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YOUTH NOW
We Need to Stop Using Teens as Eyewitnesses
They’re notoriously unreliable, easily misled, and landing innocent people in jail
During the last weekend of February 2010, Jennifer Linzer, assistant director of the Chicago-based Center on Wrongful Convictions, set out with a colleague on a 350-mile journey on I-90 east toward Cleveland. Their goal was simple: Find the man who fingered Jacques Rivera for murder.
Rivera was 20 years into his sentence at the Illinois Stateville Correctional Center for a crime he long claimed he did not commit. In 1990, at age 23, Rivera was convicted in the murder of Felix Valentin, a young Latino man affiliated with the Campbell Boys street gang who was shot 11 times while sitting in a parked car in an alley. Without a shred of physical evidence, Rivera’s case hinged on the eyewitness testimony of a single kid — a boy named Orlando Lopez, who was 12 years old at the time of the shooting. Two decades later, the Center on Wrongful Convictions legal team found the man they believed was that witness. Their first hope was that it was the correct Orlando Lopez. Their second was that he’d recant his statement.
“Somebody needs to talk to this kid, because I’m sure — being a young boy at the time of testifying — he was lying,” Rivera remembers thinking at the time. “I am so confident that he’s going to speak the truth now.”
Rivera’s case is indicative of a well-established problem in the criminal justice system: reliance on eyewitness testimony. Decades of research has shown that our memories are not trusty recorders. They are easily reconstructed or undermined by stress, suggestion or bias. Of the 362 people exonerated by DNA evidence since 1989, 70 percent were incarcerated, at least in part, due to eyewitness misidentification.
Yet Rivera’s case is further complicated by another factor: His witness was a minor.
Why is this noteworthy? In adolescence, physical maturity outpaces our mental competence. While teenagers may look like adults, cognitive development isn’t complete until they reach their twenties. This can have dire consequences when young people interact with the criminal justice system. Adolescents struggle to connect present choices to…
