The Independent Variability Of Eyewitness Testimony

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

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

| Based on explicit knowledge and this can be easy and fast to capture and analyse.Results can be generalised to larger populationsCan be repeated – therefore good test re-test reliability and validityStatistical analyses and interpretation are

Control group (M = 101.10) Drug A (M = 86.20), drug B (121.40) drug C (M=83.20), and scores 82.25, 94.00, and 109.75 represented the 25th, 50th, and 75th percentiles, respectively.

Elizabeth F. Loftus and John C. Palmer carried out a number of experiments with the purpose of discovering the scientific link and interaction between language and memory. For many years, Loftus has focused mainly on how information relates to the wording of a question and visual imagery and how it can influence an individual’s eyewitness testimony. This was demonstrated in the study conducted by Loftus and Palmer in 1974 ‘Reconstruction of Automobile Destruction’ which tested the hypothesis that an eyewitness testimony can be altered by the type of language used. To test this, Loftus and Palmer designed two experiments where the participants viewed a series of videos portraying automobile accidents and were then asked to answer specially

In an eye witness testimony, your judgement and what you saw in a crime scene will effect the rest of the accused person’s life. This made me question if we can really trust our senses enough to define someone’s destiny, and if so to what extent is our sense perception a reliable way of knowing? That is why we can focus on the human sciences area of knowledge and use the reliability assessment criteria to judge the eye witness testimony. There are different ways of knowing and one way is through sense perception. Something that I asked myself was what shapes our perception? And there are many things that shape our perception such as our culture, our acquired knowledge and maturity, our personal knowledge, our emotions as well as physical flaws in how our physiological systems analyse information input. All these supposed factors influence the ways

The aim of this experiment is to investigate the effect of leading questions on eyewitness testimony when asked to estimate the speed that a car is travelling in an accident. Participants were asked two questions in total. The first question was regarding the speed of the car with contrasting verbs (crashed/collided), the second question asked was whether there was any glass at the scene of the accident.

Eyewitness testimony, which depends on the precision of human memory. Nothing conveys as much importance with a jury as the confirmation of a good eyewitness. Certain in the acknowledgment of this confirmation as strong proof is the supposition that the human personality is an exact recorder and stores these memories. Why is the eyewitness testimony so powerful and convincing? Because people in general believe that our memories stamp the facts of experiences on a permanent, non-erasable tape, like a computer disk or videotape that is write-protected. For the most part, of course, our memories serve us reasonably well. But how often is precise memory demanded of us? When a friend describes a vacation, we don't ask, "Are you sure your hotel room

We will recruit 120 participants to participate in this study with the expected attrition of approximately 20. All participants will be required to sign a consent form to be involved in this study (A-1). Participants will be assigned a number and then the numbers are drawn out of a hat to determine which group they are assigned to; treatment group 1, treatment group 2, treatment group 3,

Juries tend to pay close attention to eyewitness testimony and generally find it a reliable source of information. However, research into this area has found that eyewitness testimony can be affected by many psychological factors.

(N=200). Study was designed into two groups with 100 patients in each cohort. In group 1, one

I would start off by saying you're relying on the accuracy of the human mind. At this point, you are making a big mistake because the eyewitness may not remember or recall everything they see. In fact, you cannot always rely on eyewitness testimony because a witness mind can go through misattribution, which causes the eyewitness to confuse the source of information. They might also go through suggestibility, which typically happens through police interviewing eyewitness causing them to create false memories with the help of the police officer. They could even have a bias toward my defendant causing them to come up with fake memories based on feelings and views they have. Also, an eyewitness may be stress, frustrated, and nervous which could

Table 1 presents the pre and posttest means and standard deviations for the test and control group. Table 2 presents the analysis of covariance data, showing the level of significance of the difference between the test and control groups' posttest mean scores.

I personally believe that eyewitnesses are not reliable since there are a lot of things to take into consideration: bias, memory, character, etc. There is no formula to know whether someone is telling the truth with accuracy about the story that they are telling. For me is all how believable or if they believe the story that they are telling. The bigger and elaborate the story is, the more proof and evidence I require from the person that is telling the story. The more simplistic the story is, more than likely I will believe their story and accepted as the truth; now, if for some reason, I find something off-putting or do not believe their source, then I will not believe or trust his story or give them any type of credit. I truly think that we are fortunate and bless to have multiple gospels’ accounts available to us, and not including the ones that are from the Bible. This is good news for us because this way we compare and contrast with peoples’ testimony that took place at the same place and time. That being said, there are discrepancies between gospels when it comes to their religion’s opinions and the accuracy of the events that took place in history. Now, we must take into consideration of whether the authors knew about one another or if they did not hear about Jesus into later in their lives; however, if both authors are followers of Jesus’s word and they are real disciples, then one should be skeptical about what they say about the gospel.