Eyewitness Identification: Supreme Court Case

Eyewitness Identification In the Supreme Court case of Lorenzo Prado Navarette and Jose Prado Navarette, Petitioners, versus the state of California (argued January 21, 2014, decided April 22, 2014), two men argued that one of their constitutional rights had been violated. In August of 2008, a Mendocino County dispatcher received a call from a woman reporting that another vehicle had run her off the road (Navarette v. California, 2014). The dispatcher notified the California Highway Patrol (CHP) and at 4:00 p.m. they passed the suspected truck and pulled them over five minutes later with a second CHP officer arriving shortly. Upon walking up to the vehicle, the highway patrol officers smelled marijuana and warranted a search of the vehicle.
In this court case, the eyewitness identification of the truck was vital to the initial traffic stop of the vehicle. The 911 caller’s identification of the vehicle played a key role in the court as it served as evidence against the petitioners, so if the caller’s description of the vehicle was not accurate, the right truck would not have been found or the case could be dropped. In a study performed by Neil Brewer and Gary L. Wells, they identified several variables that impact the witness’s accuracy and instill a bias against the suspect. Some of these variables include cross-racial identification and poor lighting (Brewer & Wells, 2011). The cross-racial bias is when someone of one race is able to more easily identify another member of their own race, and their ability to identify someone of another race is impaired (Rutledge, 2016). In an effort to decrease the prevalence of the cross-racial bias, psychologists have recommended the use of double-blind lineups to hopefully discourage the administrator of the lineup from involuntarily indicating the witness to the suspect. Some prime routes to consider when trying to advance in the accuracy of eyewitness identification are decreasing the certainty of variables to explain the identification performance, and the inadequacy of scrutinizing interactions
California, two men argued that their Fourth Amendment had been violated by the officers conducting the traffic stop. When the case was brought to the Supreme Court, the court determined that since their was an eyewitness account of reckless driving along with the smell of marijuana, the officers had enough reasonable suspicion to conduct a traffic stop and a vehicle search. Without the 911 callers description of the vehicle, someone else could have been pulled over or, if she had provided inaccurate information of the vehicle, the petitioners could have appealed to the court by stating that they were not the vehicle described, therefore were searched with no reasonable suspicion and should have the evidence thrown out of court. Since it appeared that the caller experienced no sort of impairment when describing the vehicle to the dispatcher, they were able to make an entirely legal traffic stop and vehicle search with no breach of the petitioner’s constitutional