...In the article titled, “Expert Testimony on Eyewitness Evidence: In Search of Common Sense.” Houston, Hope, Memon, and Read all discuss the inaccuracies of eyewitness testimony in legal courts. They found that eyewitness testimonies are always going to have errors, some larger than others, and that judges and juries need to be aware of this during the trial. The first study was given specifically to judges and was aimed to test the ability to trust certain eyewitness testimonies. Judges were found to be 67% accurate with expert opinion on all the generated testimonies combined. The studies also found that courts expect jurors to generate common sense on the influence that questions given by police have on the accuracy of the eyewitness testimony. One more study was completed on jurors specifically, jurors were found to be 61% accurate when questioned on the accuracy of eyewitness statements. So, less than judges but not completely imperfect. This article helps show the potential of inaccuracy that eyewitness testimonies have, and how jurors and judges can fall for it at times....
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...Reliability of Eyewitness Testimony Eyewitness testimonies have played a major role in many wrongful court convictions. There is a great difficulty faced by many eyewitnesses when identifying perpetrators of crimes. Additionally, existing procedural safeguards are insufficient to put off erroneous convictions caused by eyewitness errors. It is therefore important to have a scientific method that can enhance reliability on eyewitness testimony when making a judgement in a court of law. Based on thirty years of broad scientific study on eyewitness testimony, this article delineates a tripartite solution to eyewitness error. This is necessitated by the fact that criminal justice system mainly relies on eyewitness evidence to convict suspects. Often, eyewitness evidence happens to be the only evidence available and if appropriately handled it can be very reliable. The proposed solution maintains accessibility of eyewitness substantiation, while at the same time providing safeguards to uphold its accuracy and reliability. Court of laws and criminal justice system can rely on eyewitness Testimony. This is the hypothesis that will be tested through research on the internet, books and other relevant sources. The expected outcome of this research paper, it will be easy to tell whether or not jurors can rely on eyewitness testimony. In this tripartite solution, the first component is allowing experts testimonies when the sole or primary evidence against the...
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...convictions are eyewitness misidentification, misleading/unreliable forensics, false confessions (coerced/intimidated), witness perjury, prosecutorial misconduct, insufficient lawyering, racism and implicit bias. Since the first DNA exoneration conviction in the United States case that...
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...discovered the next morning on her property in Los Angeles. (OJ Simpsons murder, n.d.) OJ Simpson did not turn himself in but instead became the center of attention in a pursuit in his white Bronco SUV. Simpson was charged and pleaded not guilty to both murders and he was held without bail as per the Judge. Multiple hearings were held, presenting evidence against Simpson in which many were overlooked. Many flaws were exposed in the trials and the judicial...
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...The Court’s Administration: An Analysis of the Roles in the Process of Criminal Trial The Court’s Administration: An Analysis of the Roles in the Process of Criminal Trial Criminal procedure is the process of investigating, prosecuting, and punishing crimes (Scheb & Sharma, 2013). Criminal procedure includes law enforcement activities, including the arrest, interrogation, and identification of suspects. Criminal procedure also involves a process of criminal trial, in which a person is tried for their crime. The trial process can be extensive, but criminal charges can also be settled in the pretrial process. The pretrial process largely determines the outcome of a criminal case; most criminal cases never make it to trial. Charges against the defendant may be dropped or dismissed due to a lack of evidence. The defendant may also plead guilty without trial. Many guilty pleas result from plea negotiations between the prosecutors and defendant or defense attorneys. This pretrial process makes a formal criminal trial unnecessary (Scheb & Sharma, 2013). There are various roles in the criminal trial process, including the judge, the prosecuting attorneys, the jury, and the expert witnesses such as forensic psychologists. The assortment of roles has a high effect on the outcome for the defendant. A prosecutor is responsible for determining what charges to pursue and whether to plea bargain with the defendant. A jury decides a verdict. A judge decides a sentence. A forensic...
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...Knowing that many innocent people are convicted or even sentenced to death for crimes they did not commit shows that as a society we have to fix a broken legal system. If not, we all are vulnerable to be wrongfully identified as a criminal. There are many reasons why eyewitness identification are dangerous. First of all, memory is not accurate. Second, memory can be altered by other environmental factors and contaminated by new memories. And last but not least they have a tremendous power on the outcome of a trial. Some of the steps that the legal system can take to fix the problem are: to accept the fact that there is a problem, get informed and make changes to fix this problem that is affecting the life of many innocent victims. In North Carolina, Ronald Cotton was convicted for one count of rape and two more for burglary and sentenced to life and 54 years in the year of 1987. He was Identified by Jennifer Thomson as the man who entered her apartment, searched through her belongings, cut the phone cables, sexually assaulted her , fled away, and raped another women half a mile away. During the assault Jennifer try to study the face of her aggressor, in her mind, she was 100% sure of how the assailant would look like if she just had him in front of her. She worked with a detective to create a composite sketch and a few days later, she was informed they had a suspect. Her accuracy to identify the picture of her aggressor was low at choosing one picture out of five , she...
