The Weapon-Focus Effect: The Cause Of Wrongful Conviction

Mr. Stephens identified Brenton Butler as the person who shot his wife, Mary Ann. In the field of Forensic Psychology, and declared by The Innocence Project, that eyewitness mistakes are one of the greatest cause of wrongful convictions around the world. When James Stephens was being cross-examined by Ann Finnell (Butler’s attorney), he testified that he hadn’t seen no one or head footsteps and just recalls seeing a gun. With that statement we can assume that the Weapon-Focus Effect had affected Mr. Stephens and influence him to mistakenly identify Brenton Butler. The Weapon-Focus Effect refers to the visual attention that a witness pays to the weapon of a perpetrator during the course of the crime. In other words, an individual pays more attention to the

(1987) conducted a study on Weapon-Focus Effect that supports the argument that Mr. Stephens wrongly identified Brenton Butlter as the individual who shot his wife, Mary Ann. In this study the researchers were interested if there is any accurate support for the phenomenon of the weapon-focus effect. Sophisticated methodology was required, that is also used in picture memory experiments. The study examined the eye activities of the individual as they watched scenes that did/did not contain a weapon, researchers would know if the weapon captures more attention because of the quantity and time of the eye fixations could be studied. The 36 participant were from the University of Washington and ranged in age from 18-31. Two different series were shown to the participants. In the first series, the control series, cashier was given a check to pay for the purchase and in this series a person pulls out a gun on the cashier and she hands the “offender” money. The snapshots were shown using a Kodak projector and a corneal reflection device was used to track and record the eye movements of participants as they watched the changing scenes scene in which the cashier was threatened with either a check or