Eyewitness In Court Cases

Children have been found to experience much higher levels of communication difficulty in the criminal justice system and this diminishes their ability to give evidence with the coherence desired by the court to facilitate prosecution of crime. In the case of R-v- Green youth court, the court held that There was no absolute right for a defendant to be allowed to face his accusers. Special measures to protect a vulnerable or intimidated witness from the accused would not normally be applicable to a defendant witness, but other means were available to a court to assist a defendant in ensuring that where he had communication difficulties, his case was put across properly. The court had an obligation to achieve fairness in each particular case, and that requirement was met by the system. This application was dismissed but the ruling gave critical understanding that a child under 17 years qualifies to be a vulnerable witness if they have communication difficulty and vulnerability was more circumstantial than mere age

Historically, eyewitness accounts of a crime were a vital piece of evidence used in the prosecution of criminal offenses. Lineups were a method used where typically a group of individuals not involved in the crime along with the suspect whom is believed to be directly related to the crime are grouped together for the witness to review in the hopes to identify the suspect. This is accomplished in two ways, the first is simultaneous where several photos are grouped together at the same time (typically six) for the witness to review. This specific procedure raises the issue of certainty from the witness.

How Accurate Children Are at Recognizing Faces Many criminal investigations rely on eyewitness accounts in order to identify a criminal. Some of these investigations require children to choose from a photograph who they believe the person they saw was. Children (ages 4-7) are less able to recall details of a situation, and are not yet able to descriptively describe events that happened to them. Adults however, are better at recalling than children (given optimal conditions).

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.

Not surprisingly, witnesses are likely to assume that the culprit is in the lineup; when explicitly warned that the lineup may or may not contain the culprit, witnesses are less likely to make a selection (Brewer & Wells, 2006). Identification accuracy is impaired under encoding conditions likely to undermine memory strength, such as divided attention, short exposure duration, and long viewing distance (e.g., Lindsay, Semmler, Weber, Brewer, & Lindsay, 2008; Palmer, Brewer, McKinnon, & Weber, 2010). Some conditions, such as identifying a culprit of a different race or one who was wearing a disguise (e.g., Meissner & Brigham, 2001), undermine encoding and/or lineup discrimination performance. Other conditions such as lengthy retention intervals are associated with diminished memory strength (Deffenbacher, Bornstein, McGorty, & Penrod, 2008). Indicators of Identification Accuracy Because an identification decision is often the key evidence against a suspect, characteristics of identification decisions that might discriminate accurate from inaccurate decisions have been explored.

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.

With studies doen the witness developesfalse memories(Huffman & Sanderson 2014). Over time those memories multiply. They think that they really seen something but that could of been a memory they herd someone else say about it. They then take that as a true fact even though they did not seem to remember that

Context consists of such factors as emotion and environment, and it is necessary to recreate those factors in order to access the memory that has been naturally primed to be recalled in reference to them (Cutler, Penrod, Martens, 629). Thus, when addressing these identification errors made by eyewitnesses and when trying to fix them it is essential that the officials involved in the criminal justice system who are questioning the witnesses “reinstate the context surrounding an event” (Cutler, Penrod, & Martens, 629). In other words, eyewitness identification errors need to be fixed, as well as discrepancies of reliability and accuracy within a jury and among the jury members. Furthermore, authors Kovera and Borgida discuss how social psychologists are not allowed in the courtrooms even though that would be very beneficial as they can share the knowledge of these phenomena that can often lead to injustices (1376). Perhaps the first step to more forcefully addressing and working on these influential estimator and system variables as well as jury biases will be to change that rule.

The first thing we need to discuss is what the ideal eyewitness should be and how they are in the judicial system. The eyewitness’ testimony is taken as the fundamental criterion, and the person should be able to perceive all that transpired during the event, accurately encode these perceptions, exhaustively store the encoded perceptions in memory, and accurately retrieve the encodings from memory in the form of later reports (Penrod, 121). I personally feel that eyewitnesses should be honest no matter what, even if they committed the crime. The trial would not be a long investigation if people owned their mistakes. Also when there are lots of witnesses the investigation can change multiple times and feel like the whole thing is starting back at square one.

Furthermore, there can be several factors at play when a wrongful conviction occurs and each case is unique. Three of the more common and detrimental factors that will be explored in this essay are eyewitness error, the use of jailhouse informants and professional and institutional misconduct. Firstly, eyewitness testimony can be a major contributor to a conviction and is an important factor in wrongful conviction (Campbell & Denov, 2016, p. 227). Witness recall and, frankly, the human emory are not as reliable as previously thought. In fact there has been much research showing the problems with eyewitness testimony such as suggestive police interviewing, unconscious transference, and malleability of confidence (Campbell & Denov, 2016, p.227).

There are many types of trails that are presented in court during this era that usually consist of at least two eyewitnesses. However, it is very unreasonable to have eyewitnesses during a very serious trial concerning a life or death outcome. Owing to the fact that whatever the individual saw could in fact be modified to fit a certain individual's liking so that he/she could perhaps win the case. Let’s not forget that humans are not perfect and are very different individuals, what one may have witness could possibly not happened exactly as they thought, dependent on the angle they saw the event. Another important factor of viewing an event unfolding, is that whatever is happening could maybe traumatized that individual which also can alter the way he/she saw the event and what really happened.

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

, (2003) study. Gabbert investigated the effect of post event discussion on the accuracy of eye witness testimony; where participants

Children are susceptible to finding other children ‘bad’ or dislikable too, just as adults are of the same. In fact, a child narrator does not necessarily makes the narrative seem truer. Children are frequently less innocent than they seem. For example, in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Huck is clearly not innocent. Some would say he is too precocious, independent and worldly-wise to be convincing; he does fake his own murder with great relish and

and it is what is inside that matters. Children can take away the lesson that stealing is wrong and that there are consequences for your actions. Also,