Research has established that eyewitness testimony is often highly unreliable. How does the Protocol accommodate that?
The Protocol excludes from its scope witnesses who may be honestly mistaken. It leaves to the court to decide whether a witness might reasonably be honestly mistaken about who or what he or she saw. The research identifies many factors that affect the reliability of eyewitness testimony – how well the witness knows the person, how long the incident lasted, the lighting conditions, the distance between them, etc. There is an almost infinite gradation between a witness recognizing a stranger who she saw for a few seconds, say, and recognizing her mother.
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