Eyewitness Misidentification

In 2015, Smalarz found that a misidentification testimony by very confident eyewitnesses has happened in about seventy-two percent of cases where innocent people have been accused and were later found innocent by DNA testing. Someone can tell you a story with details, confidence, and passion yet it doesn’t necessarily mean that it is true. In correspondence with Smalarz, in 1977, Randall Adams was sentenced to death for the murder of a police officer in Dallas, Texas. An alleged eyewitness, who in fact was the actual killer, framed Mr. Adams; he received immunity from prosecution in exchange for his testimony. Mr. Adams was in fact not involved in the crime.

However, these two men would not have suffered what they never deserved to if there were enough strong evidence their innocence. According to a survey of Ohio State University, there are about 10,000 people in the United States might be wrongfully convicted of serious crimes each year; also, this survey points out that there are more than half of those wrongfully convicted cases (52.3%) were built on eyewitness misidentification (Tom Spring). Unfortunately, Ronald Cotton was one of victims of those wrongfully convicted cases. The book tells us that after spending 5 minutes of studying mug shot photos, Jennifer, who was a victim of rape, picked Ronald Cotton who was one of the pictured; second, during the lineup, she picked him again without

If she was given the mug shots one at a time and only for a brief instance, then she would have never picked Ronald (Lindsay & Wells, 1985). It is logical to believe the picking of Ronald’s mug shot created a snowball effect to all the other mistakes in the process. If this case happened today, there would have never been a false memory problem, because the DNA would have proven innocence and guilt from the beginning. In all the cases that rely on eyewitness testimony and do not have DNA to fall back on, brief mug shot exposure would be a viable solution to keep human memory from failing. I do believe there is one major flaw with this solution; the longer the memory is stored the less accurate the memory becomes (Atkinson & Shiffrin, 1968).

She “studied every detail on the rapist’s face. [She] looked at his hairline; [she] looked for scars, for tattoos, for anything that would help [her] identify him” (New York Times). She put so much effort to stay conscious and study this much detail of her attacker, yet when Bobby Poole stood in front of her in the courthouse, she did not recognize him claiming “that she’s never seen that man before in her life”. This shows that there are other contributing factors that could lead a witness to misidentify an attacker and that even the “best” eyewitnesses are not perfect. Thompson shared the statistic that eyewitness error is the leading cause of wrongful convictions in America.

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

It’s not easy to reconstruct your memory and we always rely on our knowledge and attitudes to fill in the gaps. Eyewitness can be right but not always. In Zimmerman trial the witnesses were saying something totally different and it’s really hard to know which one is right. Although they saw the same thing they explained it differently. One witness said she saw two people and then the second time she said she only saw one person that explains to us that we can’t always rely on eyewitness.

This research looks at type of eyewitness identification called CMEI, which claims that certain crimes will instantly stimulate precise stereotypes about a suspects looks. Dependence of this relies on how much the suspect looks or does not look like themselves, and thus the eyewitness may recall the suspect looking like them or not at all (Osborne & Davis, 2014). Much research done previously also supports the idea of CMEI, and therefor will support the current research.

Fourth, if there is more than one witness, the position of the suspect in the lineup should be changed in each lineup so as to prevent communication of the suspects position between witnesses influencing identifications. Finally, it is recommended that no cues of any kind should be given to the witness concerning whether or not the identified person is the suspect in the case as doing so can

There were seventy-two students that watched a clip of a bank robbery where a little boy was shot and killed (Whitehouse et al., 2005). These participants were interviewed about a week later and asked about what they remembered from the video (Whitehouse et al., 2005). Afterwards, some of the students were randomly selected to go through forensic hypnosis (Whitehouse et al., 2005) Eyewitness testimony has a large impact on criminal court cases and many people have been looking for ways to help witnesses remember more from crime scenes (Whitehouse et al., 2005). This study found that cognitive interviews were just as effective as forensic hypnosis, if not slightly more effective (Whitehouse et al., 2005).

For instance, if an eyewitness misidentifies a person whom they believe to be the suspect and report that person to the police and the “suspect” reacts out of anger when stopped by police causing an altercation to take place, which often times may be physical. Now that person may be facing charges for a crime they didn’t commit and also may be facing charges for the altercation that occurred during the arrest for the crime they didn’t commit. It is extremely important for eyewitnesses to have a clear and convincing description of the suspect because it can easily cause further complications. It can also ruin an innocent persons life if they are wrongfully convicted of the crime because of the

A jury trial is a privilege that we all have so that we are administered a fair and impartial trial; thus, it must be taken seriously. Depending on each state, when summoned for the jury selection process, and chosen to serve as members of the jury, we are required to take an oath or an affirmation. Additionally, the consideration of the circumstances that lead us to be a witness, should be prevalent in our minds. It is important that we listen to the entire case and determine if the offender, based on the facts given during the trial and not on personal biases, should be convicted. I think this is important because the future of one person is determined based on the testimony of the witnesses whom have sworn truthfulness.

This can distort or change small details of the original memory. The reports given by other witnesses might conflict with your memory. Eye witness testimony is used in many court systems to figure out the correct verdict. “No matter what eyewitness testimony is in the court of law, it is the lowest form of evidence in the court of science. ”(“Neil DeGrasse Tyson Quote.”

The biological approach to the basis of memory is explained in terms of underlying biological factors such as the activity of the nervous system, genetic factors, biochemical and neurochemicals. In general terms memory is our ability to encode, store, retain and recall information and past experiences afterwards in the human brain. In biological terms, memory is the recreation of past experiences by simultaneous activation or firing of neurons. Some of the major biopsychological research questions on memory are what are the biological substrates of memory, where are memories stored in the brain, how are memories assessed during recall and what is the mechanism of forgetting. The two main reasons that gave rise to the interest in biological basis of memory are that researchers became aware of the fact that many memory deficits arise from injuries to the brain.

Another structure in retrieval of information is the frontal lobe (McDaniel et al. 1999). McDaniel, Glisky, Rubin, Guynn, Routhieaux (1999), found that participants with high-functioning frontal lobes compared to low-functioning frontal lobes performed better in prospective memory. This observation came from conducting a study by giving participants a multiple-choice test and eight target questions that appeared throughout the test. High-functioning frontals allows for associating the questions with the right letter and associating the eight spontaneous cues with the right letter but the low-functional frontals capture to much attention just on the multiple-choice questions and cannot register the eight cues. Similarly, focal performance on prospective memory has positive correlations between the hippocampus and parahippocampal in brain volume, while the hippocampus has the strongest correlation (Gordon0020et al. 2011).

He also stated that the cells of hippocampus are the brain’s most energy-hungry and fragile and most easily disrupted by anoxia, general aesthetic, toxins and other threats. Hence if the hippocampus is impaired, a person will suffer difficulties in forming new memories. If a person suffers damages to the hippocampus in both halves of the brain, such as result from encephalitis, he or she may develop complete anterograde amnesia, inability to form any new narrative