Eyewitness Testimony Case Study

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.

Eyewitness testimonies are based on a person’s ability to recall what took place accurately. Memory research has proven that a person’s memory is not a recording but it is reconstructive. Loftus and Palmer’s study set out to prove that the memory could be reconstructed through the use of language.

The Car Crash Study was done in 1974 by Loftus and Palmer that was aimed to test their theory that the language used in an eyewitness testimonies can alter the eyewitness’s memory of the event. They got 45 American students and showed them 7 films of traffic accidents, ranging from 5 to 30 seconds, in a random order. Afterwards the subjects were asked to describe what happened as if they were at the accident. They were then asked more specific questions such as, “About how fast were the cars going when they (smashed/ collided/ bumped/ hit/ contacted) each other?’. This was to see if the if the verb used in the question would affect the answers given by the subjects which it did. In the next part of the experiment they showed 150 students a one-minute film that showed a car driving through the country side followed by four seconds of a multiple traffic accident. Afterwards they split the students into three groups and asked them different questions. The first group was asked “How fast were the cars going when they hit each other?”, the second group was asked “How fast were the cars going when they smashed into each other?”, and the third group was kept as a control group and wasn’t asked anything. One week later they were asked, without seeing the film, ten questions about the film. One question asked “Did you see any broken glass? Yes or No?” which there was none. The results showed that more participants who were asked “How fast were the cars going when they smashed?” said

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

The social implication that have happened with a better understanding of eyewitness testimony are quite big. Because of the thousand and thousand of crime that have been made by people, we cant really trust everyone testimony of the situation. Because pretty much a conversation with someone else can easily mess every thing up. Which could suck for the person who is taken to jail because a of a eyewitness mistake. When the real criminal is out their actually doing more harm to others. Its actually scary to think how many individuals might be in jail for years of their life knowing that they had nothing to do with a crime that they weren’t even involved

The study, Reconstruction of Automobile Destruction undertaken by Loftus & Palmer in 1974 consisted of two experiments, these experiments were completed in order to test their hypothesis that ‘the way in which a question about an eyewitness testimony was asked can change the recollection of events perceived by the witness’. The study served to aid the argument that memory can be altered and distorted when they subject is presented with new information that is given prior to the event. In order to test their hypothesis, Loftus & Palmer conducted two laboratory experiments; both experiments took the design of an independent measures. The first experiment consisted of a group of 45 students who were shown footage of car accidents, following each film questionnaires were answered. The critical question from this questionnaire was in regards to the speed at which the car was travelling. In this question the verb used to describe the actions changed, meaning this was the independent variable. The results of this question varied depending on the verb used. With the highest mean speed being for the word ‘smashed’ and the lowest for the verb ‘contacted’. The dependent variable in this experiment was the estimated mean speed.

I thought that the "Witness for the Prosecution" was very interesting. At first, I thought it was kind of boring. It was just a normal trial, and nothing that I thought was interesting happened. However, as the story progressed on, I became more intrigued with the plot of the story and I tried to guess who the murderer was. When I discovered that Leonard Vole was being accused of killing Miss Emily French, I didn't really think that he would end up being the killer because I thought, "Why would they tell you who the murder was right away?" Every time there was evidence that pointed to Leonard, I thought that I might be him, but I wasn't completely convinced. From that point on, I suspected that every character was the killer. When it was discovered

There are various places that we could possibly end up working in as a clinical forensic psychologist, like in a courtroom as an expert witness, conducting psychological assessments, working child custody cases, a jury consultant, we could work in a jail or prison, work with law enforcement, in hospitals, work for a government agency, or treating client’s office, all of which are settings that can be comprised of a great deal of diversity.

A false memory is simply a memory that did not occur. An actual experience can become distorted as best illustrated by the Cog Lab experiment on false memories accessed through Argosy University. The experiment is outlined as follows: a participant is given a list of words that are highly relative in nature at a rate of about one word every 2 seconds. At the finish of the given list, the participant is then shown a list of words in which he or she is to recall the words from the original list. A special distractor is inserted to the list, and this word, although highly relative in nature, was not in the original list. For example, the

Memory is a reconstructive process, where someone recall information from the past that will be their autobiography and it can be affected by many different factors, and according to the first study provided below, all memories are wrong to some extent. But what is important for memories is whether we can differentiate between accurate and inaccurate ones. The first study has tested two different approaches on subjects, and neither were helpful in determining the validity of a memory. On the other hand, in the fourth study it was concluded that it is possible to assess whether a particular eyewitness is true or false based on the approach the witness used to recall the information. Also, it was found in the third research that subjects were

In 1996, the U.S. Department of Justice produced a report entitled "Convicted by Juries, Acquitted

Memory has been a subject of study to see if what we remember is a true memory or a false memory. Some of the studies conducted on this have used sentences, prose, films and slides to test the memory and find out if the individual can recall the actual story or have false memories about what they experienced (Roediger III & McDermott, 1995, p. 803). The problem arises when eyewitnesses recall information about an event but proves to be false. Roediger, Jacoby and McDermott state that when you test the memory you are not just testing the retention of that event, you are also changing how the individual retains that particular event in the future.

Because attorneys shape the way witnesses think about what they have been asked by their phrasing of the leading question, they have a significant effect on the memory retrieval of the eyewitness. A study done in 1974 by Loftus and Palmer illustrates the effect of these phrasings. In the first part of the study, participants were shown different video of two cars hitting each other. Humans are generally bad at guessing the speed of moving objects, so the design of this study helped to eliminate any advantage had by a participant in guessing. After the video was shown, amongst other distractor questions, 45 college students were asked the following critical question: “About how fast were the cars going when they (smashed

Children were once scrutinised as being dangerously unreliable witnesses, reports provided by children are often questioned on their reliability, due to children’s heightened susceptibility to suggestion, limited memory capacity and their far-fetched imagination. In the past, as courts have been a habitually adult-based environment, courts have lacked any recognition of the needs of children (Hritz et al, 2015). Eyewitnesses are individuals who have seen, heard, or hold any information regarding a criminal offence (Close, 2013). According to the NSPCC, there is a heightened number of child abuse cases year upon year, in which children are increasingly being used as eyewitnesses, due to being the sole witnesses (Bentley et al, 2017). This essay