Improving Children's Testimonies In Court

Over the last thirty years, the idea of children as witnesses and the accuracy of their testimony has been widely debated. People are asking themselves if the memories of young children, specifically between the ages of five and ten, can be accurate and in return trusted. So, can children’s memory and testimony be accurate? Prolific amounts of research have been conducted in an attempt to answer this question. Most of the research suggests that unfortunately we can not rely on their accurate recall in testimony. I would have to say I agree with the findings.

Jo’ana Meyer is a sociologist at the Rutger’s University who has carried out valuable research on children’s susceptibility to leading and suggestive interviews in the context of court testimony. She has discussed the effects of stress, prompting and imagination on children’s memories and powers of recall. She stresses the importance of Milgram’s research and points out that children are likely to obey authority at an even higher level than the adults in Milgrim’s experiments. Meyer has made important suggestions about ways to interview children that would increase the accuracy of their testimony. (“Meyer’” Inaccuracies in Children’s….).

1 to 2 hours after the first trial, the same subject will watch the video again and he or she will also fill out the survey again and the answers will be rating based upon the accuracy of answer. 3 being the answer is right and 1 being the answer is wrong.

The purpose of the experiment was to determine whether people are influenced by leading questions. This experiment is a replication of an experiment conducted by Loftus and Palmer in 1974. In the experiment the independent variable was the verb used (contact, smash). The dependant variable was the speed estimated by the participants when recalling the picture of the crash from their memory. The results gave evidence that specific words could influence the retrieval of a memory. This is caused because of a schema associated with the verb. Contact is a less dramatic verb than smash, leading to different estimated speeds. This same concept results in

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.

Loftus and Palmer’s study on the interaction between language and memory was based on the hypothesis that the phrasing/leading questions used to question an eyewitness can alter the event memory. The study specifically looks at how people recall the speed, vehicles were travelling at when involved in road traffic accidents. The paper spoke in brief about other evidence to support their Hypothesis, this was relevant and valuable when assessing the results of the study. There were two experiments within the study. Experiment 1 comprised of Forty-Five students, they were shown short films of road traffic incidents and after each film asked a series of

Recent news stories, such as, ‘Operation Yewtree’, the police investigation into historic child sexual abuse allegations made against the British media personality, Jimmy Savile and others have highlighted the debate about eye witness testimony. The historic nature of these cases is only now being looked into due to the incidents taking place over four decades ago, which means the most of the witnesses where recalling memories from when they were children. However, this does raise the issue as to why these cases were not looked at when they occurred. Since 1980’s-1990’s it has been more common for children to testify in court; this is particularly important in abuse cases.

The Supreme Court has long considered competency to be a right of the criminal defendant in court. In many areas, insanity has been a criminal defense with a significant history. However, in the early part of this century, adult protections, including the competency requirement and common defenses like insanity, were not added into the juvenile court system. Because juvenile courts were established to protect juveniles from the rigors of adult court and punishments in adult facilities, states focused on achieving proceedings more compatible with juveniles' needs.

Today, the court system in this country is divided into two groups when comparing juveniles and adults. One is the Adult Criminal Justice System, and the other is the Juvenile Justice System. The terminology can be very different between the two systems. For instance; if an adult is arrested, they will be subject to a bail hearing. If a juvenile is arrested they must go through a detention hearing. Adults have trials which can be decided by a judge or jury. Juveniles go through a fact finding hearing and don’t receive verdicts because they are adjudicated. “They are not found guilty, but delinquent or involved” (Komiscruk). Another difference between the two is that juvenile court rooms are usually closed to the public, which

In conclusion, this paper has addressed the controversial issue that face the court when it comes to the controversy on the time-honored question should/or should not the court allow children to testify in child custody cases. Also, to sum it up that the BICS has a lot of weak points that needs to be changed when it comes to child custody. However, there are mores states that have their own option about children testifying in custody cases.

The question of whether or not juveniles have the knowledge or maturity to waive or exercise their rights comes to be very controversial in situations of juvenile interrogations. There is a discrepancy between whether juveniles should be responsible enough to exercise their rights or if they are immature, vulnerable, and all together incapable of understanding the rights they are granted. Many people believe that juveniles should have a parent present during interrogations to guide them through their rights while others believe that juveniles who commit crimes should be held equally as responsible for their actions as adults.

It can be extremely difficult at times to provided appropriate and effective legal mechanisms in the area of age of criminal responsibility – that being the important transition from childhood innocence into the maturity and true responsibility that arises in adulthood and its association with the Australian criminal law. In order to deal with the grey area of age of criminal responsibility there are multiple specialised institutions such as the Children’s Court and juvenile detention centres. There have also been significant manipulations to particular pieces of legislation of the criminal justice system in order to clearly differentiate the legal rules of children and adolescents from that of legitimate adults.

Forty participants watched a short film clip about student revolution. After, the participants answered some questions about it. Half of the participants were asked if the leader of four demonstrates was a male and the other half of the participants if the leader of twelve demonstrates was a male. One week later, both groups were asked new questions about the film but they did not have the chance to watch it again. One of the questions asked was about how many demonstrates were in the film, and the results were higher on the group that it was presupposed to have 12 demonstrators. It can be concluded that a wording of one question can alter the memory regarding an

The child who must be brought into court should, of course, be made to know that he is