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Are eyewitnesses identifications reliable
Eyewitness Identification and Testimony
Eyewitness Identification and Testimony
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Imagine spending twenty-four years in prison for a crime you did not commit. Furthermore, imagine that conviction is based on witness testimony and no valid forensic evidence. This is the case for Texas resident Steven Phillips and countless others whose unfortunate circumstances stem from the fallacious nature of human memory. Phillips was wrongly convicted in 1982 based on a few of the many inadequacies of human memory (“Know the Cases”). Unfortunately, this is an all-too-common occurrence due to the high malleability of episodic memory.
In episodic memory, sequences and events are encoded; it is how we remember (or misremember) our lives. It is much more subject to erosion, interferenc...
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Nelson, Kally J., et al. “Change Blindness Can Cause Mistaken Eyewitness Identification.” Legal and Criminological Psychology 16.1 (2011): 62-74. Wiley Online Library. The British Psychological Society, 17 Jan. 2011. Web. 27 Oct. 2011.
Wells, Gary L., and Elizabeth A. Olson. “Eyewitness Testimony.” InnocentProject.org. 27 Aug. 2002. Web. 27 Oct. 2011.
In chapter 6 of Unfair, Adam Benforado addresses the issues regarding human being’s poor memory and our justice systems outrageous reliability on eye witness testimony. Benforado believes that our real memories are severely obstructed by the human brains limit in perception. Our brains are not able to recall every moment of every day because there is simply no way to process everything we encounter in a day. Although most science supports the idea that our memories are unreliable and biased, most of us humans believe we have good and accurate memory. We also expect other to be able to perform basic memory task with accuracy and consistency, which is why for years, the United States so desperately depended on eye witness testimony to get a conviction. This desperation over the years has left hundreds, possibility thousands of innocent citizens paying for a crime they did not commit. According to the reading, of the first 250 exonerations in the United States, 190 of them happen to have involved mistaken identification’s
This paper will consider eye witness testimony and its place in convicting accused criminals. Psychology online (2013) defines “eye witness testimony” as a statement from a person who has witnessed a crime, and is capable of communicating what they have seen, to a court of law under oath. Eye witness testimonies are used to convict accused criminals due to the first hand nature of the eye witnesses’ observations. There are however many faults within this system of identification. Characteristics of the crime is the first issue that will be discussed in this paper, and the flaws that have been identified. The second issue to be discussed will be the stress impact and the inability to correctly identify the accused in a violent or weapon focused crime. The third issue to be discussed is inter racial identification and the problems faced when this becomes a prominent issue. The fourth issue will be time lapse, meaning, the time between the crime and the eye witness making a statement and how the memory can be misconstrued in this time frame. To follow this will be the issue of how much trust jurors-who have no legal training-put on to the eye witness testimony, which may be faltered. This paper references the works of primarily Wells and Olsen (2003) and Rodin (1987) and Schmechel et al. (2006) it will be argued that eye witness testimony is not always accurate, due to many features; inter racial identification, characteristics of the crime, response latency, and line up procedures therefore this paper will confirm that eyewitness testimonies should not be utilised in the criminal ju...
Stonehenge is located near Salisbury, England and according to an archaeologist who has investigated Stonehenge close up, Mike Parker Pearson (2010) “...the new date for the raising of the sarsens [the large stones]...[is] between 2600 and 2480 B.C….” (p. 47). It consists of the large sarsen stones which are the ones that are in pictures and on postcards. Then there are smaller bluestones that are mixed in with the sarsens, Y and Z holes that form full circles around the sarsen stones, and Aubrey holes which form a circle around the entire structure. There is a large stone outside and a ways away from the circle called the heel stone. There are two station stones that stand to the side of the of the circle and over the Aubrey holes. They form a perfect rectangle with two barrows, or burial mounds, that are there.
Stonehenge is located in Southern England on what is known as the Salisbury Plain. The structure looks different than it once did, however. Today, Stonehenge suffers the effects of time and pernicious acts by people. Originally, in the years after completion, the structure was made up of “several concentric circles of megaliths, very large stones.” (5) Stonehenge consists a circular layout of approximately one hundred megaliths. On the tops of them another flat stone was placed to make a continuous ring of horizontal stones. These structures are known as trilithons.
Vallas, G. (2011). A survey of federal and state standards for the admission of expert testimony on the reliability of eyewitnesses. American Journal of Criminal Law, 39(1), 97-146. Retrieved from http://search.ebscohost.com.pioproxy.carrollu.edu/login.aspx?direct=true&AuthType=cookie,ip,cpid&custid=s6222004&db=aph&AN=74017401&site=ehost-live&scope=site
Eyewitnesses are primarily used by the criminal justice system for investigating and prosecuting crimes, particularly in circumstances where it is the only evidence available (Wells & Olson, 2003). Their testimony is highly regarded as it allows for police, prosecutors, judges and juries to establi...
