More handpicked essays just for you.
The credibility of eyewitness testimonies
Essay on the credibility of eyewitness testimony
Eyewitness testimony reliability essay
Don’t take our word for it - see why 10 million students trust us with their essay needs.
Research provided by the Innocence Project shows that Hundreds of people are accused of crimes they have never committed just because of eyewitness testimony and factors which distorted memory. Can we even trust our memory after knowing so many innocent people have been convicted? Coming back to the question: How does crime affect memory? Looking at the studies of Ronald Cotton and Bennett Barbour, they tell us that crime distorts the memory of a victim. In both cases, the victim identified the wrong person as their assailant.
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.
Gould remarks, “But certainty is also a great danger, given the notorious fallibility--and unrivaled power--of the human mind,” (Gould 1). Although Gould recognizes that his description of his memory is entirely wrong, he provides the example of how Elizabeth Loftus discovered that the mind is very powerful, but can at times fail to do its job properly. Therefore, in a way it was not entirely Gould’s fault for accidentally providing some falsify
Eyewitness testimony is sent to sensory memory whereby it involves retaining information and details. In order to recall specific features of a person, the victim must be very observant and concentrate during the event and after when trying to remember these details. This can be transferred to short-term memory, which has the capacity of remembering 7±2 memories, and if subjects rehearse what they have seen then the memory can be stored in long-term memory. Memories can then be retrieved when needed for testimony.
Her earliest studies of eyewitness testimony addressed several issues: when someone sees a crime or accident, how accurate is his or her memory? These studies led Loftus to ask what happens when witness are questioned by police officers, and what if those questions are suggestive (Loftus, 2003). For instance, when Loftus began showing people films of traffic accidents, she found that a question such as “How fast were the cars going when the smashed into each other?” led to higher estimates of speed than a more neutral question that used the verb “hit”. Moreover, the “smashed” question led more people to falsely remember seeing broken glass when there was none.
This creates a major issue within a judicial system. It takes a few eye witness testimonies towards the prosecuted individual to incarcerate them, even if they did not commit the crime. It is because of this reason that Scott Fraser chooses to speak out against eye witness testimonies. In his speech, he argues that memory is fallible and should not be as heavily relied upon within the judicial system.
In the book “Picking Cotton”, the former Burlington Police Chief Mike Gauldin, who was the lead detective on Jennifer’s case, was certainly sure that Ronald Cotton was the guy he was looking for after Jennifer picked him twice (Jennifer, Ronald, Erin 80); also, on the McCallum’s case, the polices also chose to trust eyewitnesses when they did not have enough physical evidences. Furthermore, judges can be wrong sometime. Wise and Safer, who are authors of the report “ what US judges know and believe about eyewitness testimony”, surveyed 160 U.S. judges to determine how much they know about eyewitness testimony on a small test( Wise, Safer, 427-432). However, the survey responds the average judges in the U.S. only 55% correct within 14 questions (Wise, Safer, 431-432). Moreover, most of the judges who were surveyed did not know key facts about eyewitness testimony.
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.
She studies false memory when people remember things that they did not happen or happened. In other words, they remember things differently. She has studied the case of Steve Titus and stated that he is not the only victim who gets convicted based on someone else, information and that there are 300 hundred of innocent people and 300 defendants who were convicted of the crime that they did not do. This person usually spends about 10 to 30 years of jail time for the crime that they supposedly did and most of these cases were due to false memory (Loftus, 2013).
The voices began at that point, Lori did not understand at first where the voices were coming from, so she ran and jumped to the trampoline until the point that she truly was prepared to die. “Yet still they continued, commanding me, pounding into my head. They began to curse and revile me: You whore bitch who isn't worth a piece of crap! they yelled at me. I tried to answer them, to make them stop” (Schiller and Bennett 24).
Psychologist, Elizabeth F. Loftus is concerned with how misleading questions can influence an eyewitness ability to recall true information. Loftus wrote Leading Questions and the Eyewitness Reports to explore the effects of how wording of a question asked right after an event impacts the answers to future questions. The research hypothesis is that language or wording used in questioning a witness can alter their memory and answers. Loftus researches this hypothesis via four experiments. These experiments show how memories can be changed by questions or new information we are told.
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
Part One is very informational and contains the bulk of the book’s research. The information was presented in a thesis format; Loftus stated a claim and then supported her ideas with research and quotations from experts in the field of law and memory. Part One is helpful for psychologists, attorneys, and interested law people. The major principles concerning the errors in eyewitness testimony are supported by research and are accepted by psychologists (Kassin, Ellsworth, & Smith, 1989). Part One will contribute to the future of psychology by showcasing how the memory works and the different ways it is manipulated and changed: this will allow jurors and lawyers to become more wary when dealing with a traumatized
Jim Dwyer, a columnist and author, wrote an article which discusses the possible steps that can be taken to battle false confessions and witness identifications. As he argues in the article these aspects are closely connected and one leads to another. Dwyer (2005) proposes that testimonies and memories of suspects and witnesses should be treated just like any other physical evidence that is discovered in the crime scene. Also, investigators and police officers should keep in mind that testimonies are also subjected to contamination (Dwyer, 2015, para. 4). One proposal that regards eye witnesses is to present the potential evidence by an investigator who is not on the case, thus eliminating leading questions and hints on specific details
Emma Bryce, a science and environmental journalist wrote an article for WIRED titled “False memories and false confessions: the psychology of imagined crimes”. She bases her article on the experience of a criminal psychologist, Julia Shaw and studies of a cognitive psychologist, Elizabeth Loftus. The article describes several cases where false memories resulted in getting innocent people in jail. Julia’s job is to study what triggers false memories we encounter every day and how the results of her studies can be applied to the criminal-justice system where it is very important to detect them. As she said, unfortunately, the police still makes a lot of mistakes that put innocent people in prison, so her job is to fix this by providing scientific
