Determining The Accuracy Of Testimony Of Eyewitnesses?

Eyewitness evidence has always been considering critical information when it comes to court trials and convictions. But how reliable are eyewitnesses? Scientific research has shown that eyewitness’s memories are often not accurate or reliable. Human memory is very malleable and is easily changed by suggestion. Relying on eyewitness evidence instead of scientific data often leads to wrongful convictions. Scientific evidence is much more reliable, and should be more important in court cases than eyewitness evidence.

According to “The Science Behind Eyewitness Identification Reform” there are two main variables that affect eyewitness testimonies “Estimator variables: are those that cannot be controlled by the criminal justice system. They include simple factors like the lighting when the crime took place or the distance from which the witness saw the perpetrator, and the degree of stress or trauma a witness experienced while seeing the perpetrator” and “System variables: are those that the criminal justice system can and should control. They include all of the ways that law enforcement agencies retrieve and record witness memory, such as lineups, photo arrays, and other identification procedures”. Eyewitness misidentification has led to 75% of false convictions that were overruled by modern DNA testing according to “The Innocence

Eyewitness testimony has long been viewed as important evidence in court cases. The general population believes eyewitness identification more than any other evidence, even if the witness account is conflicting with the other evidence presented. Studies show that eyewitness testimony is unreliable, and yet it is still considered the most important form of evidence. People think that if a person says they saw something then it must have happened. Currently there are no universal guidelines on how to obtain and present such evidence. The purpose of this paper is to explain why eyewitness testimony is unreliable, and discuss the proposed guidelines on how law enforcement agencies should gather identifications, as well how

The reliability if an eyewitness testimony is questionable. The witness may be so certain that the person that thy are pointing out is one hundred per cent the suspect or they could be so certain when it comes to retelling the incident, although these people are so sure on what it is they are doing, their testimony cannot always accurate. Due to the lack of accuracy with eyewitness

There has been considerable interest and study in the accuracy or inaccuracy of the use of eyewitness testimonies in the current criminal justice system. Results collated by several studies add to the bulk of literature suggesting that the current usage of eyewitness testimony by the legal system is far from ideal. Currently, high emphasis is being placed on reviewing and reconsidering eyewitness accounts (Leinfelt, 2004). In particular, recent DNA exoneration cases have substantiated the warnings of eyewitness identification researchers by showing that mistaken eyewitness identification was the largest single factor contributing to the conviction of innocent people (Wells & Olson, 2003). In this essay, the use of eyewitness testimony in the criminal justice system will be explored, with a particular focus on the impreciseness of this practice.

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.

Turning to the case of Guy Paul Morin, one will see that the witness account played a great deal in the conviction of Morin. Mr. X falsely testified against Morin because he did not like Morin. The crown also used evidence from undercover officers where statements of Morin were recorded on a 60 minute tape recorder, which the officers believed to be 90 minutes. This made the case interesting because the crown used this instance for saying that Morin confessed to the crime after 60 minutes. This showed false accusation that was made both by the police officers and crown attorneys.

However eyewitness misidentification leads to more wrongful convictions than any other evidence being that it plays a role in 70 percent of cases overturned through DNA testing (Grimsley, 2013). There are multiple factors as to why eyewitness identification is often inaccurate, one reason being that it relies heavily on memory which involves three processes: encoding, storage and retrieval, all of which are susceptible to errors (Costanzo and Krauss, 2014). There are other factors that can affect one's memory such as unconscious transference (e.g. when you unintentionally replace someone's face with what one you may have seen on television, etc.), suggestive or leading comments (i.e. administrators providing cues to eyewitness about which person to pick at a lineup), cross-race effect (cross-race bias) (i.e. we often misidentify others of a different race than our own race), and so forth (Costanzo and Krauss, 2014). Despite that eyewitness identification is often inaccurate, it is still commonly used within the criminal justice system. This has affected mostly Africans-Americans negatively being that they most often fall victim to eyewitness misidentification. This is shown in a study done by Scheck, Neufeld, and Dwyer (2000) where they studied eyewitness

There is many things that should be taken into account that requires certain questions to be asked. The first factor would be to what extent was the eyewitness paying attention to the crime taking place. It is important to that witness ability to recall what happened accurately (Schwartz, 2015, p. 13). The next factor would be duration, how long did that crime go on for? The duration comes into plays because the longer the event was going on the longer opportunity the witness has to encode that information for stronger recall (Schwartz, 2015, p. 14). Also, lighting and distance is important because it plays a direct effect on the quality of the memory and encoding. The better the view is for the witness, the better chance the witness has retracing

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

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

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

Supreme Court determined, in the case of United States v. Wade, 388 U.S. 218 (1967), that a lineup is a critical stage of the proceedings against the defendant and that the defendant has a right to counsel at these lineups. These are considered critical issues as false implications could lead to a mistrial or the release of a criminal. Lineups are used to identify suspects accused of committing a crime. Three types of lineups are physical, field, and photographic, all of which cause fear and stress to the witness. Physical lineups are used for the witness to pick the suspect out of a line of participants standing with the suspect. Field lineups are used in immediate circumstances at the scene of a newly committed crime where the witness is asked to identify the detained suspect. Photographic lineups allow the witness to look at a series of photographs of similar looking people to identify the suspect. All three methods are effective and have proven to help solve numerous

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.

I claim that sense perception alone is not a very reliable way of knowing as there are many other by-factors that could trick and manipulate our senses. The first factor that would have to be taken into consideration is that does the eyewitness testimony use reason? If so, is it inductive, abductive or deductive. If it is an inductive and abductive reasoning then we cannot be 100% assured that the eye witness is reliable as it is not a guaranteed