ScienceLives Interview with Steven Clark

Steven Clark, a Psychology Professor at the University of California, Riverside, has spent the last 29 years conducting research on human memory and decision-making. During that period of time, 269 people were convicted of crimes they did not commit and were exonerated based on DNA evidence. In the vast majority of those cases, the wrongful conviction was based in whole, or in part, on mistaken eyewitness identification. The challenge for the criminal justice system, according to Clark, is to devise identification procedures that reduce the risk of false identifications of the innocent, without losing correct identifications of the guilty. Credit: NSF