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By Matthew B. Johnson and Sydney Melendez
Eyewitness misidentification is recognized as the single largest con-
tributor to wrongful criminal conviction. Psychological research has fo-
cused on a host of event related and police procedural features associat-
ed with misidentification. However, “spontaneous misidentification,”
where a crime victim, in a chance encounter, mis-identifies an innocent
person as a perpetrator, has received very limited attention in the re-
search literature. Fourteen instances of spontaneous misidentification
that led to wrongful conviction are presented from archival sources. All
of the cases involved “stranger rape” perpetration. The implications for
future research are discussed.
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