Reliability of a Child Witness
1. Introduction
Over the years, the number of cases requiring a child’s testimony in court proceedings has increased (Hill, 2011a; 2011b). This is partly due to the increasing number of sexual crime or abuse cases involving a child as a victim or as a witness (Crawford, 2009, Harker et al., 2013).
When a child is considered to hold information vital to a court’s case, the child may be called as a witness to give evidence to the court (Ministry of Justice, 2011). The evidence given by a child in a court proceeding is then known as a child’s testimony (Oxfordreference.com, 2013).
The reliability of a child’s testimony in court is always questioned when the witness is considered too young, having yet to fully develop
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Even the judges think that questions effecting the reliability of a child’s testimony are mostly “developmentally inappropriate questions” (Bala and Ramakrishnan et al., 2004, p. 995). This means that when questions are asked in a language standard that is below the reasonable level of understanding, they will not be able to answer as well as they should and can. Quoting Warner (2008), “Children, even very young ones, can give reliable evidence if questions are tailored to their cognitive …show more content…
After all, they are allowed to give unsworn evidence in court (Section 55, Youth Justice and Criminal Evidence Act, 1999). This was introduced due to realizing that younger children might have difficulty understanding the concept of taking an oath (an example of complicated court procedures). This also shows that the legislators recognize the importance of the information the children may be able to provide. The wordings of the oath itself is difficult for a child to fathom thus it is sufficient to ask the child witness to “promise to tell the truth” (Peterson, 2007). Courts have also been suggested to rephrase the request for a child to tell the truth in simple words understandable by the child’s standard such as “Tell us all you can remember of what happened. Do not make anything up or leave anything out. This is very important” (Ministry of Justice, 2011a: 73). For example, in obtaining a testimony regarding a sexual abuse case, the child might not be able to provide details of what has happened as complete as can be expected from an adult, but with simple understandable child-friendly questions, the child would be able to answer and provide accurate details on information’s such as what was done, where and
The use of eyewitness statements and testimony’s can be a great source of information, but can also lead to wrongful convictions. Due to eyewitness testimony, innocent people are convicted of crimes they have not committed. This is why the wording of a question is important to consider when interviewing witnesses. Due to the fact that eyewitness testimony can be the most concrete evidence in an investigation, witnesses may feel they are helping an officer by giving them as much information as possible, therefore they may tell them information that is not entirely true, just to please them. This is why there are advantages and disadvantages to using open and close ended questioning at different durations of an interview. The way you word a question may impact the memory of a witness, this is because a person cannot completely memorize the exact occurrences of an event.
More than 200,000 children may be involved in the legal system in any given year, and 13,000 of these children are preschool age. Often with these cases involving young children, issues arise concerning credibility, vulnerability, and memory retrieval. Studies have shown that preschool age children are quite capable of providing accurate testimony, but they are also more vulnerable to distorting this memory and testimony. Public and professional opinion about the credibility of children as witnesses in court cases has been sharply divided. On one side, it is contended that when children disclose details of a circumstance, they must be believed, no matter what techniques were used to obtain this disclosure. For example, if a child is asked whether or not he/she was abused, and to describe this incident, we must believe that child because children cannot possibly generate a false report of their own sexual victimization. The other side depicts children as being helpless sponges ...
Memory is not reliable; memory can be altered and adjusted. Memory is stored in the brain just like files stored in a cabinet, you store it, save it and then later on retrieve and sometimes even alter and return it. In doing so that changes the original data that was first stored. Over time memory fades and becomes distorted, trauma and other events in life can cause the way we store memory to become faulty. So when focusing on eyewitnesses, sometimes our memory will not relay correct information due to different cues, questioning, and trauma and so forth, which makes eyewitness even harder to rely on. Yet it is still applied in the criminal justice system.
The reliability of children’s eyewitness testimony is a controversial issue. Opinions range from proponents believing that children are virtuous in every detail to those who are more skeptical. In actuality, child testimony falls somewhere in between the two divergent views. Though children may not intend to intentionally distort the truth, they do seem to be very vulnerable to suggestibility. Therefore, certain comments and the form of questions can influence testimonials.
