct one key aspect of mistaken eyewitness identifications: lineup procedures. Mistaken eyewitness identifications have contributed to about 71 percent of wrongful convictions subsequently reversed by DNA evidence in the U.S., according to the Innocence Project, making it the leading factor in wrongful convictions. This lack of attention to detail, especially when examining facial features, affects eyewitness identifications, which are crucial to many criminal prosecutions. “And unfortunately we tend to do that with human beings, too,” she said in an interview with Yahoo News. It’s just our minds only bother with a certain amount of information.” “And it’s not an issue of discrimination or carelessness or whatever. “We’re ‘cognitive misers.’ We should take in more information, but we don’t bother,” Steblay explains. We see and use pennies all the time - so it should be easy to choose the right penny from the lineup, right?īut Nancy Steblay, a professor of psychology at Augsburg University who specializes in eyewitness identification and eyewitness evidence procedures, says people are generally stumped by the coin lineup - even though pennies are a common object most Americans have encountered their entire lives. Only one is the real penny the others have various mistakes like the wrong wording or tweaks to Abe Lincoln profile that make it different from the real thing. A common Psych101 exercise involves a rendition of pennies on a slide.

Ronald cotton and jennifer thompson cannino