Eyewitness Essay

in the accuracy or inaccuracy of the use of eyewitness testimonies in the current criminal justice system. Results collated by several studies add to the bulk of literature suggesting that the current usage of eyewitness testimony by the legal system is far from ideal. Currently, high emphasis is being placed on reviewing and reconsidering eyewitness accounts (Leinfelt, 2004). In particular, recent DNA exoneration cases have shown that mistaken eyewitness identification was one of the largest factors

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

prosecutions. The California Innocence Project says that they are numerous reasons why eyewitness are mostly wrong. They are High Stress Environment and Trauma, Human Memory, and Suggestive Identification and etc. There are all these reasons that eyewitnesses have a high rate of error but, are still considered some of the most powerful evidence against a suspect. After a comprehensive two-year study of eyewitness testimonies, the New Jersey Supreme Court concluded that they often leads to fictional

Weber, N., & Perfect, T. J. (2012). Improving Eyewitness Identification Accuracy by Screening Out Those Who Say They Don't Know. Law and Human Behavior, 36(1), 28-36. In the article Improving Eyewitness Identification Accuracy by Screening out Those Who Say They Don’t Know, the authors’ main issue was the lack of information, from previous studies, about the improved accuracy that is possible when allowing eyewitnesses to withhold responses about which they are unsure of by responding don’t know

Throughout the history of the United States’ judicial system, eyewitness testimonies — an account from a witness of a crime or an accident that involves the witness recounting their firsthand experience of the incident to a court — have been used as conclusive evidence to prove a defendant guilty. It is thought that although memory can be unclear at times, it is assumed memories of stressful or otherwise threatening events are well encoded into the brain, largely indelible, and therefore can be accurately

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

Question #2 There are many reasons on why eyewitness accounts may be inaccurate. The main reasons I believe is because of reconstructing memories, familiarity effect, source amnesia and weapon focus . Reconstructing memory is when the original memories can be altered. By any little thing can change one’s memory into believing something that is false about the original memory. We may add or omit details based on an influences. For example in the study of Elizabeth F. Loftus asked two different groups

It has been shown that eyewitness misidentification is one of the biggest factors in wrongful convictions, which has been overturned due to DNA (Innocence). Forensic evidence is one of the factors used to determine ones’ guilt or innocence in the court of law; however, some of the evidence used can pose a problem in court. Eye witness testimony has caused a lot of faults in court cases because it is portrayed as a strong factor of evidence. Eye witness testimony should not be used as primary evidence

Wisconsin, an eyewitness statement may have led to your arrest. This type of testimony has long been considered one of the most reliable sources of evidence, however, research has shown that this is not necessarily true. In fact, misidentifications by eyewitnesses contributed to more than 70 percent of the wrongful convictions that were later overturned through eyewitness testimony, according to the Innocence Project. At the Rose & Rose law firm, people often ask us about the impact of eyewitness testimony

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