...an eyewitness testimony. Twenty-two students watched a video of a crime individually or in pairs. The paired witnesses discussed the video with their co-witnesses. Yet, they had not known they had seen slightly different versions. Participants in that had pairs recalled less accurately than individual witnesses. In a cross-examination, there was no difference in accuracy between the two experimental groups. Thus, this experiment showed that the results demonstrated negative effects of cross-examination on the accuracy of adult eyewitness testimony. Likewise, as the third reason, some eyewitness testimonies lie to their advantage. For instance, Henry Drake was sentenced to death in 1977 for the murder of a 74-year old barber during a robbery in Georgia. Whether Drake was found guilty or innocent depended on an eyewitness testimony. The...
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...many different reasons why the reliability of eyewitness testimony in the United States judicial system today is all but flawed. There is only one way a witness can identify a suspect who has committed a crime, and it is called face to face recognition. Just getting a glimpse, bad weather, and bad lighting can hinder what a person can truly see. There have been several accounts of individuals that have been convicted, imprisoned, and put to death off of flawed testimonies by an eyewitness. In this I will attempt to show you my discussions of several statistics, convictions, exonerations, and key cases that will test the views of anyone when eyewitness testimonies are concerned. Within the past 30 years crimes were committed, and the people who witness these crimes made the cases have different outcomes. It used to be when a crime was committed, and someone came forward saying, “They have witnessed a crime”. History shows us when it comes to a traumatic experience dealing with crimes; the victims are different and as such react in many different ways. Most individuals panic, some are very calm, while others have no reaction whatsoever. The question has been raised about how reliable an eyewitness testimony truly is. Those who follow crime and courts trials know the stories are familiar and unnerving. Here is one case Cornelius Dupree spent 30 years Texas prison due to a 1979 rape and robbery he did not commit, because of one eyewitness. Cornelius was freed in 2011 through new DNA...
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...“Eyewitness evidence is one of the earliest and widely studied topics in forensic psychology” (Pozzulo, Bennell, & Forth, 2015, p. 123). Eyewitness testimony is very diverse and is becoming increasingly influential during court proceedings, which leads to many wrongful convictions. A specific topic that will be investigated during this paper will be the use of independent variables aiding eyewitness testimonies. In 1978, Wells divided those independent eyewitness cues into estimator and system variables (Leach, Cutler, & Van Wallendael, 2009, p.160). Estimator variables occur at the crime scene while the eyewitness is encoding the event into their memory; these are not controlled by the criminal justice system (Leach, Cutler, & Van Wallendael,...
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...November 11, 2015 Critical Thinking Paper Dr. Nancy Furlong A current question that has been frequently asked is whether eyewitness reports provided by children during a court case are reliable. Children's memory capacity, their susceptibility to suggestion, and the delay between a crime and providing an eyewitness statement are some factors that can influence the reliability of these reports. Eyewitness reports provided by children can be reliable if given within a reasonable time frame, and that the presented questions are not suggestive. Also, that the eyewitness reports are provided by older children (9 to 12 years old), their reports tend to be more reliable than those of younger children (5 to 8 years old). Taking these factors into account in future court cases with children as eyewitnesses will ensure the best possible reliability in children's statements. The number of children as eyewitnesses is ever-growing and therefore child eyewitnesses are more involved in the field of legal testimony (Flin, Boon, Knox, & Bull, 1992). Due to this greater involvement, it is frequently questioned whether children are able to serve as credible eyewitnesses during a court case, especially in cases where the sole eyewitnesses to an offense are children (Flin et al., 1992). There can be several factors that might influence the reliability of children's eyewitness reports. Firstly, children of all...
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...Witnesses rely on their memories to testify as to what they believe is a true account of the event. However, memories have been found to be fallible with no guarantee of corresponding with objective reality (Johnson, 2001). Research has found that false memories (FM), where a person recalls an event that did not occur and mistakes it to be a true representation of that event (Gleaves & Smith, 2004; Johnson, 2001) exists within the realm of eyewitness testimony (ET) (Loftus, Miller & Burns, 1978). This raises the issue of how well does ET reflect reality. Some theories that explain FM include the source monitoring failure theory (Johnson, Hastroudi & Lindsay, 1993), activation monitoring theory (Roediger, Balota &Watson, 2001) and fuzzy trace theory (Brianerd & Reyna, 1998; Reyna & Brainerd, 1995). Due to word count limitations, this paper will explore the concept of FM using fuzzy trace theory, source monitoring errors and the misinformation effect to explain how FM occurs in the context of ET and why ET can never the representation of the complete truth. The FTT proposes that there are two parallel memory traces, the verbatim trace and the gist trace (Brianerd & Reyna, 1998; Reyna & Brainerd, 1995). The verbatim trace stores information item-by-item and is a verdicial representation of an event. The gist trace stores a generalised meaning based representation of an event. The FTT proposes that verbatim trace decays quickly whereas the gist trace lingers in memory longer resulting...
