Opinion ID: 4027532
Heading Depth: 4
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: Weapon Focus

Text: The presence of weapons is a second, and related, estimator variable. The National Research Council has stated, “[r]esearch suggests that the presence of a weapon at the scene of a crime captures the visual attention of the witness and impedes the ability of the witness to attend to other important features of the visual scene, such as the face of the perpetrator . . . . The ensuing lack of memory of these other key features may impair recognition of a perpetrator in a subsequent lineup.”136 In 1992, an analysis of weapon focus studies concluded that the presence of a weapon significantly reduced witnesses’ ability to recall their perpetrators.137 A more recent study of the pertinent literature confirms that weapon presence 135 Id. at 274. 136 National Research Council, Identifying the Culprit, supra, at 93. 137 Nancy K. Steblay, A Meta-analytic Review of the Weapon Focus Effect, 16 L. & Hum. Behav. 413, 415-17 (1992). 31 has a consistently negative impact on both feature recall accuracy and identification accuracy.138 Here, the jury was never informed that visibility of the perpetrator’s gun may well have hampered the witnesses’ ability to observe and/or form an accurate memory of the assailant’s face. Howard, Bertha, and Cameron all provided clear descriptions of the gun, revealing their focus on it. But the jury was never informed of how this powerful estimator variable may have affected them.