수사기관의 범인식별진술의 신빙성 제고 방안

Abstract

An eyewitness identification is a statement made by an eyewitness to describe a person whom he/she has seen in an event from the memory. Typical forms of the pretrial eyewitness identification procedure in criminal justice system are divided into showup, lineup, photo array and street identification. While Each form has its advantages and drawbacks, I would like to recommend the police to take the lineups since the lineups are likely to be less prejudicial or influenced by unjust suggestion compared with the other forms. Mistrial cases has been found consistently both in advanced countries and hear in South Korea, where the courts have been giving judgments of 'not guilty' more frequently than past reasoning that the guidelines for the eyewitness identification are not followed or due to the lack of reliability in the identification procedures in the pretrial investigation by police officers or public prosecutors. In recent case laws, the courts have found that the show-ups and the photo arrays are not reliable due to the high risk of leading questions and suggestions made by the law enforcement officers. Causes that lower the credibility in the eyewitness identification statement in the criminal justice process made by the law enforcement agencies could be the imperfect memory structure of human brain, the lack of objectivity or fairness in the eyewitness identification procedure, and the wrong practice of eyewitness identification procedure. Recommendations for enhancing the reliability of eyewitness identification may be as follows: the law enforcement officers' recognition of the possibilities of mistrials due to wrongfully proceeded eyewitness identification; promulgating a clear and accurate regulation of the identification procedure; a complete compliance with the guidelines of the identification procedure, adopting forensic science technique in the identification procedure, guaranteeing the accused rights to an attorney and security of transportation in the identification procedure; judges' giving jury instructions stressing the importance of eyewitness identification procedure in a criminal court trial; and the law enforcement officers' recognition of the relationships between the exclusionary rule of illegally obtained evidence and the wrongfully proceeded eyewitness identification. Especially, to improve credibility of the eyewitness identification statement, the law enforcement officers need to completely abide by the guidelines given by the court precedent, maintaining the identification process objective and fair by proceeding lineups rather than proceeding show-ups or photo arrays. In addition, the law enforcement officers should not give leading questions, unfair suggestions, pressures on witness to be objective and fair in the course of identification process. People in the criminal justice system should give much more attention to the identification procedures and make lots of effort in referring to the experts' studies in a range of fields, including police study and law, psychology and law, forensic science, and sociology.