Both Devlin Report and 11th Report of the Criminal Law Revision Committee regarded mistaken identification as the greatest cause of actual or possible wrongful convictions.

I thought to myself: that can’t be right. The greatest cause should be something like, police fabricating or concocting stories, or other form of abuse of power.

A little voice in my head then reminded me of the times when I was a school prefect, where we were quite sure of someone who break the school rules and how we tried to bend the rules (unauthorised, obviously) to catch the culprit. Most of the time, they were the real culprits. I suppose MOST (not ALL) police have the same mentality: that they know who the criminal is, but they just don’t have enough evidence to convict him, hence they have to fabricate stories.

Which explained why police fabrication cannot be the greatest cause of miscarriage of justice.

I then remember how often I pat someone on their shoulders, thinking they are someone I know, but it turn out to be that I had identified the wrong person. It’s so easy to identify the wrong person, because most people resemble each other in one way or another – the same hairstyle, hair colour, voice, height, skin colour, clothings…

Which is why we need the Turnbull direction (derived from the case R v Turnbull) when dealing with identification evidence.

Turnbull direction requires the judge to warn the jury of the special need for caution before convicting the accused based on identification evidence, to tell the jury why such a warning is needed, and direct the jury to examine the circumstances when the identification was made.

The court in R v Turnbull also suggested factors that can help determine whether an identification is mistaken, such as whether the identifying witness was drunk, the distance between the identifying witness and the accused, was the observation impeded, etc.

Next time when I notice someone that I think I know on the street, I’m going to tell myself: hey girl, you can be mistaken. Look carefully before you say hello.