ipl-logo

Ronald Cotton Eyewitness Misidentification Court Case

879 Words4 Pages

Ronald Cotton Eyewitness Misidentification The Ronald Cotton case is well known for the fact that misidentification happens when having a victim identifying a suspect and how detrimental this misidentification can be to someone. It is clear in many ways that identification is unreliable. Ronald Cotton was wrongfully convicted due to the fact that a witness had chosen him rather than the real perpetrator. This happened due to the fact that the victim, Jennifer Thompson Cannino, had an altered memory of the situation. But, within this case, there was also the issue that the victims felt as though their feelings and experiences were being dismissed, which did not help in getting the correct person held responsible. Supporting Evidence and Facts There …show more content…

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. Additionally stated in the same article is that “white victims often misidentify African American men” (Smith & Hattery, 2011). This is pertinent since in this case, there was a misidentification of an African American man. There are numerous issues with the way the victim, Jennifer, remembered the night. In the video it is stated that the situation took place at night, while it was hot, and while a traumatic event

Show More
Related

The Leighton Hay Case

1367 Words | 6 Pages

She was shown photographs which included Hay’s photograph (taken 18 months earlier) and she selected him as an 80% likeness. Three weeks later, she was shown a sequence of photographs which included one of Hay (taken hours after the murder) and she did not select any photograph. At a second identification process, Maillard didn’t select any photographs and, when shown the photograph of Hay she stated that he looked very different and that in his arrest photo, he did not have a gaunt face like that of the second gunman at the club. An article by Pezdek, Abed & Cormia (2021) explores the relationship between stress and eyewitness memory accuracy, as well as the relationship between stress and eyewitness confidence. They found that stress impairs the accuracy of eyewitness memory but not the confidence-accuracy relationship.

Read More

Eyewitnesses: 60-Minute Segment Of Ronald Cotton And Jennifer Thompson

702 Words | 3 Pages

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.

Read More

Ronald Cotton Eyewitness Testimony

878 Words | 4 Pages

The case of Ronald Cotton is a well-known example of an eyewitness testimony resulting to false convictions. On the 29th of July in 1984, Jennifer Thompson had a man break into her house and she was then sexually assaulted. The

Read More

A Brief Summary Of Picking Cotton

1620 Words | 7 Pages

The eyewitness was Kenny an inmate in prison with Ronald, who unfortunately choked on the stand when questioned about what he knew. So unfortunately for Ronald, Kenny wasn’t his key to being released from prison for the crime he hadn’t committed. Ronald got new lawyers in 1992 A man by the name or Mr. Rich, a professor at UNC-Chapel Hill, who was interested in looking into Ronald’s case, Ronald weighed the pros and cons and in the end agreed to let someone else taking a chance at handling his case. It wasn’t until 1994 that the most significant piece of evidence came into play. It was in 1994 that the OJ Simpson case started it was also one of the first instances of DNA being used as evidence in a case.

Read More

Eyewitness Testimony In Court Cases

1052 Words | 5 Pages

Eyewitnesses are very faulty. There are many circumstances where a witness’ memory can be altered or clouded. Throughout the 1900’s to the late 2000’s scientists found that in 239 cases, 73% of them were wrongly convicted due to

Read More

Discuss The Six Primary Causes Of Wrongful Wrongvictions

287 Words | 2 Pages

In 1907, Hugo Mustenberg examined the reliability of eyewitness identification in his book, “On the Witness Stand”. In a study of 65 wrongful convictions completed

Read More

Inaccuracies Of Mulan

461 Words | 2 Pages

Evidence of

Read More

Effects Of Unconscious Transference On Eyewitness Recall

918 Words | 4 Pages

60% of participants chose the bystander when that picture was included instead. The participant’s memory of all faces became integrated and so they were unable to tell the bystander from the perpetrator when recalling. Therefore positive identification in eyewitness testimonies could be a case of an incorrect integration of memory and not a fully accurate account of the events that occurred. As the witnesses are unaware of this transference this could lead them to be very confident in their recall and identification of the culprit, when in fact they are wrong. This has major implications in law and to the level of which eyewitness accounts can be

Read More

Examples Of False Eyewitness Testimony

966 Words | 4 Pages

Eyewitness identification is highly important in criminal trials without it it lets the defendant off a little easier, despite this different steps should be taken in order to avoid legal issues such as false eyewitness

Read More

Blurred Vision: The Fallibility Of Eyewitness Testimony

1843 Words | 8 Pages

Blurred Vision: The Fallibility of Eyewitness Testimony On an early, foggy morning in April 1981, a Dallas, Texas woman awoke to find a man with a knife on top of her in her bed. After trying to get the knife from her attacker, she was cut on her hand, neck, and back, and then raped before the attacker fled the scene. According to the Innocence Project, in the report “Reevaluating Lineups: Why Witnesses Make Mistakes and How to Reduce the Chance of a Misidentification,” the victim originally told the police she could not describe her assailant because at the time of the attack, 45 minutes before sunrise, the room was too dark (7).

Read More

Eyewitness Misidentification Essay Examples

1555 Words | 7 Pages

Eyewitness misidentification is a major problem that has an effect on adequate policing. One major goal and priority of law enforcement is justice. They should focus on prosecuting the correct person because if they are prosecuting the wrong person they are ruining an innocent persons life and justice is not being served. Many problems can arise from misidentification. It often leads to an innocent persons rights being infringed on.

Read More

Is Eyewitness Testimony Too Unreliable To Trust?

1519 Words | 7 Pages

Over time, the topic of whether eyewitness testimony should be used in the courtroom or not has been debated back and forth, with both sides making a valid argument. Over the years, thousands of people are accused of committing a crime that they were not involved in. As published by The Week, the article “Is Eyewitness Testimony too Unreliable to Trust?” states, “Every year, more than 75,000 eyewitnesses identify criminal suspects in the U.S., and studies suggest that as many as a third of them are wrong.” This is a very large number which brings attention to the consideration of limiting the process in which people people make accusations in the courtroom based on memory. These false accusations put innocent people in jail for years.

Read More

Ideal Eyewitnesses In The Judicial System

606 Words | 3 Pages

We cannot define everybody to have the same characteristics or personality. Everybody is unique in their own way, and due to that, we have to carefully rely on eyewitness testimonies and their reliability. Overall, we need the eyewitness to be truthful and not making the investigation much harder to determine the person who committed the

Read More

Eyewitness Testimonies Essay

627 Words | 3 Pages

Eyewitness testimonies were a large factor in the conviction of possible suspects. They are commonly asked to recognize the suspect, several years after the actual crime. However, research done by psychologists suggest that eyewitness testimonies are very unreliable. When people encode and process their memories, they lose and alter part of it, and when it is retrieved, the memories have been revised with what they later imagined or experienced. The wording effect and the misinformation effect also plays a large role in leading the witness to reconstruct false memories.

Read More

Discipline Of Eyewitness Psychology

766 Words | 4 Pages

The discipline of Eyewitness Psychology is a relatively novel discipline of Psychology that serves to investigate the psychological factors that affect the memory and cognitive processes used to formulate one’s testimony when one is witness to some, usually criminal event. The role eyewitnesses play is critical to the prosecution and conviction of offenders, but also puts an enormous amount of faith in the witness’s recollection of the event that took place. The implications of a witness’s potentially incorrect identification of a suspect can be devastating and long lasting, not only for the witness but especially the accused. When a person is witness to or is the victim of a traumatic event, he or she often feels powerless over the situation,

Read More

More about Ronald Cotton Eyewitness Misidentification Court Case

Open Document