Memory And Evidence Analysis

The McMartin Preschool Abuse Trial: Many children and people were harm due to false memory accusations. In the case, the Social Worker, Kee MacFarlene her style of interviewing the children was wrong and misleading to the witnesses. A social worker is conducting an interview, must be done in an ethical manner and style. Their goal is to have the witness give the correct and honest answers to the questions asked. A valuable lesson for a Social worker when they are speaking with a client is not to contaminate their client’ memory is to ask questions that are not suggestive, leading, and misleading questions. After viewing the different Elizabeth Loftus clips, I realize that your memory can be easily manipulated, by making you believe something

Research shows that the human mind is not like a tape recorder, we neither record events exactly as we see them, nor recall them like a tape that has been rewound. Instead, witness memory is like any other evidence at a crime scene; it must be preserved carefully, or it can be contaminated. A case I would like to mention is the Calvin Willis Case. One night in 1982, three young girls were sleeping alone in a Shreveport, Louisiana home when a man in cowboy boots came into the house and raped the oldest girl, who was Ten years old. When police started to investigate the rape, the three girls all remembered the attack differently. One police report said the Ten year old victim didn’t see her attacker’s face. Another report which wasn’t introduced at trial said she identified Calvin Willis, who lived in the neighbourhood. The girl’s mother testified at trial that neighbours had mentioned Willis’s name when discussing who might have committed the crime. The victim testified that she was shown photos and told to pick the man without a full beard. She testified that she didn’t pick anyone, police said she picked Willis. Willis was convicted by a jury and sentenced to life in prison. In 2003, DNA testing proved Willis’ innocence and he was released. He had served nearly Twenty Two years in prison for a crime he didn’t

However, factors such as interactions with other witnesses and the influence of media outlets cannot be accounted for. In addition, the small sample size of 13 participants means the results are not as reliable and cannot be generalised to the population at large. One possible factor which may influence the results is that witnesses were within close proximity to the events which transpired which can influence memory as well as not being applicable to many crimes whereby the witnesses only see part of the crime or a shadow of the perpetrator. An alternative explanation would be that flashbulb memory was at work here.

Is our justice system fair? Is our justice system truly set out to do what it was meant to do? Or are there social factors and memory errors that come into play that can change a conviction outcome. In today’s court rooms we have, Defense attorneys, Prosecutors, judges, juries, evidence, forensics experts, witness testimonies, and of course the human memory. What better type of evidence than the human memory, right? Unfortunately, human memory is subject to the power of suggestion and unable to truly recall an event when told to recall. In other words, the story may not be the same as the one that actually happened the day of that event because many variables come into play like cross examinations and the way a question can be asked can alter the answer or how the event was perceived. The main focus of this paper is to see how the human brain is not able to effectively recall events which could possibly convict an innocent person of wrong doing. Also how lawyers use the misinformation effect to their advantage. In order to understand how something as simple as a question can decide a person’s faith we must first answer some questions. First, How does memory actually work and how is memory retrieved when your need to answer a question or being cross examined? Second, how does the misinformation effect play a role when a witness needs to testify against the defense or vice versa? Third, how can structuring a word or sentence effect the outcome of a conviction?

The novel Unfair: the new science of criminal injustice, is a collection of short pieces addressing different situations in the criminal justice world where psychology plays a major role in determining outcomes. Chapter 6, "The Corruption of Memory”, addresses the problems with the process and using of an eyewitness testimony to convict someone (108-132). John Jerome White’s real-life example is used to demonstrate the problems with eyewitness testimony and how mistakes made during the process can ruin someone’s life. In the case of John Jerome White, he was misidentified as the man who raped and robbed a 74 year old women, by the victim herself (6 weeks later), which resulted in him spending 28 years in prison. To make it worse the actual guilty man, James Edward Parham, was in the lineup one person away from Mr. White and he was not caught again until he raped another victim. Many errors were made in how the case was handled and although they were not intentional they still magnify problems in the justice system and how we view our memories. From immediately after the crime to the point a suspect is put behind bars, the questioning, interrogation techniques, line up methods, and cross examinations can all effect the victims and witness’s recollection of events. Human memories are thought to be strong but with all the information that needs to be processed they are not as reliable as thought. However, this is not accounted for in the criminal justice system and it can greatly affect the outcomes of cases like John Jerome White’s. The point of the criminal justice system is to provide justice like it says in its name and although it happens more times than not, if there are possibilities of not providing justice they need to be fixed. Chapter 6, "The Corruption of Memory”, looks at what went wrong in order to wrongly convict an innocent man which ended up costing him half his life and how psychological principles could help prevent this from happening again.

