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False Eye Witness Testimonies In Marvin's Long Term Memory

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It is hard to believe that over seventy percent of convictions overturned through DNA testing were based on false eye witness testimonies. Due to conflict and hesitation in eye witness’s long term memory, testimonies from them are frequently inaccurate and give distorted information on the crime. The demanding process of encoding, storing, and later retrieving memory all takes place during a rather rapid and stressful period of events, making the procedure all the more tedious for the witness. For this reason, eye witness testimonies are now seen as unreliable for giving flawed results and have been slowly replaced with more modern means of finding evidence such as DNA testing. On July 17th, 1982, a young woman was raped by a black man whom she said was a total stranger. The offender had held her captive in the woods close to the apartment …show more content…

The victim would have every motivation to forget their dramatic episode leading to the possible reason Marvin was identified as her assailant. Her memories were clouded by fear, causing her to forget the perpetrators face and accuse the wrong person. Though both John and Marvin were black, they had very distinct facial differences, leading to the belief that Marvin was only accused because he was bought in by the police that day. Lincoln was not accused as a suspect and would not have been in the police line-up. Anderson’s face reoccurred to the subject as well. He appeared in a photo spread, a police line-up, an employment photo, and followed again in court. This interfered with the victim’s short term memory, causing her to recall his face when reminded of the attack. It is as if he was forced into her head. This caused the victim’s eye witness testimony to be inaccurate and defected. The mind of an individual cannot collectively encode memories while experiencing such trauma as

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n February of 1982 in Brooklyn, New York a woman was attacked by two men who were wearing masks. She was tied up, robbed, beaten and set on fire. She had survived the attack, but sustained multiple injuries, including injuries to her eyes. The victim believed her neighbor, Calvin Boyette, was one of the men who had assaulted her. She even pointed him out in a photo lineup.

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This finding proved that while Jennifer swore it was Ronald based on his appearance, it is not. Additionally, there is the fact that there was suspect bias represented in Jennifer choosing Ronald and continuing to believe that it was Ronald behind the crime even when evidence proved otherwise. So, eliminating as much suspect bias would have made an exponential difference in identifying the correct person. There are issues with relying on eyewitness testimonies, especially when it comes to a traumatic event such as sexual violence. Specifically stated by Smith and Hattery (2011) is that almost all wrongful convictions from other studies were resulting from the lack of reliability with eyewitness testimonies.

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In addition to the harrowing case of Ronald Cotton, the reliability of an eyewitness testimony was recently challenged with the incorrect conviction of Kash Register. While sitting in his parked Chevrolet in 1979, an elderly man named Jack Sasson was viciously robbed of his life when he was shot five times at close proximity (Bazelon). Brenda Anderson, a nineteen year old who occupied an apartment on the same street, informed police that she heard the rowdy sound of gunfire, and when she peered out her window, noticed an African-American man stumbling away from the scene, before turning back and firing further rounds (Bazelon). When Anderson was shown photographs of several young men, she quickly recognized Register, who was a previous classmate

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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.

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False memories Repressed memories are often recovered in therapy. The issue with treating a repressed memory that was recovered during therapy as contingent for a court case is that there is no way to prove that the therapy did not falsely construct the memory, leading to a false memory. A false memory can be misinterpreted as a repressed memory if the individual, for instance, feels a lot of emotion towards the false memory; “victims may experience ‘denial,’ an unconscious defense against painful or unbearable memories and feelings about the crime” (“How Crime Victims React to Trauma”). However, it is important to note that just because a “memory might be false does not mean that the person is deliberately lying” (Loftus, 1993, p. 525). False memories can be created unintentionally by the unconscious: or another way to explain how a memory can be constructed in therapy and believed to be truly recovered, one can look to false memory theories of “associative activation” and “thematic consistency” (Gallo, 2006, p. 51-53).

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