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...psychology in the court room. In reviewing several court cases, he was intrigued with the verdict based on the eyewitness testimony. Could these eyewitness testimonies be considered unreliable? Decisions based on the judge and jury through the questioning of the lawyers, disregarded the mental state of the witness. In his book, Hugo Munsterberg, explains the mind of the eyewitness through illusions, memories, emotions and suggestibility. Illusion is a perception. Munsterberg in his book describes several cases that make you wonder if each eyewitness was at the same scene. For example, when describing the road conditions, one witness claimed the road was dry while another said it was muddy. In another scenario, it was important to know the number of people present at a riot was larger than forty. One eyewitness mentioned there was no more than twenty while another said it was more than a hundred. So, is your mind playing tricks on you? In order to prove that everyone’s visual perception varies, Hugo Munsterberg developed several experiments. One of his experiments among 100 young men was to show a poster with 50 black squares for approximately five seconds. When asked how many squares the answers varied from twenty-five to two hundred squares. He continued to perform experiments based on perception of time, ink plot pictures, comparison of two colors and memory image. In his final experiment, he held a rotating color wheel in his right hand for a few minutes then started...
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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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...Final Paper: Case Study#3 Forensic Psychology: Information Recall / Eyewitness Testimony ABS200 Instructor Clark August 18, 2014 Ashford University Applied behavioral science can be defined as a science that bases its concepts on the observations and learnings of human behavior. Science itself is all observation and learning, we try and try experiments in order to come to one or several conclusions and we observe in order to discover new things. In order to understand behaviors and what causes people do to the things they do we must observe not only the person but their surroundings and daily habits in order to understand them. In behavioral science there are many different sub-sections that can vary from clinical to criminal. Within these different sections we learn by making observations not just of one person but of every person we come across in our work and therefore have to learn how to make treatments based on these observations. In criminal cases, most of the time we are analyzing not only why a person has committed the crime they have committed but what drove them to become the person that they are. In many cases there is a mental illness whether treated or untreated that can cause the person to become unbalanced and therefore dangerous. Other times it is caused by childhood events which cause mental trauma which causes the person to act out in a certain manner. Cognitive psychology goes hand in hand with handling eye-witness testimony. With this type of psychology...
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...Eyewitness testimony is a legal term. It is the detailed account given by a witness in a courtroom, describing what they perceived happened during the specific incident under investigation. This is used as evidence to show what happened from a witness’s point of view. Eyewitness testimony is a crucial area of research in cognitive psychology and human memory; studies into eyewitness testimony have found that it can be affected by many factors. Elizabeth Loftus, a leading researcher in eyewitness testimony, conducted studies to demonstrate that memory is not a factual recording of an event and that memories can become distorted by other information which occurs after the event. Loftus and Palmer (1974) study consisted of two laboratory experiments; both were examples of an independent measures design. The independent variable in both of the experiments is the verb used. The dependent variable in the first experiment is the participant’s speed estimate and the dependent variable in the second experiment is whether the participant believed they saw glass. In the first experiment 45 students from the University of Washington were shown video clips, short excerpts from safety films made for driver education, which were 5 to 30 seconds long. They were split into 5 groups, with 9 participants in each group. After each clip the students were asked to write a report of the accident they had just seen. They were also asked to answer some specific questions but the crucial question...
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...There have been over 300 post-conviction DNA exonerations in the history of the United States. Although the number is high, there are still many more wrongfully convicted people who’s still incarcerated and have yet to be considered for retrial. Unaddressed wrongful conviction cases show the weaknesses in the U.S. justice system. This paper will touch on the causes that lead to wrongful convictions and discuss possible solutions. The main factors of wrongful 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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...occur at any point in the memory process: 1) Acquisition: Information the person perceives Poor viewing conditions Focus on weapons 2) Storage: Information the person stores in memory Misleading information Source misattribution errors 3) Retrieval: Information the person retrieves at a later time Best guesses in line-up identification Leading questions - Inaccurate eyewitness testimony can have very serious consequences leading to wrongful convictions. - Why eyewitness testimony may be unreliable? * The role of anxiety: Baddeley 1997 reported that 74% of suspects convicted in 300 cases where eyewitness identification was the only evidence against them. Anxiety may lead to unreliable remembering depends on number of factors. * Research on ‘weapon focus’ Loftus 1979: P were exposed to one of the 2 situations; 1- They overheard a low-key discussion about an equipment failure. A person then emerged holding a pen with grease on his hands. 2- They overheard a heated and hostile exchange between people in the lab. After the sound of breaking glass and crashing chairs, a man emerged from the lab holding a paper knife covered in blood. P were then given 50 photos to try and identify the person. Findings: 1- Accurately identified the person 49% of the time. 2- Successfully 33% of the time. Conclusion: Reported a lab experiment which demonstrated the powerful role that anxiety can play in undermining the accuracy of eyewitness testimony. * Research...
