Eyewitness testimony is being able to choose the suspect out of a lineup or an array of photos. Sometimes the witnesses' testimony is not always accurate. When a witness falsely testifies they can send an innocent person to prison. An example of a case where the eyewitness testimony was incorrect was in the murder of 78-year-old Jack Sasson. The man who was convicted of the murder of Mr. Sasson was 18-year-old Kash Register.…
AFRICAN AMERICANS WRONGLY CONVICTED 3 Why Are African Americans More Likely to Be Wrongly Convicted in the United States? Introduction Imagine, you are just minding your business walking down a street and an officer stop you to bring you to the station to question you. The next thing you know you are being charged for a crime you didn’t commit.…
Also, memory schemas can affect eyewitness testimony. For example, as stated in Matlin’s Cognition (2012), past view point or schemas can affect present day perceptions. If an eyewitness consciously or unconsciously believes that a certain group of individual are more violent or are more likely to commit crimes than that schema can cloud their perception of the crime they witnessed. Cognitive psychology has extensive research on why eyewitness testimony is unreliable. Holloway’s argument could have been stronger if she incorporated some findings on eyewitness testimony by cognitive psychologists.…
The testimony of an eyewitness during a court proceeding can have at times a positive implication and pave the way for justice to be served, but it may however also have detrimental repercussions for the accused. There are numerous instances upon which innocent suspects of crimes have been convicted of heinous crimes as a result of eyewitness misidentification. In serious crimes, eyewitnesses are used as a strong evidence of an event. However, we as humans are all prone to mistakes - mistakes in what we say, what we see and what we remember, and it is these mistakes which can have earth shattering effects on the accused perpetrators of crimes if there is an incorrect eyewitness. Though we may think our memories are spot on in areas such as…
There have been many wrongful convictions due to faulty memories. However, these eyewitnesses believe that their memory is true, even if some of it is false. These memories could be wrong for a number of reasons: information from other places, combining some of the gathered information with…
Sigler and Couch’s (2002) study replicated Loftus (1974). The study examined the effect of discredited eyewitness. The study used 192 college students between the ages of 18 and 21 to participate in a mock trial. The students that volunteered received course credit. Upon arrival, each student was read the instructions explaining the procedure, and signed informed consent forms.…
Some eyewitnesses will be very confident in what they saw even though it’s not correct information. The article “Why Our Memory Fails Us” states that “for false memories, higher confidence is associated with lower accuracy” (Chabris and Simons). In court however, a jury might have some sort of evidence in place already. When they associate that evidence with the confidence they see in the eyewitness testimonies, they may find a match somewhere even though it is inaccurate. That may lead to the court convicting an innocent man or woman to prison even though he or she did nothing wrong.…
Eyewitness identification relies upon the eyewitness memory and the ability for him or her to retain that information and reporting it straight to the police. Memory is considered as evidence because information is being gathered and encoded in memory. Over time the storage holds in the encoded information in the brain until retrieval occurs so the brain can have access to the information. Although memory is not accurate, errors can occur throughout the process of encoding, storage, or retrieval. Even images and sound can deteriorate over time, which makes it hard to recall them back.…
“Eyewitness” was on 60 Minutes reporting on the flaws of eyewitness testimony. Eyewitness testimony is where the victim talks about who she thinks did the crime. A point of the finger can heavily influence the thoughts of the jury members. Jennifer Thompson was going to sleep one night, when a man broke into her house. The man held a knife to her neck before raping her.…
Few pieces of evidence are more powerful than an eyewitness to a crime pointing to a suspect in a police lineup and exclaiming “That’s him! He’s the one!” There are also few pieces of evidence more flawed, imperfect, and subject to manipulation by police and prosecutors. Study after study has shown eyewitness identification to be notoriously unreliable. In fact, as the Innocence Project notes: “Eyewitness misidentification is the greatest contributing factor to wrongful convictions proven by DNA testing, playing a role in more than 70% of convictions overturned through DNA testing nationwide.”…
The constructive nature of memory is one of the reasons for the unreliability of eyewitness testimonies. The human brain does not record all the things that people see around them. Instead, the brain collects different pieces of information that are relevant to the situation. Consequently, eyewitness accounts may be flawed because as the brain attempts to reconstruct different bits of information, it might omit vital details (OpenStax College, 2016). The scenario is better understood when comparing human recollection to playing a video recording.…
The testimonies gained from witnesses are considered a vital component when conducting a criminal investigation. The two imperative duties an eyewitness will be called upon is either to recollect details of an event (recall), or to identify the face of a person seen earlier (recognition). On the contrary, eyewitness memory is notoriously malleable where previous studies have demonstrated memory can be manipulated in several…
In one particular case, State v. Henderson (2011), James Womble witnessed the shooting of Rodney Harper. On January 1st, 2003, Harper and Womble were together at a friend’s apartment. Two men forcefully entered, one of which was George Clark, whom Womble knew. Clark and Harper stepped into another room while the other man held a gun to Womble, making sure he did not follow them. The ensuing argument in the other room resulted in Harper being shot by Clark, who then threatened Womble.…
After watching How reliable is your memory? by Elizabeth Loftus, I believe that to a great extent, memory is not a reliable source of knowledge because it can be distorted, contaminated, and even falsely imagined. Memory decay, distorted memory, hindsight bias, consistency bias, the availability heuristic bias and suggestibility- are all problems that beset our reliance on memory. “I was there. I saw it.”…
Two major issues in long-term memory for children are increased suggestibility and errors in source monitoring. This means that they can take false information into their brain and keep that as an actual memory and they can have problems remembering the source of where they learned a piece of information. More and more studies have been conducted investigating the validity of children’s eyewitness testimony and strategies for improving their accuracy. Several studies have been conducted on the long-term memory effects of eye closure on children’s eyewitness testimony. Children can be informative witnesses, but the quality of information they provide is influenced by factors such as the kind of retrieval mechanisms engaged and the quality of communication between the child witness and the adult interviewer.…