Witness For The Defense Sparknotes

The novel Witness for the Defense: The Accused, the Eyewitness, and the Expert Who Puts Memory on Trial goes into great detail about the encounters an expert witness, on memory especially, might come across by telling true stories from Dr. Elizabeth Loftus’s experiences with the help of Katherine Ketcham. It also provides information about Loftus’s work and research on memory and its limitations and malleability (Loftus & Ketcham, 1991). Applying research on memory to this novel allows one to better understand the implications of the prosecutor’s case more effectively. The first story told in Witness for the Defense is the one involving Steve Titus. It was a case involving the rape of a seventeen year old female. Titus was identified

The victim’s flimsy identification was caused by something known as relative judgement conceptualization—this is when the victim identifies the person who most closely resembles the perpetrator in comparison to the other individuals in the lineup as the offender even if that person did not commit the crime. The victim’s eyewitness testimony also began to grow stronger as time went on because of commitment bias. Commitment bias causes the victim to become more convinced that someone is the actual perpetrator because of an eagerness to please the police and because of the assumption that the police has substantial evidence against the suspect; thus, every time the victim is shown the suspect, they begin to

Gary Eastburn, Kathryn’s husband, contacted the police with information that his wife had placed in ad in an attempt to get rid of their dog; the man who picked up the Eastburn’s dog was Hennis. Because of this interaction with Kathryn, Hennis was interrogated, and his picture was placed in a photo based lineup for a potential witness to view. The witness had seen someone walking down the Eastburn’s driveway early in the morning, and he eventually identified Hennis as the man he saw. However, his identification of Hennis was not without flaws; the witness stated that he looked most like the man he saw, but he stated that he could not be sure that it was him. This identification was very tentative, and there was a lot of pressure put on the witness by the police (Loftus & Ketcham, 1991). The witness indicating that Hennis looked the most like the man he saw could be a suggestion that his identification may be a product of relative conceptualization judgement (Bartol & Bartol, 2012). When comparing the witness’s initial description of the man he saw to the one he gave in court, it is obvious that there are major differences; the description that the witness gave changed to fit Timothy Hennis’s physical appearance (Loftus & Ketcham, 1991). This could be caused by unconscious transference. Unconscious transference occurs when an individual confuses a person