Eyewitness Testimony On The Criminal Justice System

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

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

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.

One of the most infuriating aspects of the criminal justice system - both ours and India’s - is that we put so much weight on witness testimonies. It is absurd that one person’s account of events could be the determining factor in whether or not someone is sent to prison. Not only is it irrational to allow such testimonies to play such a pivotal role in determining the culpability of the defendant, but it is completely unfair to the defendant. Sure, some witnesses deliberately lie because they are receiving something in exchange for their statement, but plenty of other witnesses still provide false information that they believe to be true. Everyone interprets events differently. We all have different perspectives and prejudices which shape

Individuals of all ages are involved in the criminal justice system as eye witnesses. So, it is important to understand how witness skills and limitations may be affected by age. Past research clearly shows that older adults are poorer at lineup identification than young people, showing a tendency toward more false alarms (Memon, Gabbert, & Hope, 2004). Extensive research has also shown that older adult witnesses are viewed as less believable than younger witnesses (Allison, Brimacombe, Hunter, & Kadlec, 2006). But the research on aging is mixed with respect to the impact of misinformation at different ages (cf. Dodson & Krueger, 2006; Roediger & Geraci, 2007). It “remains unclear if older witnesses are generally more vulnerable to suggestions

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.

Human memory is a complex system that encodes, stores, and retrieves information. Encoding involves two types of rehearsal: maintenance rehearsal, which is reciting the information, and relational or elaborative rehearsal, which is thinking about what the information means and how it relates to what you already know (Reisberg, 2016). Active encoding helps short-term memory transfer to long-term memory. Next, storage involves holding the information until it is needed, which brings us to retrieval. Retrieval happens when you remember the information; it requires first finding the information in storage and then bringing it to the surface. Errors in any one of these processes can result in error in memory which has large implications for eyewitness identification in the criminal justice system. During a criminal investigation, the police seek out eyewitnesses to better understand what happened and who committed the crime. The eyewitness may assist in making a sketch of the assailant and might be asked to look

Elizabeth Loftus explains how eyewitnesses are not always reliable because the human mind can distort memories and make you think you remember one thing when that never happened at all. To start, sometimes these eyewitnesses are right and can really help a case, but when they are not that’s where the issue is especially when they’re dealing with a death sentence case. Stated by Loftus “One factor that can affect a trial is a testimony from an actual witness” what I believe is being said here is though eyewitnesses are not always reliable they can a big role in a trial. The main point that Loftus argues is “are we aware of our minds distortions” and the answer is no most of the time, our mind alters our memories through mind distortion making it difficult to rely on an eyewitness. One way to solve this issue would to have a psychologist or a “expert testimony” speak to the jury on how our memories can become distorted. Dr. Loftus’ arguments have proven that eyewitness testimonies are not always reliable but there are ways around the issues that we have with

The second article reports that experts feel that eyewitness testimony is often inaccurate, especially when it comes to the wording of questions, lineup instructions, confidence malleability, mug-shot-induced bias, postevent information, child witness suggestibility, attitudes and expectations, hypnotic suggestibility, alcoholic intoxication, the cross race bias, weapon focus, the accuracy-confidence correlation, the forgetting curve, exposure time, presentation format, and unconscious transference (Tubb, Hosch, Memon, 2001). All eyewitness testimony should be taken with a grain of salt, because people’s memories can be pressured, altered, inaccurate, or even just plain

I am not sure what you are asking what pace? But I will try to answer this the best I can. I think that when there is an eyewitness I feel the defendant should also have a right to challenge the eyewitness since eyewitness testimony can be corrupted by societal influences, power of suggestion, and other variables (e.g. distance where crime was witnessed, lighting, or even who the eyewitness also spoke to prior to being interviewed by police). But, if there is even the slightest chance that DNA is present in a crime, it should be tested in a timely manner. This also includes investigating for fingerprints, security video footage, or trace evidence left behind that can specifically

The most important foundation for eyewitness testimony is a person's memory - after all, whatever testimony is being reported is coming from what a person remembers. To evaluate the reliability of memory, it is once again instructive to look to the criminal justice system. Police and prosecutors go to great lengths to keep a person's testimony "pure" by not allowing it to be tainted by outside information or the reports of others.

Eyewitness accounts are continuously put into question in the court room. By studying how memory works and what factors influence what we remember, we can try to determine how credible eyewitness accounts are and if they are an accurate source of evidence in crimes.

Eyewitnesses are required to provide testimony based on their episodic memory to aid the investigation in courtroom. Idealistically, eyewitnesses are able to provide details of crime scene accurately. However, the interference during the process of encoding and retrieval of episodic memory may impair eyewitnesses’ memory. In Megreya and Burton (2008) research, it was found that witnesses were less capable to encode faces in traumatic events. Because of flashbulb effect, some witnesses may hold a belief that they can vividly remember the details of crime scene despite their memory was somehow flawed. It poses an adverse effect on criminal justice system as the subjective judgment of eyewitnesses’ identification contributed to more than 75% occurrence of 239 DNA exoneration cases. (Ask & Granhag, 2010). During the retrieval process, Therefore, cognitive psychologists and scientists conducted decades of methodological research to improve the accuracy of eyewitnesses’ memory. This essay would mainly focus on how ‘cognitive interview’, one of the widely studied scientific techniques since 1980s that corrects the errors and deficiencies of memory retrieval during conventional police interview.

In their research Oeberst, and Blank initially exposed at group of participants to a videotaped incident of a crime. The group was then asked leading questions pertaining to the incident “participants are later tested for their memory of the event. “Typically, memory accuracy is found to be significantly lower when inconsistent information has been presented, compared to a control condition without exposure to misleading details” (Aileen Oeberst, Hartmut Blank p 142). This shows just how powerful leading and manipulation can be when investigators are questioning an eyewitness. Aileen Oeberst Hartmut Blank found that even after being debriefed on the intentions and the correct information about the staged crime only 12% changed the answers they gave during the questioning. This again shows the power that the manipulation leading questions can have on an investigation. The question is what can be done to improve eyewitness accounts? One study considered how initial eyewitness accounts can be

Historically, eyewitness testimony has been frequently practised, and has played a consequential role in the conviction of criminals. Monumental amounts of unsolved crimes lacking sufficient evidence has meant that an eyewitness testimony could help secure a much-needed verdict in an otherwise unsolvable crime. However, in this contemporary society, experts claim that many factors can be responsible for faulty eyewitness testimony. For example, post incident events, most specifically suggestive police strategy (Brace and Byford, 2012). Milgram’s (1963) study into obedience highlighted