Unfortunately error in memory recall is not the only difficulty facing those who have experience wrongful conviction. In Mr. Bravo’s case he was unable to produce a strong alibi due to the lack of assistance from his council (“Innocence Lost,” 2004). This setback

In 1907, Hugo Munsterberg published ‘On the Witness Stand’, in which he questioned the reliability of eyewitness identification. When Yale Law professor Edwin Borchard studied 65 wrongful convictions for his pioneering 1932 book, ‘Convicting the Innocent’, he found that eyewitness misidentification was the leading contributing factor of wrongful convictions. Research illustrates that the human mind is not like a tape recorder; we neither record events exactly as we see them, nor recall them like a tape that has been rewound. In eyewitness identifications, witness memory is impacted by a variety of factors that occur from the time of the crime onwards, and their memories can be easily contaminated. This is linked with the concept of ‘false memories’ they are events recalled by a witness that did not actually happen.

The memory of an eyewitness has always been an endless dispute throughout the narration of its existence. The word of an individual holds the most substance; it’s the only real thing of value that person hold, having a witness of a crime is a criminal’s vilest nightmare. There is a phrase that may have been heard in movies and reality, ‘eyewitness do not live too long.’ This phrase has range amongst people revealing the reputation of eye witnessing for the majority and jury. All evidence used to convict a person has to go through a vigilant examination process especially the testimony of an eyewitness. So much emphasis is put on a truthful and accurate testimony because there has been a false testimony, which cause consequences and complications. Criminal justice systems should demand their district to notice there is an occurrence of bad witness memory, because the brain will juggle and play games with the hauler. Predominantly, the mix up happens because of the perception particularities the individuals mind has mad up and the original information. Memory is simply the development of perception, how the brain process what is seen and reproduces it later. Since there is a chance that the reproduction of once memory will be wrong that makes it essential to the individual does not damage the facts. This accentuates the stress on the knowledge of the eyewitness well-being

The challenges of memory recovery have not escaped judicial attention. Courts have increasingly found repressed memory testimony to be

Many of those, who are suspects, may say what they think is right and believe who they think is telling the truth if they cannot recall the story. New York Times claims that, some suspects who falsely confess eventually accept the stories told by interrogators because they are not positive of their own memory (Brooks). Unfortunately, the problem is hard to fix if people are not able to recall their own story. One complicates fixing court system even more when they state, “It is not implausible that we might say what we know our listeners want to hear” (Brooks). Although many people who are innocent will most likely not remember what they were doing on a specific day; letting themselves accept the lies is not a solution to this

The article reports on several cases where testimony from an adamant eyewitness was proven to be completely incorrect during the course of a trial, or has been found erroneous when new evidence has come to light after the conviction of an innocent person. As “From Finding to Evaluating Sources” warns, “you need to evaluate the extent to which the information is recent, accurate, and consistent with information you find in print sources and clearly regulated sites” (123). One of the benefits of including this news article as a popular source is how it explicitly lists various cases where memory malleability was uncovered over the course of a trial. Such discoveries are easy to very because they are widely reported in other media and court records. In one of the cases Hayasaki describes, “a decade after the crime, an arrest was made. When [the witness] saw a photograph of a suspect in the newspaper, she no longer doubted her ability to recall.” The problem with her identification was that it was a 10 years after the crime, the suspect looked nothing like her original composite, and the newspaper headline subsequently framed the suspect with the words “Knox man charged in ’91 murder of

It is a common misconception that the human memory is accurate and reliable (Poston, 2014). For example, the supposition that memory is mostly dependable forms a major part of the legal system. Judges, attorneys and juries are inclined to trust the testimony of a confident eyewitness (Van Wallendael et al., 2007) and confessions are considered among the most compelling forms of evidence (e.g., Cutler, 2012; Kassin, Bogart, & Kerner, 2012). However, 30 years of ground-breaking work by Elizabeth Loftus around the theory of false memory has cast doubt over the role memory should play in legal proceedings (Loftus, 2005). Loftus defines false memory as a phenomenon that occurs when a person believes they remember something that did not actually

We may think we remember everything exactly the way it happened, but we are more likely to provide less than accurate portrayals. The most common way memory distortions can negatively affect us would be a false memory. Eyewitness testimonies would be an example of memory bias. How can we trust what we say if our memories change over time to fit our current beliefs? In the Pollyanna effect, you are really only agreeing with one side of the argument. You will only see the good in any argument and hear what you want to hear instead of thinking outside the box. The illusion of truth is a tendency to believe information after having a previous encounter. The illusion of truth effect can have a negative effect on our decision because we would be

Eyewitness testimonies and identifications are often considered controversial and unreliable sources of information due to the many misinformation effects that may pose a threat to the recall of a person’s original memory. The discrepancies between original memories and later recalled memories—sometimes referred to as errors of commission, may be the result of a variety of psychological phenomena. Past research points to the possibility that these discrepancies may be caused by cognitive errors known as memory impairment, misinformation acceptance, misinformation interference, or the idea that the original memory was never encoded, and thus cannot be recalled. Although there is no single explanation to prove why false memories are sometimes

People are often astoundingly confident in their distorted or false memories, often going on to describe the pseudomemories in substantial detail. Sometimes, the memories persist even