Opinion ID: 2628721
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: The Experiment Tested Eyewitness Identification Testimony Critical to Pease's Convictions.

Text: Pease argues that the court of appeals mischaracterized the superior court's conclusions by relying on an incorrect premise that the jury was only testing Dr. Loftus's testimony; he also argues that the superior court correctly described the jurors' experiment as testing the testimony of both Olson and Dr. Loftus. The state responds that the court of appeals did not inaccurately describe the superior court's ruling. I think the court of appeals made two related errors that misdirected its analysis. First, its description of the superior court's findings was incomplete in an important respect. Second, it drew a distinction between permissible and impermissible experiments that is unsustainable and irrelevant. And as to both errors, it failed to defer to the superior court's findings concerning the relationship between the experiment and critical trial evidence, and concerning the experiment's possible effect. The court of appeals described the jurors' purpose as follows: As Judge Esch found, the circumstances surrounding the experiment show that the jurors were not attempting to re-create Arlo Olson's nighttime observation of the assault on Franklin Dayton. Rather, the jurors were attempting to test Dr. Loftus's general assertion about the limits of human perception. [12] That description is incomplete because it does not acknowledge the more-nuanced findings the superior court actually made. The superior court found that: [w]hat the jury was doing, in addition to getting an appreciation of the distance, was trying to test the validity of Loftus'[s] testimony.... They were also, impliedly, assessing the validity of the testimony of Arlo Olson when he stated that he could recognize two individuals at that distance. The superior court repeated this findingstating that the jury was using the mutual observation experience to attempt to check Olson's testimonyin discussing its legal significance. In effect, the superior court found that the jurors were evaluating the credibility of both Olson's testimony that he was able to identify Dayton's attackers and Dr. Loftus's testimony that it is impossible to recognize a person from more than 200 feet away. These findings are at least permitted, if not required, by the jurors' testimony and are the only reasonable explanation of what the jurors said they were doing. [13] At least one juror referred in his deposition to Olson by name, and others clearly indicated that they had been testing Olson's identification testimony. That the jurors, in conducting their experiment, far exceeded the 200-foot distance discussed by Dr. Loftus confirms that they were directly testing Olson's identification testimony. Some jurors did not mention Olson and some described potentially more limited purposes. But likewise, few mentioned or described Dr. Loftus, either, and the state offered no contrary admissible evidence and has not argued that there was a genuine factual dispute material to Pease's post-conviction relief application. The appellate court's incomplete description caused it to misfocus on the issue of the experiment's validity in testing Dr. Loftus's opinions, and to overlook the issue of its invalidity in testing Olson's credibility. The court of appeals relatedly drew a distinction that is both unsustainable and irrelevant. It implicitly reasoned that the testimony of prosecution eyewitness Olson could be isolated from the testimony of the defense expert, and that jurors could test the expert's categorical opinions without simultaneously testing Olson's long-distance identification. [14] Thus, the court of appeals stated that the main objective [of the experiment] was to test Dr. Loftus's assertion about human perception under optimal conditions. [15] But Dr. Loftus was a defense witness whose expert opinions squarely challenged Olson's ability to identify Pease and Dayton. The superior court correctly observed that [t]he primary focus of Dr. Loftus'[s] testimony was the impeachment of Olson. As Pease asserts, the testimony of the two witnesses was inextricably linked. Their testimony was also inherently inconsistent. There is no basis in the record for thinking the jurors were testing the testimony of only one of these two witnesses and not the fundamentally inconsistent testimony of the other. It should also be important that the trial judge, who was best able to understand the relationship between the Olson testimony and the Loftus testimony, did not consider any such exacting distinction important when he granted a new trial. To the extent such a distinction affected the analysis of the court of appeals, the distinction is chimerical and the resulting analysis wrong. There is no legitimate or material factual dispute about why the jurors conducted the experiment or the importance of Olson's identification testimony.