One of the things that scares me about the US criminal justice system is that it relies almost entirely on magical thinking and torture to secure convictions. I don't believe anyone is guilty unless they were literally photographed holding the bloody knife while standing over the body and even then I'll need some convincing to rule out potential mitigating circumstances.
Eyewitness memory is a fun one, because everyone overestimates their ability to accurately remember things, and cops and judges put a lot of stake in people's testimony regarding their memories.
But witness identification accuracy goes way way down (from an already poor baseline) the less similar the target is to the witness, say they are a different race. The cross-race effect is very powerful*.
So you end up with a White witness who is extremely confident (confidence has no correlation with memory accuracy) that that Black guy was the one who robbed the store. And the legal system goes "hey she seems pretty sure, and she probably has a good memory because I have a good memory." But the science disagrees.
*Interestingly, the cross-race effect has less to do with one's own race than that of the people you live and grew up around. A White kid growing up in a majority-Black neighborhood would likely be somewhat less likely to misidentify Black people than people of other races. Probably the best way to mitigate this problem as a whole, is to stop segregating society so much. Also back in college I helped run labs where people would do a photo lineup and then say why they identified their target. Surprise surprise, it turns out the really easy ways to distinguish White people (hair color, eye color, freckles) doesn't work nearly as well with other ethnic groups!
White people with the same hair color are the bane of my existence. When I'm introduced to an old white guy at work, I always say "nice to see you" because I have literally no idea whether we have met before.