The first phase of the interview process is planning details of what the interview will consist of. A witness assessment is what allows interviewers to find out information about the child and what happened to the child. The interviewer collects information about the child such as the name, age, gender, ethnicity, current living situation, physical/learning disability, medications taken, emotional state, any contact with public services, and relationship to the offender (Lamb, Michael E.; La Rooy, David J.; Malloy, Lindsay C.; Katz, Carmit (2011). It’s useful to find what hobbies may interest the child to build a connection with them. It also helps to find out any misunderstandings of the event that could lead to a false accusation (Forensic Interviewing Protocol). This helps distinguish any possible missing information and if the child is being accurate with their story.
“There are generally three parties to child abuse: the abused, the abuser and the bystander,” according to Louise Penny, author of A Fatal Grace. In this case, however, there was no bystander. That is the reason that this case’s verdict was so hard to reach. Seven years and $15 million later, that verdict was reached. It was the influenced words of the children versus the words of the accused. (The McMartin Preschool Abuse Trials: A Commentary, Douglas Linder)
In the court of law, eyewitnesses are expected to present evidence based upon information they acquired visually. However, due to memory processing, presenting this information accurately is not always possible. This paper will discuss the reliability of eyewitness testimony, its use in a relevant court case, and how the reasonable person standard relates to eyewitness testimony.
However, as the court system creates a level of judgment on the crime that was committed by a juvenile, there is a higher focus on providing individuals with a level of protection in terms of their information being put in the public arena. In many of the cases that can be seen in the public sphere, individuals that are of a certain age are usually not provided their names to public outlets. They are simply called witnesses or offenders, which is a key way of creating an implementation of confidentiality by shadowing the names and not providing that information to the public. Overall, this helps individuals become more protected from any type of future harm depending on the offense that might have occurred.
Eyewitness testimony needs to be reliable as it can have serious implications to the perceived guilt/innocence of a defendant.
Many people think that children do not lie. It is not that they lie, they just cannot remember what happened a year or two ago when they were much younger, perhaps only a year or two old. The truth is children do lie. “One study shows that twenty three percent of abuse allegations are false and there was insufficient information to determine the truth in another twenty four percent” (Slicker W.D., 1999, Child testimony ¶ 16). Fear is also a factor in children lying or not providing adequate information. Lepore (1991) says that studies show in most abuse cases the suspect will usually bribe the child or threaten them into secrecy. This causes the child to become afraid to tell the truth, and they will begin to deny what has happened or even worse not report the abuse at all. The way an interviewer phrases a question will influence a child.
Lyon, T. D., Scurich, N., Choi, K., Handmaker, S., & Blank, R. (2012). "how did you feel?": Increasing child sexual abuse witnesses' production of evaluative information. Law and Human Behavior, 36(5), 448-457.
For both Cognitive and Forensic interviewing, it has been found to be more effective with older children than with younger for a variety of reasons. These reasons include the natural linguistic and cognitive development of children. Older children are more likely to remember the more information about the situation they experienced through a Cognitive interview than younger children, which suggests that may be most beneficial for them. Forensic interviewing should work better with younger children than Cognitive interviewing in that it allows freedom to give unique answers and considers the child’s age and developmental level more than a Cognitive interview does. In many interviews, children with intellectual disabilities need more prompting
Regan, P.C. & Baker, S.J. (1998). The impact of child witness demeanor on perceived credibility and trial outcome in sexual abuse cases. Journal of Family Violence, 13(2), 187-195.
“The bedrock of the American judicial process is the honesty of witness in trial,” (Engelhardt, 1999, p. 25). Eyewitnesses have become the most critical piece in uncovering the truth about a crime and are heavily relied on by the criminal justice system. They play a vital role in identifying, charging, and ultimately convicting a suspected criminal. This is why it is extremely important that the eyewitness evidence be accurate and reliable.
Child witnesses have provided a basis for controversy over the years in criminal justice. There are two main things that people worry about when it comes to having a child witness, one is the anxiety that is put on the child with regard to the traumatic experience and the other is dependability of the testimony. Child testimony has long been considered an important part of the case but what is to be done when there are questions regarding legal, ethical, and professional ways to interact with the children.