By Nina Totenberg | NPR | November 2, 2015

The U.S. Supreme Court wrestles Monday with a problem that has long plagued the criminal justice system: race discrimination in the selection of jurors. Continue reading »

In August 2014, CLBB partnered with the American Psychological Association to submit an Amicus Brief to the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court (SJC) which outlined the latest neuroscientific understanding of eyewitness memory. The following January, the SJC issued an opinion in Commonwealth v. Gomes that changed eyewitness testimony law. This article discusses the reforms the SJC is making to account for the fallibility of memory.

By Daniel S. Medwed | WGBH | September 25, 2015

The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court (SJC), the state’s highest, enjoys a storied place in the annals of progressive legal thought.  Among its many notable achievements, the SJC laid the groundwork for the national recognition of same-sex marriage by the U.S. Supreme Court last June through its innovative 2003 decision in Goodridge v. Department of Public Health, the first major case upholding the right of gay couples to wed.

The SJC may well be on the cusp of another trailblazing decision that could also legal resonate across the nation. It has recently taken up an issue near and dear to the hearts of many critics of American criminal justice policy: the problem of eyewitness misidentification.  Continue reading »

Harnessing the current scientific consensus on the neuroscience of memory, CLBB recently contributed to a fundamental shift in the treatment of eyewitness identifications in Massachusetts courtrooms. CLBB partnered with the American Psychological Association to submit an Amicus Brief to the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court which outlined the latest neuroscientific understanding of eyewitness memory.

The brief addressed the misconception that human memory may work like a video camera and rejected the notion that witnesses who are highly confident in their identifications are therefore necessarily reliable. It outlined research demonstrating that a witness’s viewing of the same suspect in multiple identification procedures lowers the reliability of subsequent identifications and research regarding the effect of stress on the ability to recall past events. The Court embraced the core arguments presented in the Amicus brief, namely that these scientific principles regarding the limits of eyewitness identification are so well established that in appropriate cases, juries should be explicitly instructed about these limitations. Continue reading »