Assess The Difference Between Simultaneous And Sequential Line-Up

Eyewitness identification are considered to be the most powerful evidence against a suspect. There are numerous reasons for this to occur which includes stress, human memory, and the focus on weapons which leads for the eyewitness to focus less on the perpetrator. When an individual is in a position with high stress, their ability of remembering what actually occurred won't be easy to prove. It leaves the eyewitness unable to recall what occurred at the tie of the scene. This has been a huge problem over the years. According to “Carla Stenzel” eyewitness misidentification will occur because our memory is dynamic. It is very impossible for our brains to perform everything we see. Our memories take in pieces of information and processes the most important information. When a witness is asked by a police officer to give certain details of a suspect, they won't be able to remember how exactly they looked like but will be able to give out certain details like their height, race, and hair color. When a crime is being committed witnesses usually testify that there focus was more on the perpetrator's weapon. All they can focus on would be the size and shape of the weapon and focus less on the actual suspect. Another contribution would be the way the investigator presents the operator to the witness. The investigator prepares a lineup which includes a six pack of people. The use of a six pack lineup has

There are many different factors that play a part in the increased chance of a witness correctly identifying a suspect. Such factors should be brought to the attention of the jury and the judge to help in properly assessing whether a witness is correctly identifying a suspect. A study by Magnussen, Melinder, Stridbeck, & Raja (2010) found that of the three different types of people: judge, jury, and general public, that for the most part all where fairly ill-informed on the reliability of eyewitness testimony with judges having the most. Judges only had about an 8% difference in knowledge when compared to jurors. With this information it is very clear that education on the reliability of eyewitness testimony needs to become more of a general knowledge information for the everyone, especially people who are involved in upholding the law. Another factor to look into when evaluating the accuracy eyewitness testimony is the role that memory plays. Memory is divided into three processes: perceiving, remembering, and recalling information (Simmonsen, 2013). There is plenty of room in all three of those stages to forget or falsely remember something. Some factors that play a part when a person perceives an event is the amount of time they are exposed to the event and the suspect. A study conducted by Horry, Halford, Brewer, Milne, & Bull. (2014) found that witnesses were increasingly more likely to correctly identify a suspect if they had been exposed to the suspect for sixty

Eyewitness identifications is a noteworthy topic. Victims see their attackers from time to time, but

Davis, D., Fowler, N. B., Laney, C., Loftus, E. F., Knowles, E. D., Nelson, K. J. (2011). Change blindness can cause mistaken eyewitness identification. Legal and Criminological Psychology, 16(1), 62-74.

The impact of eyewitness testimony upon the members of a jury has been the subject of various research projects and has guided the policies formed by the federal government regarding its competent use in criminal matters (Wells, Malpass, Lindsay, Fisher, Turtle, & Fulero, 2000). Therefore, eyewitness studies are important to understand how

The traditional procedure in identifying criminals involve a simultaneous (SIM) lineup procedure whereby all the suspects are presented simultaneously to the eyewitness and asked to identify which one closely resembles the perpetrator (Steblay, Dysart, Fulero & Lindsay, 2001). This type of procedure however has led to many wrongfully convicted innocent suspects (McQuiston-Surrett, Malpass & Tredoux, 2006), suggesting that an alternative procedure is needed. In 1985, Lindsay and Wells devised the sequential (SEQ) lineup

In Canada, the leading cause of wrongful conviction is due to the factor of eyewitness account. It has been proven that individual’s minds are not like tape recorders because everyone cannot precisely and accurately remember the description of what another person or object looks like. The courts looks at eyewitness accounts as a great factor to nab perpetrators because they believe that the witness should know what they are taking about and seen what occurred on the crime scene. On the other hand, eyewitness accounts lead to a 70 percent chance of wrongful conviction, where witnesses would substantially change their description of a perpetrator.

The participants seated themselves around a table, these confederates were not known to each other, and most important concept of this experiment relied on the fact all of the participants were working together, but for one. They took turns in a fixed order to call out publicly which of three comparison lines was the same length as a standard line on the left card. In reality only one person was a naive participant who answered second to last, the rest were experimental confederates instructed to give erroneous responses.

According to the Innocence Project, the misidentification of eyewitness is the most common causes of wrongful conviction in which approximately 75% of the cases has been overturned because of this case. There are several causes of eyewitness misidentification, which includes the types of lineup, post-identification feedback effect, and does the instructions given. The lineup is a process which the suspect is identified by the witness as the perpetrator. The main reason that the

Identification responses, such as correct identifications and false or incorrect identifications, vary depending on whether the line-up is sequential or simultaneous (Flowe, 2011). Simultaneous line-ups are widely used and considered the norm. However, there has been an increased use of sequential line-ups (Wright, 2007). In sequential line-ups, eyewitnesses view the line-up one at a time; the procedure ends once the eyewitness has identified someone (Wright, 2007). According to Flowe, people spend longer analysing faces in a sequential line-up than in a simultaneous one, suggesting that participants are more thorough. Furthermore, Lindsay and Wells (1985) suggest that the sequential presentation of a line-up would encourage the use of absolute judgements. Absolute judgements refer to when witness make positive identifications by contrasting the present line-up to their memory. In contrast, in a simultaneous line-up, people tend to use relative judgements (Wells, 1984). The eyewitness views, and is asked to identify, the suspect amongst non-suspects simultaneously. In this line-up procedure, participants tend to compare the people present in the line-up against each other to determine which resembles the suspect the most in relation to other members of the line-up; which is making a relative judgement (Wells, 1984). According to Wells et al. (1998) certain line-up procedures

Eyewitness identification and testimony play a huge role in the criminal justice system today, but skepticism of eyewitnesses has been growing. Forensic evidence has been used to undermine the reliability of eyewitness testimony, and the leading cause of false convictions in the United States is due to misidentifications by eyewitnesses. The role of eyewitness testimony in producing false confessions and the factors that contribute to the unreliability of these eyewitness testimonies are sending innocent people to prison, and changes are being made in order to reform these faulty identification procedures.

In the past decade, eyewitness testimonies have cast a shadow on what is wrong with the justice system in today’s society. Before we had the advanced technology, we have today, eyewitness testimonies were solid cold-hard facts when it came to proving the defendant was guilty. However, time has changed and eyewitness testimonies have proven to be the leading causes of wrongful convictions due to misidentification. The Thompson and Cotton case is a perfect example of how eyewitness testimonies can put an innocent man behind bars.

The experiment consisted of a line judgement test, a naïve participant, and several confederates who had determined what their answers would be beforehand. To have a valid result of conformity, the naïve participant was made to believe that the confederates were real people just like them. Lines consisting of A, B, and C were presented to both the confederates and the naïve participant. Once presented with the three lines, they had to verbally state out loud which of the three lines were the same length in comparison to the target line. The experiment was purposely designed so that the naïve participant sat at the end of the table, thus allowing him to be the last one to give an answer. The results showed that out of the eighteen trials that were conducted, twelve of them consisted of the confederates purposely lying about which line they thought was the same length as the standard line (Asch,

The Effects of Alcohol Intoxication on Accuracy and the Confidence–Accuracy Relationship in Photographic Simultaneous Line-ups. Applied Cognitive Psychology. Volume 31. Page 379 - 391 There has been a growing interest concerning the accuracy of eyewitness and victim reports as pertains criminal investigations. In line with this, the purpose of the study was to establish the outcomes of alcohol intoxication on identification accuracy and confidence in police line-ups.

Two hypotheses were presented in this article. Both of them focus on how unfair lineups are more likely to cause witnesses to make false accusations about who actually committed the crime. Does the lineup cause subjects to