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...Short paper #4 1.) I believe there is only a certain degree of accuracy in eyewitness testimony. According to the Innocence project & eyewitness identification, the single greatest cause of wrongful convictions nationwide is eyewitness misidentification. There were over 70% of convictions overturned through DNA testing. There are so many ways to give unintentional suggestion to false identification, for example, verbal and non-verbal cues, relative judgments, feedback and lineup composition. According to research conducted by Wells, people who were given with positive feedback would have two times higher confidence to pick a suspect when none of the actual suspects were actually in the line-up photo (Wells 2006). 2.) Memory is constructive...
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...Abdoul Fofana 10/24/11 Integration Paper A lot of the time, the evidence produced by eye witnesses can determine if someone is convicted or set free. It is not always good to put so must trust in eye witnesses because we are all human and we make plenty of mistakes. Jurors are influenced by what eyewitnesses have to say and usually base their decision on the eyewitness’s testimony and evidence. They sometimes rely too much on them which cause problems in the legal system. This issue and problem has occurred on numerous occasions and had led to many wrongful convictions. In the Greene book, it states that errors can occur at the moment the crime is committed at any of the three phases of the memory process: encoding, storage, and retrieval. Also, questioning and new experiences can alter what is remembered from the past. It is good ideas to have psychologists testify as expert witnesses so they can point out the problems in eyewitness testimony and to be able to question their memory. In the Ronald Cotton case, he was charged with rape and burglary and sentenced to life in prison plus 54 years. When the case was sent to appeals, his sentence was overturned because one of the victims picked out a different man in the lineup and none of the DNA matched Cotton. A man who was convicted of similar crimes admitted to the crimes that were associated with Cotton. This just shows eyewitness misidentification and how innocent people can remain in prison for several years for a crime...
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...When you put these two words together, you get witness misidentification which has been referred to as the single greatest cause of wrongful convictions nationwide, with nearly 75% of the convictions overturned through DNA testing. There have been 260 exonerations across the country based on forensic DNA testing with 3 out of 4 involving cases of eyewitness misidentification. (Innocence Project 1999) In 1907 or 1908, Hugo Munsterberg published “On the Witness Stand”; he questioned the reliability of eyewitness identification. As recent as 30 or 40 years ago, the Supreme Court acknowledged that eyewitness identification is problematic and can lead to wrongful convictions. The Supreme Court instructed lower courts to determine the validity of eyewitness testimony based on irrelevant factors, like the certainty of the witness, the certainty you express in court during the trial has nothing to do with how certain you feel two days after the event when you pick a photograph out of a set or pick the suspect out of a lineup. It has been said that you become more certain over time. (The Confidential Resource September 15, 2010) An eyewitness viewing a simultaneous lineup tends to make a judgment about which individual in the lineup looks most like the perpetrator relative to the other members of the lineup. This is particularly problematic when a lineup only contains innocent people. Research has shown that the effective use of fillers when composing a lineup can help combat the tendency...
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...not be available in the conscious mind. The hypnotist will place the patient/ client in a hypnotic state and then proceed to ask a series of questions that may trigger memory. There are few problems with hypnosis in clinical psychology, but poses some in forensic psychology. My paper will be asking the question, “ Is hypnosis a valid tool in a court of law?” Forensic psychology uses hypnosis in eyewitness testimony. This can be a positive investigative tool if the hypnotists do an ethical job. There are problems that exist, such as, leading questions. This works similar to a leading question in a court case. In this setting the client is in a vulnerable state of mind, which makes it easier to give false testimony. Another problem that exists is debate in the ability of the conscious mind to be present during hypnosis. Some psychologists say an individual will not say things they don’t want to hypnotize or not. Does hypnosis increase or increase the error rate of a testimony? This is another question raised in forensic psychology. I would also like to explore the judicial laws on hypnosis. The United States have 2/3 of the states legislatively against the use of hypnotism in a court of law. This still leads to conflict as far as individuals Constitutional Rights. As a whole in this paper I would like to discuss the role of hypnosis in forensic psychology. I would also like to explain the role it plays in clinical psychology, so that I can portray a better...
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