This week’s topic was very interesting to learn about how important eyewitnesses can be when a crime and accidents do occur. In the case that was presented in the 60-minute segment of Ronald Cotton and Jennifer Thompson is exactly how legal system can fail us when it comes to the eyewitnesses’ identification testimony and how a person’s perception and memory can be altered.
The aspect of psychology and law research from this week’s course material is most relevant to the topic of perception and memory. The memory has different stages the first is encoding the process of entering perception into memory. The second is storage the fees of a memory process referring to the retention of information. The third phase is the retrieval the process
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She was sleeping when one night an attacker had broken into her apartment, a knife was placed on her throat and was raped. Jennifer at the time of the attack was trying to study her attacker’s face, she was trying to pay attention to the detail and if she survived she could help the police catch the attacker. Jennifer was lucky enough that she did escape out the back door by fixing her attacker a drink. The detective and Jennifer worked together to composite a sketch of a face of the attacker. Then a photo-line up and the physical lineup was introduced and Jennifer kept identifying the same person. The police arrested Ronald Cotton 22 years of age. During the trail Jennifer was asked do you recognize the man who did this to you? Jennifer “pointed the finger” to Ronald Cotton. It took the jury 40 minutes for the verdict to state guilty to all counts. He was sentenced to life to 50 years and was taken to North Carolina Central Prison. Ronald Cotton was writing to his attorneys to get a new trial. While in prison a new inmate came in and Cotton had a strange feeling from him and stated that “you look familiar and resemble a drawing of which I am falsely imprisoned for did you commit this crime, the inmate said no” his name was Booby