...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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...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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...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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...Jessica Jones Legl 110/Compare and Contrast Paper November 7, 2011 In August 2011, the New Jersey Supreme Court decided on new guidelines making it easier for defendants to request pre-trial hearings to question the validity of eyewitness identifications. Under the new guidelines, a hearing must be held when a defendant presents evidence that the identification of a suspect by a witness may have been influenced. The influence could be any number of factors including police behavior, level of stress during the event, lighting and length of time between the event and the identification. If the evidence is admitted, the jury must be given an explanation giving details of the factors that could contribute to misidentification. Two articles discuss this decision, “Court Raises Bar for IDs by Witnesses” written by Caitlin Dineen for The Press of Atlantic City (October 8, 2011) and “In New Jersey, Rules Are Changed on Witness IDs” by Benjamin Weiser for The New York Times (August 24, 2011), and offer interesting viewpoints on the issue. This paper will discuss those viewpoints. The Press of Atlantic City article did not go into extensive detail as to what the new ruling entailed, instead, it chose to interview local attorneys to get their views. James Leonard Jr. states, “I think it’s going to be a valuable tool for defense attorneys.” While on the surface this new guideline would appear to make prosecution more difficult, Ocean County executive assistant...
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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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...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 on witnessing real-life events Yuille and Cutshall 1986: they interviewed 13 witnesses to a real-life shooting involving the owner of the store and an armed thief....
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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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...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 for the relative judgment process to lead to the identification of an...
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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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...villages were taken away, leaving them with nothing, not even small scraps of food or grain to survive on through the seasons between harvests. When harvest came, the grain and other crops would be taken away before the local population could feed their own bodies, leaving people to steal anything that they could to feed themselves and their families. The question that has plagued historians for decades is who exactly is at fault for causing a tragedy of this nature to occur. The purpose of this paper is to bring to light a possible factor of guilt for this event, and give supporting evidence from both eyewitness accounts and research, done since the occurrence of the events in 1931-1933, to prove that there is indeed guilt to be placed on a party. It is this authors viewpoint that suggests that criminal charges be brought against the government of the Soviet Union, and the Communist Party as a whole. It is important to mention that no one person was responsible for the famine, and this paper will cover the parties responsible for the atrocities that took place from 1932-1933. Before the start of the famine, there were a few aspects of the changes in government that affected the economy of the Soviet Union. Scholars concur that in terms of the number of victims—between 3 and 10 million 28—the famine of 1932–1933 constitutes an event of great enormity and significance in the history of the twentieth century and one that devastated Ukraine as well as Ukrainians who lived...
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...read a lot of books, magazines and papers; how hard could it be? It wasn’t long before I had a real eye opening experience trying to write my first real formal paper. Writing has never been easy for me so when I started writing formal papers in college it was one of the more difficult assignments for me. In the first part of this essay, I will review my first experience in writing a formal college paper, how the Professor encouraged me to actually finish the paper, then in the second part of my paper I will describe my experiences with research and MLA formatting style. I will never forget my first college English Composition class. When I walked into the class it looked like any other classroom. People were sitting in what I was sure was their comfort spots in the classroom, some in front, some in back. I, of course, chose a middle seat. I pulled out the books and papers I needed for the class and sat quietly. When the Professor started the class we all signed in and of course, we had to write an introduction of ourselves to him. That seemed easy enough. I wrote it out and handed it in and was passed back a syllabus. The final draft of our first paper wasn’t even due for four weeks. At that time I never imagined I would need that full four weeks for one paper. My first paper was to be on a topic in which I could interject my own opinion and provide backup for my opinion much like I would use in a debate. He called it an argumentative paper. My thoughts at this point were still...
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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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...liberty, livelihood and reputation at stake. The law requires witnesses to give truthful evidence and encourages them to admit when they do not know or cannot remember the details of the event (Evidence Act of 2008). 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...
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...AJS/514 November 9, 2015 James L. Smith Crime Reduction and Prevention Proposal Chicago is a major city with a huge amount of crime and this paper will address crime reduction and prevention in this particular city. It will also address other issues such as; assisting victims, preventing crime, and achieving effective justice. This paper will address the effect that criminological theories and research have had on contemporary and historical crime control policies in Chicago. It will include theoretical rationale for the recommendations that are suggested. Chicago needs more help in these areas because of the amount of crime they are seeing. Victim assistance programs are well organized and widely available to the public of Chicago. The number of programs varies from domestic violence to identity theft. There are specific programs for every individual affected by crime. The Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan has created and made the priority of victim assistance a key service to not only victims but to responder’s as well. In assuring that the right training is given to each field in order to assist victims appropriately. Programs and Trainings available to the people of Illinois According to the Attorney General • The Illinois Crime Victim Compensation Program (Direct financial assistance to innocent victims of violent crimes) • The Domestic Violence Fund (legal assistance funding, legal services to victims of domestic violence) • The Violent Crime Victim...
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...Innocence Project Research Paper Since 1992 The Innocence Project has exonerated 289 people in the United States. To be exonerated of a crime means that a person is acquitted for their crime and released back into society. These wrongful convictions are due to unvalidated or improper forensic science, eyewitness misidentification, and false confessions. In this paper I am going to tell the story of Clarence Elkins and why wrongfully convicting a person is a problem in the United States. It all started on June 6th, 1998 in Summit County, Ohio. Clarence Elkins’ niece was sleeping over at her grandmother’s house, only to be woken in the middle of the night to hearing her grandmother screaming. So his niece ran into the kitchen to see her grandmother being beaten by a man. She ran back into her bedroom to be followed by this man. The niece was sexually assaulted by him. Her next memory was waking up to see her grandmother dead in the kitchen. She then proceeded to run to her neighbor’s house to call the cops. While the cops were on the way the niece proceeded to tell her neighbors that the man she saw last night looked like her uncle Clarence Elkins. Elkins was immediately brought in for questioning and he was the police’s number one suspect. Biological evidence, including hairs, was found at the crime scene and from the victim’s body. Mitochondrial DNA testing was done on pubic hairs from the victim’s bodies. This testing excluded Elkins as a possible contributor...
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