The name Stonehenge is believed to have been derived from words that mean either “circle of stones,” “hanging stones,” or “stone hinges.” (Wendy Mass 8) it was originally called stanhenge; stan, which means stone in OLD English, and henge, which means “to hang.” There are several theories as to t...
Fradella, H.F. (2006) Why judges should admit expert testimony on the unreliability of eyewitness testimony. Federal Courts Law Review. Retrieved from http://www.fclr.org/fclr/articles/html/2006/fedctslrev3.pdf
For example, the old man that lived beneath the boy and his father testified that he heard a fight between the boy and the father and heard the boy yell, “I’m gonna kill you,” along with a body hitting the ground, and then claims that he saw the boy running down the stairs. With this information, along with other powerful eyewitness testimonies, all but one of the jury members believed this boy was guilty. The power of eyewitness testimony is also shown in Loftus’s (1974) study. In this study, Loftus (1974) found that those who claimed to “see” something were usually believed even when their testimony is pointless. She discovered in her study that only 18 percent of people convicted if there was no eyewitness testimony, 72 percent of people convicted when someone declared, “That’s the one!”, and even when the witness only had 20/400 vision and was not wearing glasses and claimed “That’s the one!”, 68 percent of people still convicted the person. This proves that in 12 Angry Men and Loftus (1974) study, eyewitness testimony is very powerful and influential in one’s decision to convict a
When you begin to wonder why the Stonehenge exists you have to think back hundreds of years into the past, all the way back to 3,100 B.C. (Palmer, Veronica). That is when the first stage of construction began. Some of the tools used to create the Stonehenge include the bones of animals. “They used primitive tools, often made from deer antlers.”- History.com Staff. They were used to dig ditches on the site of what would become the Stonehenge. When a team of archeologists were excavating at the Stonehenge they discovered that over fifty individuals had been buried there around that time of construction. This supports the fact that the Stonehenge could have been used for religious purposes and ritualistic purposes.
Euclidean distance was proposed by Greek mathematician Euclid of Alexandria. In mathematics, the Euclidean distance or Euclidean metric is the distance between two points, which is shown as a length of a line segment and is given by the Pythagorean theorem. The formula of Euclidean distance is a squ...
The Stonehenge at Salisbury Plains has been shrouded in mystery even before the time of Christ, but the truth of the matter is that nobody truly knows how this monument came to be. The origins of this monument range from logical theories to totally far fetched science fiction and middle age theories. This site has been around for over 4 millennia, but before the stones were even erected or on British land, it was used as a burial site. Then comes the weird theories, like Merlin from the King Arthur tales using his powers to move all of the stones into their formation or extraterrestrials coming down from outer space and giving knowledge to the ancient people in the area. Aside from these theories that lack any form of logical reasoning, the most widely accepted theory is that the monument was created as a religious shrine for the Druids of the area.
Eyewitness testimony is especially vulnerable to error when the question is misleading or when there’s a difference in ethnicity. However, using an eyewitness as a source of evidence can be risky and is rarely 100% accurate. This can be proven by the theory of the possibility of false memory formation and the question of whether or not a memory can lie. For instance, a group of students saw the face of a young man with straight hair, then heard a description of the face supposedly written by another witness, one that wrongly mentioned light, curly hair. When they reconstructed the face using a kit of facial features, a third of their reconstructions contained the misleading detail, whereas only 5 percent contained it when curly hair was not mentioned (Page 359). This situation shows how misleading information from other sources can be profoundly altered.
Stonehenge is a monument that is located in Wiltshire, England. It is one of the most famous monuments in the world, and is meritorious when it comes to the world’s best monuments. Standing tall in Southern England, the Stonehenge is an arrangement of massive stones that form a circular geometry. No one knows who built it, but medieval tales say that it is the work of Merlin the Wizard, during the age of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. As time passed, it is said that the Romans were responsible for the building of Stonehenge. In more recent times, archaeologists have discovered who really might have built Stonehenge. Archaeologists and scientists now believe that Stonehenge was put together more than 4000 years ago, a long time before Medieval England or the Romans. Modern researchers have come to a new hypothesis: Stonehenge was built by people who lived around the time of the ending of the Stone Age. Although scientists and archeologists have come to some conclusions, no one really knows how this monument was erected. Over time the monument has endured some history, and has given humanity time to discover many things about this mysterious monument known as Stonehenge.
Euclidean geometry is the study of points, lines, angles, triangles, circles, squares and other shapes, as well as the properties and relationships between the properties of all these things (Marshall, 2014, para.8). Euclidean geometry is one of the types of mathematics students are learning about in secondary schools, and is also commonly used in everyday life. Mathematicians and researchers have discovered many types of geometries, but Euclidean geometry is the oldest branch of mathematics.