City police are trying to find a hit-and-run driver and, because of the nature of the witnesses, there isn't exactly conclusive evidence to go on:
Witnesses, mainly children at the scene, described the car with a wide range of colors, changing from white to silver to maroon. At first they described it as a 1990s make, but Joyner said that is now in question. Some thought a man was driving the car. Now police are backing off that assertion.
We shouldn't be too hard on the kids -- most of us would have trouble identifying a person or a car we've seen only once, briefly, under stressful circumstances. Most people whose ideas of the criminal justice system come from TV shows and movies think that a circumstantial case is a weak one, made good only by eyewitness testimony. In fact, circumstantial evidence is often quite strong, and eyewitness testimony is notoriously unreliable, in some studies by as much as 50 percent. I don't know how many innocent people are behind bars because of faulty eyewitness accounts as opposed to faulty circumstantial evidence, but I'd bet the numbers are comparable.
