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Eye Witness Testimony An eyewitness testimony is when an individual witnessed an evert firsthand and recalls the details. This can be as simple as recalling a time with friends and family at Christmas, or something as serious as a crime that has occurred. Eyewitness testimony has been controversial in court cases for a while. The reason for controversy is because eye witness testimony can be inaccurate or influenced. The judge and jury do not want to make a wrong decision by trusting the eye witness because the eyewitness might not be recalling the event, actions, or descriptions properly, even though the witness does not realize he is doing so. There are numerous ways in which eyewitness accounts can be inaccurate or influenced to make them …show more content…
Eyewitness accounts are recalls of memory. When an individual does not get enough sleep, his mind is not as sharp as it is if it was fully rested. This can cause the individual’s memory to be hampered; this causes the individual to recall details incorrectly. Also, another interesting fact is that sleep can have a negative effect on memory. If a person sleeps right after witnessing something, he or she will tend to lose details. Thus, sleep as well as sleep deprivation causes an increased chance for a witness to recall false details (cite sleep). Some of the details and events that the individual is ‘remembering’ may not have even happened at all. If the witness was sleep deprived when he or she witnessed the crime, the mind may not have been sharp enough to remember all the slight differences and details that would affect the court case. Also, if the eyewitness was not well rested before the day or court, he will not be able to remember the details and will have a higher chance of recalling false or incorrect information. Because of the numerous differing effects of sleep on eyewitness accounts and memory, one must be cautious when listening to an eyewitness account. This is just one of the reasons how the eyewitness accounts can be incorrect or …show more content…
Environment has a huge impact on an eyewitness’s memory. If the crime happened at night in poor lighting, the witness may not have been able to clearly identify the suspect due to poor visibility. The judge and jury should be cautions when receiving an eyewitness account that has occurred in a poorly lit environment. Also, panic and chaos can have a tremendous affect on an eyewitness. In a scenario that is in panic or chaos, the mind transitions into survival mode; the brain directs the individual to fight for his or her life. When this occurs, the brain is not focused on the details as much as it is focused on fleeing from the threat. Not only does the environment have an impact on the eyewitness account, but personal beliefs also have effects (cite pdf). Racism towards individuals hinders the integrity of the eyewitness account, especially if the eyewitness could not see the criminal very well. The witness may assume the suspect’s race because of racism or stereotyping. This could be very problematic in court cases. For instance, there are two individuals who look very similar in appearance, but one has a tattoo and the other one does not. In this situation, the criminal is the individual without the tattoo committed the crime. The eyewitness may ‘remember’ that the individual who committed the crime has a tattoo, but the eyewitness has not remembered correctly
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.
The use of eyewitnesses has been a constant in of criminal justice system since its very beginning. Unfortunately, people do not make the best witnesses to a crime. The person may not have seen the actual criminal, but someone that looks similar to them. The witness may lie about what he or she may have scene. Also the witness can be influenced by the police as to who or what they saw at the time of the crime. The witness or victims memory of the person may have faded so that they don’t remember exactly what had seen, which could be disastrous for the accused.
In the magic of the mind author Dr. Elizabeth loftus explains how a witness’s perception of an accident or crime is not always correct because people's memories are often imperfect. “Are we aware of our minds distortions of our past experiences? In most cases, the answer is no.” our minds can change the way we remember what we have seen or heard without realizing it uncertain witnesses “often identify the person who best matches recollection
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...
Eyewitness testimony is when people who were either involved in the “accident/ situation” give their side of the story, and give a testimony on what supposedly happened all through their eyes (Branscombe & Baron, 2017). In the movie eyewitness testimony was key to convict the “killers” of the store clerk murder, and one example was when each person described the car all from different points of view and distances. I felt like the eyewitnesses just used each other to reference the same car, they all didn’t have an accurate description of the car but when with it based on what the lawyer was say and hinting at. Another way these eyewitness testimonies seemed to be completely wrong and even harmful to the investigation was because everyone said that they saw Billy and his friend running away and speeding off when they could not really describe those two young mans descriptions with great detail. Which this was another form of eyewitness testimonies are really unreliable and shouldn’t really be used in a court of
For example, when the victims want to remember something, or someone, strongly and with high confidence, the witness can still be wrong. The eyewitness is given all the photos of the suspects laid out to identify the person they remember committing the crime. Also the eyewitness is asked to identify each photo whether is the culprit or not. Prosecutors should look over the cases before relying on eyewitness. Prosecutors should not depend on eyewitness testimony because that will lead to wrongful convictions. The wrongful convictions span the criminal justice system from investigation and arrest to prosecution and trail(Ferrero). False conviction makes the justice system stronger and arresting innocent is wrong. And picking out person similar to the murder. Not catching the real suspect might cause the public risky. Public safety be in risk."Wrongful conviction is gravest violation of personal liberty and also poses severe public safety risks, as the real perpetrator could remain on the street," an innocence Project news release said. The real suspect might kill many people or if the eyewitness might be in risk. If the victim is still life might be kill again. Lying about someone is not good thing might have miserable life in their future.
