...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 accused...
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...the misconduct of Gerard Williams' sole eyewitness testimony which overlooked evidence that initially identified the true perpetrator (Innocence Project). Using the works of Loftus’s (2015) and Rattner’s (1983), I will examine how the primarily causes for cases of wrongful convictions consist of faulty eyewitness testimony and the exposure of the false memories. To begin, Loftus suggested that the identification of defendants from criminal cases were predominantly determined by witnesses (2015). In fact, studies have established that the possibility of misidentifying an individual tends to be increasingly high due to...
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...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 evidence. Derrick Williams...
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...against minorities and people of color will never end. Black and Hispanic will always be racially profiled when referring to blame someone about any situation. There will always be big stark racial disparities is what define American’s relationship with the death penalty and people of color. That’s why many people argue that the criminal justice system affirmatively depends on inequality. Traditionally courts around the United States have shown that they all have been designed to prosecute adult offenders, juveniles are treated differently, they are not seen as criminals, and they are seen as delinquents and...
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...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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...“The testimony of an eyewitness is so flawed that it can never be trusted” To what extent is eyewitness testimony as flawed as the quote suggests? The eyewitness testimony can be inaccurate and distorted: Eyewitness testimony (EWT) is the evidence provided by people who witnesses a particular event or crime. It relies on recall from memory. EWT includes, for example, descriptions or criminals (e.g. hair colour, height) and crime scenes (e.g. time, date, location). Witnesses are often inaccurate in their recollection of events and the people involved. As you can probably imagine, this has important implications when it comes to police interviews. Many cognitive psychologists focus on working out what factors affect the accuracy of eyewitness testimony, and how accuracy can be improved in interviews. Loftus and palmer (1974) studied eyewitness testimony and investigated how EWT can be distorted. Loftus and Zanni (1975) also looked at leading questions. Loftus and Zanni (1975) showed participants a film of a car accident, then asked them either ‘did you see the broken headlight?’ or ‘did you see a broken headlight?’ there was no broken headlight, but 7% of those asked about ‘a’ broken headlight claimed they saw one, compared to 17% in the group asked about the accuracy of people’s memories of an event. The accuracy of eyewitness testimony is affected by many factors as well as leading questions, there are other factors that can affect the accuracy of eyewitness...
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...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 we use different...
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...Eyewitness testimony, which relies on the accuracy of human memory, has an enormous impact on the outcome of a trail. For example, In 1984, American College Student Jennifer Thompson was raped at knifepoint by a man who burst into her flat. During her ordeal Jennifer concentrated on every detail of her attacker so she could later accurately recall him. Later that day she worked with police officers to compose an accurate sketch of an assailant. A few days later she identified Ronald Cotton as the rapist and picked him out of Identity parade. On the basis of her eyewitness testimony was cotton was sent to prison. In 1995, after serving 11 years in Prison, DNA Evidence proved that Ronald cotton was Innocent. With Eyewitness testimony, events...
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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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...Wrongful Convictions A man who was caught in a crime scene at the wrong time, is now serving 25 years to life, for a crime he did not commit, this is an example of a wrongful conviction. Wrongful convictions occur when innocent defendants are found guilty in criminal trials, or when defendants feel forced to plead guilty to crimes they did not commit in order to avoid the death penalty or very long prison sentences. In some instances, the law runs into convictions before getting complete facts, which is very unfair in the criminal justice system. Also, in the United States about 10,000 people may be wrongfully convicted of serious crimes each year according to Ohio states. This shows that it’s a major issue that needs to be solved; therefore,...
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...The Innocence Commission The criminal justice system is best described as a search for the truth, however the more precise definition of it states that it is the system of law enforcement, the bar, the judiciary, corrections, and probation that is directly involved in the apprehension, prosecution, defense, sentencing, incarceration, and supervision of those suspected of or charged with criminal offences. As the justice system is handled by humans, it is bound to make mistakes and such errors lead to circumstances in which an innocent is found guilty; this is called a miscarriage of justice. Miscarriage of justice means the failure of a judicial system or court in the administration of justice, especially when an innocent is convicted in a crime (Dictionary.com, 2007). 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...
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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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...Research on DNA Forensics 1. Is DNA evidence perfect? 2. Should every prisoner have the right to reopen his or her case for DNA testing? Follow-Up Questions • Who should decide who does and does not have the right to reopen a case? • Who should pay for the testing? • How is the credibility of our legal system affected by the fact that numerous people have been convicted and then exonerated of a crime? 3. Would you vote to convict a person of a crime based solely on DNA evidence? Follow-Up Questions • Would you be more or less comfortable with convicting a person of a crime based solely on DNA evidence than with convicting a person based on eyewitness testimony? • Other than scientific evidence, what else might influence the decision of a jury? • If the case were heard by a technology-savvy jury, would the verdict have been different? • If the memories of an eyewitness are open to contamination, how can we trust what honest people see? • Should eyewitnesses that wrongly implicate a person for a crime be held accountable for damages? • Should a wrongly convicted person seek damages and restitution? What would be the implications for our legal system? • How does the questionable nature of eyewitness testimony affect the use of DNA forensics? Internet Research links Killer’s Trial (http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/sheppard/) From WGBH Boston, this is a collection of on-line resources that accompany a NOVA special investigating the Sam Sheppard murder...
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...MEMORY ACCURACY: THEORETICAL MODELS AND EXPERIMENTAL VALIDATION Human memory has been on many occasions compared to the operations of a computer on the basis of their multifunctional systems. Memory is critical and plays a central role in our everyday information processes. Several models of information processes have in-time being proposed. The Atkinson-Shiffrin model (1968) is the most popular is and widely used by many memory researchers. The model indicates the transfer of information from the environment into the sensory memory which is very brief that some information is forgotten before it reaches the second storage. Short-term memory is the second temporary store which is also fragile. The short-term memory is very similar to working memory responsible for higher cognitive functioning which is also temporary. Information is then finally encoded onto the long-term memory where it is assumed to be a permanent storage for longer periods. Baddeley (2000) proposed the episodic buffer as the new forth component of the working memory model. This model was initially proposed by Baddeley and Hitch (1974) with three components, the central executive assisted by the phonological loop and the visuo-sketchpad assumed to be temporary storage faculties. The episodic buffer is assumed to play a very central role of binding features into objects and it is assumed to be a temporary limited store which links all systems together for the purposes of multi-dimensional coding (Baddeley...
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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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