Essay about Eye Witness Testimony

“Life's a maze, you twist and you turn through it,The driest of droughts, maneuvered and I earned through it” (Clipse). During the Blind Side, Michael Oher comes up from living on the `street to becoming an NFL football players. Throughout the film he is adopted by a new family who puts him down the right path in life. Although the movie "The Blind Side" is similar to Michael Oher's life, there are also many things that the movie changed about Michael's journey to add excitement to the movie.

The Blind Side depicts the story of Michael Oher, a seventeen year old African American homeless boy from a broken home, taken in by Leigh Anne Tuohy, a wife and mom of two living in a well to-do neighborhood. Repeatedly running away from the group home after group home, he was placed in after he was taken from him drug addicted mother, he happens to run into the exceedingly accepting family. Only after the catholic high school football coach sees his size and agility he is accepted to the privet school, despite a 0.7 GPA and lack of a place to sleep Leigh Anne Touhy, along with only one of his teachers, take a special interest in him. The families give him

Eyewitness testimony is a hot button issue in not only the criminal justice field but also the psychology field as well. It continues to be argued that this type of “evidence” is far too unreliable for the court room and can ultimately end up punishing the wrong person for a crime they did not commit. The influence of an eyewitness testimony cannot be denied as research has showed that, “adding a single prosecution eyewitness to a murder trial summary increased the percentage of mock jurors’ guilty verdicts from 18 to 72” (Leippe, Manion, & Romanczyk, p. 182, 1992). In the article discussed here, researchers will look into various age groups to see if age has an effect on the credibility of eyewitness testimonies while attempting to discern what certain cues build upon such credibility.

False confessions is a major flaw in the criminal justice system that must be addressed through videotaping and audio recording with the help of outside viewers. There are a few cause to this problem and society as a whole can change them to solve the problem of false confessions. Throughout this paper, it will address the problem the cause and give a few solutions to fix this issue that is present.

Information is the lifeblood of a criminal investigation. The ability of investigators to obtain useful and accurate information from eyewitnesses of crimes is crucial to effective law enforcement, yet full and accurate recall is difficult to achieve (Stewart, 1985). Such elicitation of complete and accurate recall from people is important in many aspects of life; specifically, eyewitness recall may determine whether a case is solved. Principle advocates of the cognitive interview (Fisher, Geiselman, Holland & MacKinnon,

In the late 19th-century research on eyewitness, testimony memory began, psychologists had been studying memory, and the findings became useful for forensic psychology and law. A central issue with studying eyewitness memory and testimony is the ecological validity of lab studies. There are relatively few ‘real world’ eyewitness memory studies, and that causes problems for determining the generalizability of findings in eyewitness memory. Coined by Wells (1978) estimator variables are present at the time of a crime and cannot be changed (i.e. witness characteristics and the type of offence) and system variables are factors that can be manipulated to affect eyewitness accuracy (i.e. line-up procedures and interview types). The system variables

So how can we find out if they have given a false confession is the real question. In Villar’s study he conducted about remorse in oral and handwritten false confessions gives us a hint on what is a true confession to what is a false confession. The Study states, “Although it is impossible to determine the true rate of false confessions, it is estimated that as many as 12% of individuals interrogated by police in the United States might have provided a false confession (Gudjonsson, Sigurdsson, Asgeirsdottir, & Sigfusdottir, 2007)” (Villar 255). Just the estimation of 12% would mean that a good amount of confessions would be false.

Imagine being at home with your family, when a knock comes at the door. You go to answer the door and you are promptly arrested and taken away from your family. Why, because you have been identified by someone as the perpetrator of a crime you have never heard of. Since you know that you are innocent you don’t worry, until you get to the sentencing. Once you are sentenced for 50 years without parole, reality takes hold. You may think this cannot happen to you, but until we fix some major flaws with law enforcement, prosecution deals, and an overloaded system: This could happen to anyone. State prosecutors should not be able to convict anyone on eyewitness testimony only, without any other physical or forensic evidence.

It is critical to understand why eyewitness testimony has such a great impact upon jurors’ choice of guilt because many innocent people have gone to jail due to eyewitness testimony. It is speculated that male and female jury members weigh guilt differently. This study hypothesizes there will be a measured difference between the independent factors, gender and type of eyewitness and the dependent variable, level of guilt. In this experiment the eyewitness type is: ‘no eyewitness,’ ‘unrefuted eyewitness,’ or ‘discredited eyewitness.’ The controlled condition is the level of guilt assigned by the participant after hearing details of a crime. The results supported the hypothesis. There were significant differences between the gender and eyewitness types when assigning levels of guilt. Female participants rated higher levels of guilt overall while both genders rated higher levels of guilt to the unrefuted eyewitness group over the other eyewitness types, which shown similar measures.

Have you ever been a witness to a crime? Would you feel comfortable if prosecutors relied on your eye witness testimony alone for a conviction? According to “The Magic of the Mind”, eyewitness testimony which relies on the accuracy of human memory, has an enormous impact on the outcome of a trial. Eyewitness testimony is a legal term. During an eyewitness testimony, the witness usually goes into an account of the crime he or she has witnessed. This can include details of the crime or identification of perpetrators. Eyewitness testimony is an important area of research in cognitive psychology and human memory (simplypsychology.com). Eyewitness testimony can be affected by many psychological factors such as:

The reviewed article is about a study in which children of two different age groups, and a group of adults were asked general-to-specific questions and misleading questions in an interview to see if the timing of the misleading questions and temperament affected the quality of the witness’s testimony. The researchers hypothesized that the use of misleading questions by interviewer’s causes the witness to unwittingly incorporate false information into their testimony.

Think of how many lies a person tells within their life time. Now imagine that one simple lie making someone spend 10 years behind bars. Many know how easy it is to lie about one little thing, but in the court room lying is a serious issue. False witness confessions show how easy it is to send someone innocent to prison, and must be prevented by recording a video of confessions and DNA testing. The cause of this problem is trying to be helped through video recording and DNA testing. However, innocent people are being convicted and its becoming a huge problem in the judicial system.

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.

After the first step, the interrogator is to establish what’s known as a theme, or justification for the offence. Most themes are based on morality or deflection thereof. These themes are to be given in a sympathetic and understanding tone. Interrogators are encouraged to limit the suspects talking if any, suggesting a correlation between frequency of denial and persistency to innocence. At this point in the interrogation, the Model states anything that varies from “normal” behaviour infers guilt.

John Lee Hancock’s film, The Blind Side, is an absolutely must see. The Blind Side, is a semi biographical movie that is based on the life of a football player named Michael Oher. The film was produced in 2009 by the Warner Bros. Production Company. The movie exemplifies the works of talented actors and actresses, some of whom are familiar and others that are new to the acting world. The names of the Main characters are as follows: Sandra Bullock, who plays the role of Mrs.Tuohy, Tim McGraw, who portrays Mr.Tuohy, and new comer Quinton Aaron, who plays the lead as Michael Oher. Even though, the film seems to be over exaggerated cliché, it excels tremendously in acting, setting, and encouraging and inspirational relationships. For these