During the identification and prosecution of a suspect, eyewitnesses are the most important. Eyewitness testimony needs to be reliable as it can have serious implications to the perceived guilt or innocence of a defendant. Unfortunately, the reliability of eyewitness testimony is questionable because there is a high number of eyewitness misidentification. Rattner (1988) studied 205 cases and concluded that eyewitness misidentification was the factor most often associated with wrongful conviction (52%). Eyewitness testimony can be affected by many factors. A substantial literature demonstrates own group biases in eyewitness testimony. For example, the own-race bias, in which people are better at recognizing faces of their own race versus another
There are many factors that can contribute to faulty eyewitness testimony, including own-race bias, focus on a weapon, stress, length of exposure to the stranger, eyewitness confidence, and events that occur after the incident, such as suggestive police procedures (V...
There has been considerable debate worldwide, regarding the accuracy of eyewitness testimony in the criminal justice system. Particularly, arguments have surrounded wrongful convictions that have resulted from incorrect eyewitness evidence (Areh, 2011; Howitt, 2012; Nelson, Laney, Bowman-Fowler, Knowles, Davis & Loftus, 2011). The purpose of this essay is to consider psychological research about the accuracy of eyewitness testimony and its placement in the criminal justice system. Firstly, this essay will define how eyewitnesses and their testimonies are used within the criminal justice system and the current debate surrounding its usage. Secondly, the impact of post-identification feedback will be used to show the affect on the confidence of a witness. Thirdly, studies around gender related differences will show how a witnesses gender can affect memory recall and accuracy. Fourthly, empirical studies will be used to highlight how a psychological experience called change blindness can cause mistakes in eyewitness identification. Finally, the effect of cross-examination will be used to explore the impact on eyewitness accuracy. It will be argued, that eyewitness testimony is not accurate and highly subjective, therefore, the criminal justice system must reduce the impact that eyewitness testimony is allowed to have. Developing better policies and procedures to avoid wrongful convictions by misled judges and jury members can do this.
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.
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
Inaccurate eyewitness identifications can confound investigations at the earliest stages. Critical time is lost while police are distracted from the real perpetrator, focusing instead on building the case against an innocent person” (Sheck, InnocenceProject.com). So the question arises “how reliable would you predict an eyewitness’s testimony of a crime to be”? Well, the eyewitness can have several factors that determine their decisions. These factors include misinformation, imagination, and things such as amnesia.
We believe that the best method would be cognitive interviews. In many cases, eyewitness testimony is an important source of evidence which highlights the importance of obtaining an accurate and complete information from them in order to prevent wrongful conviction. Cognitive interviewing is a method where interviewers has a set of rules and guidelines for interviewing the eyewitness which is neither aggressive or accusatory. Where standard police interviewing is often full of interruptions and has an over-reliance on a predetermine list of questions, this method does not interrupt the witness and allow them to control the flow of information through enabling them to tell the events of the story. Our textbook explains that this interviewing process improves the number of correct information generated regarding the event in comparison to other techniques. It has also showed better memory retrieval and communication which in turn produce a larger, more accurate and detailed body of information that we can obtain from the eyewitness.
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.
The writers argue that the focus on identification itself, especially in court cases, does not factor in the influence that postidentification suggestions have on the testimony of the eyewitness that might later be given about the identification. They suggest that postidentification feedback from the lineup administrator has strong effects on how the eye witness remembers the original event and on how the eyewitness recalls the identification decision. They call this the Postidentification Feedback Effect. This Effect influences both the retrospective reports of confidence and the eyewitnesses’ retrospective reports of how good their view of the culprit was, how much attention they paid to the culprit, how long they took to identify the culprit and so on. According to the writers, any psychological interpretations of the postidentification feedback effect must take into account the broad range of effects on retrospective reports of the witnessing