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...Miscarriage of justice is also known as wrongful conviction. If someone is wrongfully convicted, that person is punished for an offence he or she did not commit and the actual perpetrator of the crime goes free. As well, public confidence in the system declines when wrongful convictions are identified. There are several elements that cause a miscarriage of justice, such as non-disclosure of evidence by police or prosecution, confirmation bias on the part of investigators, fabrication of evidence, poor identification, and unreliable confessions due to police pressure or psychological instability. They are all considered unjust as they violate the principle of justice. The three major causes for wrongful conviction are false confession, eyewitness error, and official misconduct. When a defendant has confessed to committing a crime, the vast majority of police, prosecutors, and jurors see it as rock-solid evidence of guilt. Many of these involved children or suspects with mental illnesses or mental retardation. Even more cases involve adults with no history of mental illness or retardation who...
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...Wrongfully Convictions Introduction: Each year, many people that are innocent are dished out short or long term prison term for crimes that they did not commit. These innocent people have been “wrongfully convicted”. Sometimes these wrongfully convicted charges are unbeknownst to the judge and or jury; other times, they are just wrongfully convicted due to corrupt law enforcement officers. This corrupt issue is very wrong and should be done away with immediately, which is my reason my choosing this topic. In this research paper, I plan to find reasons for wrongful convictions, the actual number, statistics, of individuals that have been wrongful convicted, and those individuals who have stepped up to make a difference in this dilemma. Although there aren’t any statistics kept by the Criminal Justice Department on the number of crimes that were recorded as wrongful convictions, research has estimated about 5% of the cases that are tried annual result in a false conviction. Since 1989, 1,241 people have been wrongfully convicted and later cleared of all charges based on evidence that they were innocent, according to the National Registry of Exonerations, a project of the law schools at the University of Michigan and Northwestern University (Clark 2013). The Michigan Innocence Clinic was the first clinic of its kind to work on non-DNA exonerations. Their work has revealed particular circumstances far too often seen in cases of wrongful conviction. These cases show us how...
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...Picking Cotton In the past decade, eyewitness testimonies have cast a shadow on what is wrong with the justice system in today’s society. Before we had the advanced technology, we have today, eyewitness testimonies were solid cold-hard facts when it came to proving the defendant was guilty. However, time has changed and eyewitness testimonies have proven to be the leading causes of wrongful convictions due to misidentification. The Thompson and Cotton case is a perfect example of how eyewitness testimonies can put an innocent man behind bars. Jennifer Thompson was your average young independent adult trying to earn a degree at Elon College in Burlington, North Carolina. She had a boyfriend, Paul, who commuted from Burlington to Chapel Hill, where he was a first year business student at University of North Carolina. Only being twenty-two years, she had her life ahead of her until one late July night in 1984. Jennifer Thompson was sleeping alone in her apartment, when she suddenly woke up by a strange noise that turned out to be a stranger breaking into her apartment. The intruder held her a knife to her throat and proceeded to rape her. With no chance of escaping the attacker, she did the only thing she thought she could do and that was to analyze the intruder’s physical characteristics and facial features to her best ability so authorities could catch the perpetrator. Jennifer outwits the attacker and lives to tell about the night she can never forget. When Jennifer was able...
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...Yes, the Crown will be permitted to introduced Dr. Doolittle as an expert. In this case, Dr. Doolittle would be introduced and by giving a testimony called an expert opinion. Expert opinion is a testimony given by a properly qualified person with specific expertise in an area that is an issue before the court. Dr. Doolittle has 12 years’ experience as a handwriting analyst. However, this shows that he is a properly qualified expert who can give his opinion and knowledge on the note that was left in Todd’s locker. This will allow Dr. Doolittle to compare previous documents with Nick’s handwriting and will assist the trier of fact in coming to a conclusion of a fact in that area. In addition, Dr. Doolittle should not be permitted to testify on these areas or relying on a new study that detects the level of aggression in handwriting sample because it is not a fact. However, the Judge can apply the Mohan Test too find if the study is necessary, and relevant in order to come to a conclusion of...
