Why Carl Reynolds would make a lousy witness

At a conference in Atlanta, Texas Office of Court Administration chief Carl Reynolds was with a group of people walking to dinner when a man tried to steal the purse of one of the women in their company while brandishing a gun. At his blog Courtex, Carl describes the incident and makes this observation about the potential value of his own eyewitness testimony:

The women who had been actually assaulted were later interviewed by the police, but I was not. Had I been, my information would have been quite useless, in spite of the singularity and vividness of those few moments. I could not recreate anything more than a generic description of any of the four young men, nor describe their clothes. I think I could've picked out the gun if there was such a thing as a gun lineup, but that is about it. I learned later that my colleagues and I did not even agree on the number of young men.

That's pretty typical. Because so much of what we "see" is actually generated from our memory - as opposed to depicted like a camera shot through the eyeballs - eyewitnesses are much more reliable identifying people they knew previously than in situations like Carl's involving strangers.

BTW, the headline was in jest; love ya, Carl! ;)

See related Grits posts:

• How much do eyewitnesses really see?
• Eyewitnesses and the 'feeling of knowing'
• Eyewitnesses in staged test only 8% accurate
• More on the fallibility of eyewitness testimony
• Eyewitnesses miss big changes in their environment, like the person in front of them 
• Study: 88% of police and sheriffs have no written policy on eyewitness ID procedures, even fewer follow best practices