In November 2013, a couple took their toddler shopping at Penn Square Mall to take advantage of Black Friday deals. Around 2:30 in the morning, as they loaded their packages into the car and began to buckle the child into his car seat, two men approached them.  

One of the men flashed a gun and said, "We don’t want any trouble, we don’t want to have a scene. Give us your wallet, your purse, your car keys, your phone, everything.”

The mother quickly unbuckled her son from his seat and pulled him from the car. The two men then drove away with the family's vehicle and approximately $1,400 in purchases.

A few days later, police released footage of a suspected robber from inside the mall. The woman said that the man shown in the surveillance tape looked like one of the men who robbed her and her husband. An anonymous tip led to the arrest of 18-year-old Ryan Justin Alexander.

Alexander, now 19, denied his involvement in the robbery and carjacking and pleaded not guilty to the charges against him. This week, he stood trial on the charges.

After the three-day trial, an Oklahoma County District Court jury returned its verdict: not guilty.

According to Alexander's defense attorney, the police simply stopped looking for any suspects in the robbery as soon as they "found a black man who somewhat fit the description." The defendant's lawyer noted that the couple's vehicle, which was found prior to the start of the trial, contained no evidence linking his client to the crime.

Relying on eyewitness testimony as the only evidence linking someone to a crime is flawed and dangerous. Studies prove that eyewitness testimony is unreliable:

  • According to The Innocence Project, 75 percent of wrongful convictions overturned through DNA evidence were based upon eyewitness identification.
  • Mark Green, PhD., cites a study that examined the first 40 cases of wrongful conviction that were subsequently overturned through DNA evidence and found that 90 percent of them were convicted based upon eyewitness identification. In one of those cases, five different eyewitnesses identified the defendant as the perpetrator of the crime.
  • Memory manipulation expert Elizabeth Loftus conducted a study in which her team was able to plant a false memory in 25 percent of the test subjects, and she pointed out several other studies that gave the same result.

Eyewitness testimony alone should never be enough to convict a defendant, but unfortunately, jurors tend to think that eyewitness identification is infallible. However, a skillful defense attorney can demonstrate holes in that theory and highlight the unreliability of memory and identification, particularly in the absence of real evidence.