The History Of Eyewitness Testimony

Published Date: 02 Nov 2017

WHY IS IT IMPORTANT

The potential unreliability of eyewitness testimony poses one of the most serious problems in the administration of criminal justice. Eyewitness testimony is a legal term and it refers to an account given by a bystander in the courtroom, who describes what happened during a specific incident under investigation. This is the principal way in which the guilt of the accused is established through verbal witness evidence in court. It is considered to be a reliable accepted form that provides evidence and jurors tend to pay close attention to it. However, it is questioned that eyewitnesses’ identifications are among the most important forms of evidence presented in the courts. Recently forensics and psychologists claim that memories and individual perceptions are unreliable, can being easily manipulated and biased. As a result, inaccurate eyewitness identifications can have serious consequences leading to wrong convictions of innocent people (Wells et al., 1998). In recent times, many principles are attempting to make changes in how eyewitness testimony is presented in courts. The aim of this essay, is to explore based on the literature, some reasons that may influence the memory process of eyewitnesses and what can be done in order to ensure that eyewitnesses testimony worth the value.

Eyewitness testimony is very influential in the determination of various legal decisions. Eyewitnesses are central to most court cases (Kebbell & Milne, 1998; Zander & Henderson, 1993) and eyewitness accounts are the most common and significant testimonies that can potentially serve as the primary forms of evidence against a defendant. Moreover research shows that jurors overly believe the testimony of eyewitnesses and this can lead to possible miscarriages of justice that occur (Cutler et al. 1990).

When scientific psychology was in its first steps, articles about mistaken eyewitness identifications began appearing in the field (Munsterberg, 1908; Stern, 1910; Whipple, 1909). However, eyewitness evidence has made thoughtful people to think if eyewitnesses’ testimonies are reliable or not. It would be said though that all people know they forget things, and therefore they know that memory can be fallible. On the other hand it is hard to deny the importance of eyewitnesses’ testimony. Research has shown that people probably feel better about convicting an alleged criminal when an eyewitness claims ‘I saw him do it’ than when there is no such claim. The reality that inaccurate eyewitness identifications can lead to the conviction of innocent people is accepted by Canadian legal professionals (Brooks, 1983). Recently, case studies and DNA testing in the United States have shown that mistaken eyewitness identifications are the reason for more wrongful convictions than all other causes combined (Connors et al. 1996; Huff et al. 1998). Moreover, this statement about eyewitness misidentifications that is one of the most common causes of wrongful convictions is proved by a lot of researchers (Borchard, Huff, Rattner, & Sagarin, 1986). Borchard reported that eyewitness error occurred in 45% of 65 cases of wrongful conviction; Huff found eyewitness error in nearly 60% of 500 wrongful convictions and Ruttner concluded that eyewitness error occurred in 52% of 205 wrongful convictions. All these wrongful convictions studies were conducted before the intervention of DNA testing, and the different authors included some of the same cases in their analysis. In 1996 an analysis of the application of DNA technology to forensic issues in the United States, has revealed some significant facts (Connors, Lundregan, Miller, & McEwan, 1996). More specifically 28 men who were found guilty for various criminal acts were exonerated through the analysis of DNA typing. Eyewitness identification was the single most common factor accounting for these erroneous convictions. Furthermore, Wells, Small, Penrod, Malpass, Fulero and Brimacombe (1998) added some more cases to the list of DNA-related with false identifications. These cases revealed that one to up to five eyewitnesses made false identifications of innocent suspects. Nevertheless, the eyewitness evidence was presented by well-meaning and confident citizens it was highly persuasive but, at the same time, was at least partially responsible for the majority of wrongful convictions. More recently, The Innocence Project reported some significant facts. The innocence Project is a national litigation and public policy organisation dedicated to exonerating wrongfully convicted individuals through DNA testing and reforming the criminal justice system to prevent future injustice. The facts that this project found is that about 66% of 138 cases in which DNA could exonerate the accused, wrongfully eyewitness identification was involved (Weber, Brewer, Wells, 2004). 3 STAGES OF MEMORY- LIMITATIONS(EVALUATION)-CONCLUSION

Regardless of the circumstances, there exists some memory trace. However, strong or weak, that could have important consequences for the course of justice (Wallls, 1993). Few people would doubt that human memory is fallible. According to Haber (2000), people tend to believe that memories are like video recorders that faithfully record the things that people do and replay them back perfectly later. Instead, sensory and perceptual experiences of an incident are not recorded in memory similar to the workings of a videotape recorder (Clifford & Bull, 1978; Loftus, 1979; Yarmey, 1979). Human memory is constructed and reconstructed from stored bits and pieces of acquired information of what actually happened and what a person intuits, discovers from others, or infers must have happened. Following the reconstructive view, memory can be divided into three stages: (1) acquisition or encoding of information; (2) retention or storage of information over time; and (3) retrieval of stored information through recall and recognition. A lot of problems may occur in each of these three stages.

Loftus (1979/1996) has focused a lot in these three stages of memory in order to understand the problems that may occur and lead to false convictions. Thus in the first stage which is encoding, the information first goes into the memories. More specifically, if not enough attention is paid to what is going on the encoding stage, then events may not be encoded properly. For example the length of time an eyewitness is able to see the perpetrator, will affect the accuracy of his/her memory. That is, the longer eyewitnesses can see the perpetrator, the more will be able to encode and retrieve later on the identification task. Thus, exposure time is a very important variable that can affects the accuracy of eyewitness identification ( Laugherty et al., 1971). Furthermore other problems that may influence the encoding stage are the event salience and the prior expectations of the eyewitness. Usually eyewitnesses pay more attention to some details more than other and also recall expectation not necessarily the truth. As a result they give wrong identifications (Loftus, 1974). During the second stage which is storage, people keep the information in their memories to recall later. For example witnesses might read a news report about the incident, which can affect their original memory, or if the information is stored for a long time the natural processes of forgetting could further degrade the memory. Finally in the retrieval stage, the information can create further changes: the way questions are asked can distort the original memory or the stressful circumstance may prevent accurate recall.

LIMITATIONS

Eyewitness testimony is a topic that has yet a lot of limitations and need for further research is essential. According to the above findings all researches that have been conducted about the validity of eyewitness testimony used to be experimental and laboratory. According to Twining (1983) psychologists should have paid more attention to the role that testimony plays in the criminal justice system rather to act as consultants.

. CONFIDENCE REGARLESS ACCURACY... Eyewitnesses can be very accurate in their descriptions failing to identify offenders precisely.

EXPERT WITNESS TESTIMONY: The role of eyewitness testimony is to inform a jury about psychological processes and accuracy-related variables in eyewitness testimony. Research has shown that expert testimony is the only legal safeguard about the factors that affect the reliability of eyewitnesses’ accounts (Penrod & Cutler, 1999). According to Loftus (1978), an expert psychologist can describe to the jurors the studies that have been conducted and the results from the experiments on people’s ability to perceive and recall complex events. Factors that may have affected the accuracy of the particular identification in.....