This is Scientific American's 60-second Science, I'm Susanne Bard.In 2006 a 26-year-old California man named Uriah Courtney was sentenced to life in prison for kidnapping and rape,despite having an alibi for the time the crimes were committed."And there were two witnesses. They saw a lineup in the police station, and they both identified the same person.And he was convicted, entirely based on those two eyewitness accounts."Salk Institute for Biological Studies neuroscientist Tom Albright.He says years later, the California Innocence Project looked into the case."And it turns out that the DNA that was found at the crime scene was not the DNA of Uriah Courtney."After eight years behind bars, Courtney was set free. But his case is not unique."There are now hundreds of cases in which individuals have been exonerated based on this post-conviction DNA analysis."Most of these innocent people were sent to prison because witnesses misidentified them."Somebody picked them out of a lineup, and that information was taken seriously by the police. And the jury believed it."Why do witnesses sometimes get it so wrong? Albright explains that our memory for visual events is notoriously flawed."If somebody tells us that they saw something, we figure, well, it must be true. They saw it with their own eyes."Lineups typically show witnesses photos of six faces―five of innocent people and one of the suspect.
