Eyewitness Essay

by a jury. Barbour’s case is representative of the many cases in which wrongful eyewitness testimony produces miscarriages of justice. Bennett Barbour served 5 years in prison and 29 years of parole until he was cleared of his charges due to DNA evidence when the Virginia Supreme Court cleared his charges. WHAT Lead to Wrongful Conviction Eyewitness identification, for the most part, is considered reliable eyewitness identification by the courts as excellent evidence to proof crimes at trial. Yet

Eyewitness is the most important aspect for a criminal event that has occurred. Through eyewitness police or relevant forces might be able to get one step closer to catching the criminals. There is no age limit to provide testimony but in recent years, children’s testimonies are also acceptable in courtroom. This will be typically involving rape incident, abuse incident, and robbery incident and so on. There are more procedures involved in extracting information from affected children compared to

majority of convictions overturned by DNA evidence involved mistaken eyewitness testimony. The Innocence Project estimates that around 70% of the convictions due to eyewitness misidentification have been overturned by DNA evidence (2015). A main factor in this occurrence is that eyewitness memory is unreliable (Wright, 2007). Eyewitness identification in a line-up is an important tool in criminal investigations. The eyewitness evidence that results from these line-ups has an impact on the subsequent

are used in prosecutors cases such as eyewitness identification, issues that have led to the wrongful convictions of defendants, and what is done to overturn these wrongful convictions. I will also start by defining eyewitness identification. Eyewitness identification is a person whose identification by sight of another person may be relevant in a criminal proceeding. (GS_15A-284.52.) Eyewitness identification is a major issue in today’s society. Eyewitness identification has become a very faulty

design was an experimental 2 x 2 x 2 mixed factorial study in the form of a survey to test the hypothesis presented. The purpose of the study was to see whether or not the strength of eyewitness evidence affected plea bargaining decisions made by both prosecutors and defense attorneys. The independent variable is eyewitness evidence and the dependent variables are plea bargaining decisions of prosecutors and defense attorneys (Pezdek, 2010-2011). A convenience sample was gathered from the District Attorney

Eyewitness Testimony Elizabeth Loftus has conducted many studies on eyewitness testimony (EWT). In 1974 she worked with John Palmer to look at the ways that memory can be distorted. The studies general aim was to explore the accuracy of memory after witnessing a car accident. In particular it was to find out if leading questions distort the accuracy of eyewitness’s immediate recall. It also aimed to see if it was true that people were open to hints, as people are

note that over the last 25-30 years, cognitive and social psychologists have performed research questioning the accuracy of eyewitness identification evidence and are planning methods to advance eyewitness identification precision (Cutler & Penrod, 1995; Wells, 1993). Additionally they note that the U.S justice system has now started to incorporate better methods of eyewitness identification based on this psychological research (Wells et al., 2000). The authors’ state that over the last decade, “forensic

(Mis)leading Questions Because attorneys shape the way witnesses think about what they have been asked by their phrasing of the leading question, they have a significant effect on the memory retrieval of the eyewitness. A study done in 1974 by Loftus and Palmer illustrates the effect of these phrasings. In the first part of the study, participants were shown different video of two cars hitting each other. Humans are generally bad at guessing the speed of moving objects, so the design of this study

The sole purpose of this experiment was to test the accuracy of eyewitness accounts. It was hypothesized that more than 50% of the questions asked would be incorrect. The results fully support the hypothesis. Out of the five questions that were asked, only one was answered correctly by both participants. One of the major factors affecting the reliability of eyewitness testimony is reconstructive memory. Reconstructive memory refers to the idea that the retrieval of memories does not occur in the

because I love criminal justice and psychology. Her studies have to do with both, so she was the perfect choice. She is known for studying memory. She plays a huge role in psychology and the legal system. She conducts studies about how memory affects eyewitness testimonies. She has written more than 400 publications (McNally, 2007). She is different than other psychologists studying memory because she investigates memory for naturalistic events (McNally, 2007). She does not study memory by using a list