Essay On Hearsay

“Testimonials during court hearings are performed under oath, hence the statements of an individual being examined are assumed to be true and no other statement should be falsified or forged. When the officer does not pronounce the truth in court, he or she is still capable of providing a reason for his deception, based on a substitute arrangement, such as when he or she is operating as a witness to the prosecution and is not considered as the defendant in a court case. However, it is also required that the officer is conscious of the rules of the court system that he or she has sworn to tell the truth during examination” (Chevigny , 1969).

Thus, any out of court statements made by witnesses and/or victims to law enforcement must be excluded unless the defendant had prior opportunity to cross-examine the unavailable witnesses (Byrom, 2005). The only non-testimonial statements that would be utilized in court, without direct testimony from the witness and/or complainant, were the taped 911 phone calls reporting the incident. If the victim testified, their previous statements would be allowed as evidence without limitation because the witness was subjected to cross-examination. However, if the victim refused to testify, any testimonials made to law enforcement were not allowed as evidence in the court proceedings.

Claiming that the witness wrongly identified him, Perry files a motion to suppress the identification, which he terms as "unnecessarily suggestive." He files the motion believing that the witness picked him after seeing him handcuffed by police officers and that he could not afterwards in a photo lineup or clearly describe him to the police before the arrest.

ISSUE: (1) The police department continued with the interrogations process that led to incriminating statements without reading the defendant’s rights.

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.

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.

Present sense impression exception permits a court to admit hearsay testimony of a statement describing or explaining an event or condition made while the declarant was perceiving the event or condition or immediately thereafter. People v. Brown 80 N.Y.2d 729, 731, 610 N.E.2d 369, 594 N.Y.S.2d 696 (1993); People v. Melendez 296 A.D.2d 424, 426, 744 N.Y.S.2d 485 (App. Div. 2d Dept. 2002). In People v. Brown the police received a 911 report while burglary was in progress. The caller led the police to arrest the two men who were responsible by providing description of their clothing, personal features and their whereabouts while observing them from afar. The Court of Appeals held that the 911 recording were admissible inasmuch as they were contemporaneous reports of events. People v. Brown 80 N.Y.2d 729, 731, 610 N.E.2d 369, N.Y.S.2d 696 (1993). Furthermore, such statements may be admitted even though the declarant is not a participant in the events and is an unidentified bystander. People v. Brown 80 N.Y.2d 729, 734, 610 N.E.2d 369, N.Y.S.2d 696 (1993). In our case the 911 report was received while police were investigating the scene therefore the event that was being observed by the unidentified woman was the police investigation scene. The woman provided the 911 operator

Eyewitness identification, for the most part, is considered reliable eyewitness identification by the courts as excellent evidence to proof crimes at trial. Yet, Bennett Barbour’s arrest revealed these inaccuracies as he was wrongly arrested due to an over-reliance on eyewitness identification. Barbour’s physique, specifically his

Police conduct is unnecessarily suggestive when there is no good reason to conduct the a show up in the circumstances. Commonwealth v. Figueroa, 9 N.E.3d 812, 823 (Mass. 2014). To determine whether an identification lacked good reason, the court examines the nature of the crime and whether there are any corresponding ongoing public safety concerns. Commonwealth v. Bresilla, 23 N.E.3d 75, 86 (Mass. 2015). Additionally, the need to promote and quick and efficient investigation and validate information in the immediate aftermath of a crime can justify the

In the past few years several cases have enforced a more comprehensive meaning to the confrontation clause. Such cases are Crawford v. Washington, Melendez-Diaz v. Massachusetts, and Davis v. Washington. In 2004, the landmark case Crawford v. Washington, involved an assault where the defendant Michael Crawford, got into an altercation involving a knife with another male over his wife. During the arrest, the police taped both Michael and his wife statements. The prosecution used his wife’s damaging statement, as she was unwilling to testify against her husband, during his trial and Crawford was convicted (Friedman, p. 440). Subsequently, the case made it to the United States Supreme Court and they overturned the 1980 decision in Ohio v. Roberts. Justice Scalia wrote, “Out-of-court statements were admissible only when the witness was unavailable to testify and the defendant had been able to cross-examine the witness on a previous occasion” (Supreme Court: Right to Confront Witnesses Strengthened, 2004). Under the Crawford ruling

The Reliability of Eyewitness Testimony Part 1 - How reliable is Eyewitness testimony? The Reconstructive nature of memory - Schemas and Stereotypes The reconstructive nature of memory is related to the schema theory. A schema is a package of memory that is organized and developed throughout our lives.

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.

Eyewitness testimony can be crucial for an investigation. A witness can be someone who has called in a complaint, is the victim of the offence, or has seen the incident take place (personal communication, Dave Maze, October 2017). This type of testimony in courts was heavily valued prior to research by Elizabeth Loftus who examined false memories. Since her discoveries, there have been many retrials in which individuals who were previously charged based on eyewitness memory were released due to DNA evidence. Although, eyewitness testimony is still presented in courts, there is much moreskepticism around evidence that is solely based on eyewitness memory.

The hearsay rule is based inherently on the concise definition of hearsay. In this regard, hearsay can be defined as any statement other than that made by an individual in the process of testifying at a hearing or trial, which is offered for purposes of affording evidence of truth pertaining to a particular matter. According to the Cornell University Law School (2014), the hearsay rue is the rule that prohibits out of court statements from being admitted as evidence at a trial. B and large, the hearsay rule is motivated intrinsically by the understanding in the belief that hearsay is unreliable. For example, if a witnessed stopped at a scene of a car accident and a survivor intimated to him or her that the driver caused the accident, this statement cannot be admitted as evidence to prove the same. It is imperative to understand that the hearsay rule, according to the Cornell University Law School, bars all such evidence, whether oral or written.