I just watched the most fascinating CBS "60 Minutes" segment: "Eyewitness: How accurate is visual memory?"

Back about 20 years ago, I was minding my own business driving in downtown Knoxville TN where I lived at the time, running some errands. I pulled up to the intersection at a one-way N-S street (one-way heading north), looked for an opening, and then made a right turn to head north.

 "Oh, SHIT!..." 

A car came barreling down headed south, wrong way, and I swerved -- to no avail. We crashed.

I was relatively minor, but there would be police and insurance reports and a repair job. An officer showed up forthwith, and some crazed bystander -- the only forthcoming eyewitness -- jumped up to loudly claim "I saw it  all; he (pointing at me) went out of his way to try to hit the other car."

'WTF?'

Right. So, I'm recalling my not-too-distant senior seminar in Psychology of Law. The essence of an interview we did with a judge: "if you have an eyewitness against you, you better plead out, 'cause you're goin' down."

Swell.

Anyway, it didn't matter in my banal traffic case. The cop wrote the other driver, and his insuror paid in full without any hassle. The "eyewitness" was clearly a few fries short of a Happy Meal.

 In a far more serious dispute, however, one Ronald Cotton was not so lucky. 

I am an ongoing student of cognition, quite interested in topics associated with memory, "Critical Thinking," and decision-making (with a particular focus on the cognitive bias liabilities of "expertise"). I found this extremely interesting, disconcertingly so.

 I can only wonder how many innocent people languish behind bars on the basis of errant eyewitness testimony.

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NOTE: I apologize for the embedded ad below, now forced on us on June 25th without advance warning by Salon.com. Not my doing, and not within my power to delete.