...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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...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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...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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...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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...however, this type of evidence is not always readily available at a crime scene. It is often necessary to look to other sources, such as an eyewitness, to help settle a trial (Smarlarz & Wells, 2014). This can be problematic due to a number of reasons, the first being that eyewitness testimonies have been increasingly proven, such as through DNA evidence, that the defendant is often misidentified (Innocence Project, 2014). There has been abundant research conducted into false identifications and studies have found, due to numerous reasons including age, bias, gender, cognitive ability and current state, that error rates tend to be quite high...
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...facial features and clothing and body type. When it came time to chose someone out of the lineup, she was 100% sure that she had chosen the correct perpetrator- Ronald Cotton. After Ronald is convicted and sent to jail, Jennifer begins to rebuild her life while Ronald’s life begins to fall apart. The story then switches to the point of view of Ronald, who explains his side of the story and emphasizes his innocence. It was not until DNA testing came around that Ronald was able to truly prove his innocence. The overlaying theme of this story is that Jennifer’s eyewitness account was so strong that a jury believed, without a doubt, that Ronald Cotton was the man responsible for the rape of Jennifer Thompson. This certainty was quickly dispelled by DNA testing and brings about the problem of misconceptions. Jennifer thoroughly believed that Ronald was her rapist and this proves how easily it is for people to misidentify features of different races. It also helps to disprove eye witness accounts (Thompson-Cannino & Cotton, 2009, p.1-287). Keywords: rape, conviction, innocence, misidentification The People Behind Picking Cotton Each day something will come about that two people can perceive differently. This differentiation in the perception a person has can be related to a misconception. Most misconceptions come about because of the way a person was taught. Misconceptions are so common that often people do not...
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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 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 the criminal justice system is in need of much repair and how the Michigan Innocence Clinic can combat troubling trends of the system. In each case that have been worked on, the Michigan Innocence Clinic have uncovered overlapping causes of wrongful convictions. There are many causes of wrongful convictions, but there are a few common causes that the Michigan Innocence Clinic have found:...
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...Knowing how wrongful convictions happens research have shown there are quite a lot of ways to fix the problem. A lot of studies have shown that recording interrogations to reduce false confessions which are usually used during the trail of the wrongful convictions. Some other ways to reduce wrongful conviction would be to have a guide in which possible red flags that lead to the officers and prosecutors believing they have the wrong person, better training for the police officers and the prosecutors. For example when it comes to using the “jailhouse snitch” that can be lying just to get a better deal for him self. Another way to reduce wrongful conviction is to after the inmate have been exonerated letting the inmate know that the prosecutor will be getting disciplined and just given “hush money” in sense now that it was proven they were innocent. To avoid wrongful convictions from happen eyewitness testimonies, false DNA evidence, and other obstacles need to be examined by an unbiased eye. When researching ways to prevent wrongful convictions all the articles had the same thing about recording the interrogations, and doing the open file discovery. I thought all...
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...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 prosecutor Michael Paulhus states that, “It gives both sides an opportunity to address a critical factor in their case…. Anything that’s well-grounded, as this appears to be, enhances the confidence of the eyewitness identification...
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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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...Implications: There are many factors that lead to miscarriages of criminal justice. Few wrongful convictions are caused by eyewitness identification, forensic science errors, and false confessions. Mistaken eyewitness identification is the number one cause of wrongful convictions. Eyewitness “was a factor in 72% of post-conviction DNA exoneration cases in the U.S.” (Innocence Project, 2007). Studies show that the human mind does not record or obtain information like a video recorder; it does not keep the information as a short-term memory, but keeps the information in long-term memory. For this reason, witnesses cannot fully recall facial details, especially when they are under stress by the events of the crime. Also, memory is very flexible...
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...sentenced in latest decades. For each situation that requires DNA, you will find thousands of cases in which it was never used. Just a portion of criminal cases require scientific evidence which can be exposed through DNA screening, and even though such proof exists, it's usually missing or damaged after following a conviction. Because they do not have the use of a conclusive check like DNA, several wrongly convicted individuals have a thin possibility of actually showing that they are innocent. There is also the problem of Eyewitness misidentification, which could be the more likely reason behind wrongful convictions nationally, vying a position in more than 70% of convictions invalidated utilizing a DNA test. Whilst eyewitness testimony may be persuasive, the proof brought before a judge and jury of the court, more than 25 decades of solid cultural research study has established that eyewitness recognition is frequently untrustworthy (Panthro.M). This study shows that a person’s brain is nothing like a recorder or a camera. We do not report functions precisely once we have seen them, and we don’t completely recall them like the playback...
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...the man who attacked her but in all reality, DNA proved it was not the same man. This shows that there is many reasons eyewitness testimony could be false, but there is also more than one type of eyewitness testimony is there one that is more effective than the others There are many different ways to gather eyewitness testimony. One method is to use the sequential method, which uses one picture at a time and then you pick the one you think is the correct one. Wells and colleagues did a test on the method and found that the people were less likely to misidentify the suspect than when all the people were put in on the lineup. This lead to the endorsement of the Innocence Project which led to the estimated one-third of law enforcement use. Another method is traditional line up in where six or more people see simious tamely lined up and then the suspect is picked. The study done by Gronlund and Wixted showed that the sequential method makes it less likely for a person to choice from the lineup and when they do choice they are more likely to misidentify the suspect. (Weir 2016) Therefore the traditional lineup has people look at all the suspects at once and that makes people more likely to choice. That the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) that measures the confidence of the witness and that confidence played a big role in the accuracy of the eyewitness. The National Academy of Sciences issued a report to declare its findings and decision on sequential versus simultaneous...
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...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 psychologist can influence all of these decisions by serving as an expert witness after their interaction with the defendant. All of these positions involve a great deal of discretion. This work seeks to research existing guidelines for decisions of prosecutors in bringing charges against a defendant, of judges in sentencing a defendant, of forensic psychologists in giving expert testimony,...
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