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Eyewitness Identification And Wrongful Conviction

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Eyewitness Identification & Wrongful Conviction
Introduction
According to Matlin (2013), eyewitness testimonies can be inaccurate for a few reasons including the inability to pick a person from another ethnic group, issues with memory schemas, and being influenced by someone else 's recall of the facts. Therefore, eyewitness testimony is not always the most reliable when faced with trying to place a suspect at the scene of a crime. Wrongful convictions can happen when an eyewitness recalls memories and details that are not their own or in cases where the person seems familiar to the eyewitness but not because they committed a crime.
Summary
It was informative and interesting to read "Safeguards against wrongful conviction in eyewitness …show more content…

These stages include the encoding phase, recognition phase, and either target-present or target-absent identification according to Smith & Dufraimont (2014).
• Measures of Identification Performance - this is where they begin to calculate the percentage of correct identifications to incorrect identifications as well as type of identification used and how that calculates into the percentage of correct versus incorrect. This is where the researchers began to determine where inconsistencies would emerge due to bias, and sensitivity.
• Best-Practice Identification Procedures - this focus is on making sure that the procedures that lead up to the eyewitness identification are so sound so as not to lead or tamper with the eyewitnesses identification. This involves making sure that the information given to eyewitnesses are regulated and not adlibbed at the time of identification because having a standard procedure in place allows the system to ensure that the eyewitness isn 't swayed by something that is or is not said while being given the instructions of how the identification procedure …show more content…

Best-practice identification as mentioned above is approach that allows eyewitness to have the best-unbiased and relaxed atmosphere possible in order to make a positive identification or to positively state that the perpetrator is not among the group being viewed. "Courtroom safeguards are procedural and evidentiary rules designed to attenuate the potentially deleterious impact of unreliable eyewitness identification evidence; they provide a wrongly identified accused a last line of defense against wrongful conviction" (Smith & Dufraimont,

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