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...system. This is however, different from forensic science. While a forensic psychology deals with legal issues, such as public policies, new laws, competency, and whether a person is sane at the time of a crime, they focus on the psychological perspectives involved in the legal system. Some examples of when forensic psychology is used in the criminal justice system are treating mentally ill offenders, consulting with attorneys, jury selection, serving as an expert witness, analyzing a criminal’s mind and intent, and criminal profiling. There are some forensic psychologists that choose to focus on research, which could range from the examination of eyewitness testimony, to improving interrogation methods. There are also forensic psychologists that focus on public policy, such as designing correctional facilities and prisons. In 1901 a man named William Stern studied memory by asking students to study a picture for forty-five seconds, and then recall what happened in the picture. This is when eyewitness testimonies began to lose credibility, because often times the participants were incorrect in explaining what happened in the picture, and when asked a question such as, was the man holding a knife in the picture, they would answer yes when in fact there was no knife. These were known as lead-in questions, which are often used in police...
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...project’s website; in greater than fifty percent of wrongful convictions, the use of invalidated or improper forensic techniques played a role in cases; which were later overturned by DNA testing. Unlike other forensic methods, serology has been subjected to rigorous scientific testing to achieve validation. Even still, these methods can be inaccurately conducted or counterfactually conveyed during the trial (Innocence Project, 2012). Since the evidence presented during a trial can be the difference between freedom, and incarceration in many cases and death in some cases, misconduct in the forensic field is not tolerated. Some types of forensic misconduct include exaggeration of statistics, false testimony and laboratory fraud. Evidence offered by forensic scientists is often called “expert testimony”. Nevertheless, what is an expert? Is it someone who has gone to school and earned an undergraduate, graduate or doctoral degree? Alternatively, could it be someone whom has many years of “on the job training”? The answer depends on whom you ask. Regardless of who is asked, the testimony given by forensic scientists are typically given more weight than other evidence. The articulation of the findings almost always makes a difference in how the case is decided. When misconduct occurs, it is often...
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...juries are selected in a rather casual manner. Many individuals called to jury service, especially those with a higher education or in a higher economic echelon, can find ways to escape their civic duty, while those who are less educated and theoretically less qualified for jury service, end up serving on the jury and making critical decisions. A fairly new trend in jury selection is that of trial consulting, which gained notoriety in the mid 1990’s in the O.J. Simpson trial. The application of scientific jury selection (SJS) was first applied in 1971, and has grown tremendously in recent years for those who have the means to employ such methods. The goal of the trial consultant is to find persons to fill the jury seats who optimally will arrive at a decision that will be favorable to their client. The tools used by the trial consultant include “…community surveys, focus groups, mock trials, pretrial investigations of prospective jurors, and voir dire assistance.” (Cleary, 2005, p.3). It appears that in the O.J. Simpson case in the mid 1990’s, the trial consultant hired by his team did an effective job as Simpson was acquitted of all charges. However, there are those that believe the Simpson verdict was an anomaly and the...
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...the United States Abstract: This research paper explores some problems faced within the criminal system justice in the United States. Larry J. Siegel’s book “Criminology” gives us a history of the criminal justice system, how it operates, and some of the problems we experience with this system. Some of the problems detailed in this paper include the right to equal justice; which he explained the different kind of judgment that people receive based on their race, gender and class, the criminal justice system spends more money on criminals instead of improving technology for the police apprehending them, the criminal justice system lacks of sentencing disparity, reliance on eyewitness and modern technology can lead to conviction of innocent citizen, and finally the rehabilitation model which is set up to educate criminals and eventually let them free because of the belief that they are changed people and have been rehabilitated. According to the definition from the text “Criminology”, the term criminal justice system refers to “the components of government charged with enforcing law, adjudicating criminals, and correcting criminal conduct” (Siegel, 2009, p. 558). According to Siegel, the criminal justice system is essentially “an instrument of social control: society considers some behaviors so dangerous and destructive that it either strictly controls their occurrence or outlaws them outright” (Siegel, 2009...
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...Adnan to bury Hae's body. But Adnan has always maintained he had nothing to do with her death. The Evidence: As there was no physical evidence linking Adnan to Hae’s murder, the state built their case out of three main pieces of evidence: Jay’s testimony, Adnan’s cell phone records, and fact that Adnan had poor memory of what he was doing on the day of Hae’s disappearance and therefore had no alibi. Exhibit 1:...
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