A thorough examination of how innocent people may end up in jail through false confessions and what can be done systematically to fix this issue.
Nancy Franklin is a faculty member in the Stony Brook University Psychology Department. Her training is in cognitive psychology, and her specific research interests include memory and eyewitness error.
In 2008, shortly after a major New York State Court of Appeals decision calling for eyewitness identification experts in court, she accepted an invitation to testify as an expert in a robbery case in Manhattan. She has been invited since that time onto several hundred cases in various jurisdictions of New York and in other states.
She regularly donates her time to assist in reexamining cases, some of them decades old, that are suspected to have produced wrongful convictions through witness error or coerced confessions. She has also given dozens of public and academic presentations discussing how well-understood psychological principles can lead to errors in the criminal justice system and the measures we can take to reduce these errors.
This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at ted.com/tedx