The Limited Impact of Facebook and the Displacement Effect on the Admissibility of Identification Evidence
(2015) 39(4) Crim LJ 207-218
11 Pages Posted: 30 Mar 2016 Last revised: 1 Jun 2016
Date Written: 2015
Abstract
Eyewitness identification evidence is perhaps the most common and most crucial evidence in successfully prosecuting many alleged offenders. It is also a type of evidence that is highly susceptible to fallibility. One cause of this fallibility is the displacement effect, a psychological phenomenon in which the memory of a person’s appearance can be unconsciously, and falsely, displaced with a subsequent conception of what that person might have looked like. With the advent of Facebook and other social networking sites, there is now a very real risk of witnesses searching Facebook and displacing their memory of an actual offender with an image of someone else. There are two issues arising from this. First, the Facebook identification itself can tend to occur in relatively suggestible circumstances, which may render it unreliable and therefore inadmissible. Second, any subsequent identification procedure conducted by police may be tainted by the displacement effect superimposing the unreliable Facebook identification onto their memory of the crime. The years 2013 and 2014 saw five cases across Australian jurisdictions consider how Facebook has exacerbated the potential unreliability of identification evidence, in particular due to the displacement effect.
Keywords: Criminal law, identification evidence, Facebook, displacement effect
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