Eyewitnesses In Forensic Investigations

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.

Since the development of DNA evidence, More than 300 people have been exonerated in the United states alone, since 1989 as a result of eyewitness misidentification (Hsu, cited in Wixted et al, 2015). Consequently, The Innocence Project was founded in 1992 to assist those individuals who have been wrongfully convicted. The organization claims that over 70% of overturned cases are the result of eyewitness misidentification (Innocenceproject.org, n.d.). Whilst this is American data, it illuminates the tragedy that can emanate from such an unreliable element of the justice system. This essay will argue that eyewitness identification

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.

Eyewitness Identification may be more reliable than we believe, if they are handled and assessed correctly. Eyewitness testimonies are often used by law enforcement officers to identify suspects and play a huge role in getting convictions. If witnesses identify the wrong person, an innocent man could be punished for something they had no involvement in. There are many theories to explain why witnesses may identify the wrong person as the perpetrator of a crime. The different ways we retrieve memories affects what we remember. Other theories have to deal with how lineups or photo arrays are displayed to the witness and the effect they have on the result. All of the different theories of how our memories can be influenced, cause people to argue

Professor Farris, eyewitness evidence is not perfect; however, law enforcement agencies still use lineups, show-ups, and photographic arrays today. The professionals have taken a closer look at eyewitness evidence, precisely at the effectiveness of identifying suspects from lineups and photographic arrays. Law enforcement officers in the United States investigate millions of crimes per year; considering, a percentage of law enforcement agencies investigate crimes that involve the use of police arranged identification procedures. "The National Institute of Justice (NIJ) has initiated a multisite field experiment of eyewitness evidence to examine the effectiveness and the accuracy of the crucial and influential component of the Nation's Criminal

Memory is a cognitive function of the brain that is often taken for granted. Memory may have many purposes, but most importantly it is essentially a record of an entire life span. From this perspective memory is the most important aspect of consciousness. Unfortunately, through formal experimentation it has been shown that memory is fairly inaccurate, inconsistent, and often influenced by our own experiences as well as the bias of others. Memory is not only affected during an observed event, but there are instances where memory can be influenced after an event as well. There are also instances where memory can be affected retroactively due to personal experiences and biases. Incorrectly recalling the memories of one’s life is usually not

can be interfered with and that memory is not stored passively as it is often perceived to be.

Eyewitness testimonies provide crucial evidence in pinpointing the identity of the perpetrator in order to solve a crime, thus the criminal justice system depends upon the accuracy of eyewitness identification to investigate and prosecute criminals. However, eyewitness identification is imperfect and the leading cause of wrongful convictions (Huff, Rattner, & Sagarin, 1996; Scheck, Neufeld, & Dwyer, 2000). One prominent method of eyewitness identification is a line-up procedure during which “A line-up is a procedure in which a criminal suspect (or a picture of the suspect) is placed among other people (or pictures of other people) and shown to an eyewitness to see if the witness will identify the suspect as the culprit in question” (Wells

In sum, we can conclude that eyewitness memory still hold important place in investigation and prosecution process yet it is flawed. Based on research that I reviewed in this paper, there are several aspects that important to enhance eyewitness memory such as the repetition and precision-accuracy trade off. In contrast there are some factors that can threatens quality of memory such as such as avoiding co-witness situation, less focus on the confidence level to measure accuracy and delayed effect. These factors need to be prioritize to create a better environment to recall accurate information.

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.

“Decay theory-- we forget memories because we don’t use them and they fade away over time

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

Despite knowing the unreliability of eyewitness testimonies, investigators still narrow in on suspects identified by these witnesses. To explain the effects of eyewitness testimony one can examine a few conditional probabilities:

Capacity reduces even in the healthy individuals and there placement of old memories for new ones. The

Central idea: Memory is a process of the brain which is prone to certain failures, although specific steps can be taken to guard against these failures.