By Thursday of every week, you should have completed the activities associated with 1 project. You should blog about your experience as a comment to the blog posting of that particular project. Your blog comment can be largely experiential--tell us what it was like to do the project and what you learned. Products associated with the project and a more detailed analysis of the project will go in your portfolio (see the Portfolio blog post).
Project #10 - Article Summary
For this project, read an academic journal article (either from a psychology or a law journal). Use PsychInfo, PsycArticles, WestLaw, or Nexus/Lexus to find articles. Make sure the article relates in some way to course material.
Your comment should briefly summarize what your article was about and what you found interesting about it. For your portfolio, you should provide the article and a formal summary and analysis of the article where you discuss the main point of the article, hypotheses (if appropriate), methods (if an experiment/study), outcomes/results, and overall conclusions.
In the article, Using Image Manipulation to Construct Fair Lineups: The Case of the Buddy Holly Glasses, MacLin, MacLin, and Albrechtsen (2006) determined whether using Adobe Photoshop to manipulate photos in a police lineup would reduce incidences of positive and negative bias. The article revisits a case in which a large metropolitan police department was investigating a case in which the perpetrator was wearing a pair of thick, black, framed glasses (the witness described them as Buddy Holly glasses). Believing they had the correct suspect in custody, police developed a photo lineup to for the witness to identify the perpetrator. The lineup consisted of 6 men who wore glasses. Only one of the men, the suspected perpetrator, was wearing Buddy Holly glasses and the rest were wearing thin, wired frames.
MacLin, MacLin, and Albrechtsen (2006) conducted a small study to determine whether the lineup was in fact biased. Using a small sample of students from the University of Northern, they showed the students the photos from the original lineup and asked them to identify the suspect based on the witness’s description. Out of the 63 participants, 40 (63%) identified the suspect indicating a strong positive bias.
MacLin, MacLin, and Albrechtsen (2006) further explained how police lineups are designed to test the memory of a witness. They first explained that if the lineup was designed so that anybody could identify the suspect based on vague descriptions a witness would give (as in the Buddy Holly glasses case) the lineup is considered positively biased. It is also important to note that if a lineup is too positively biased the witness may be subjected to creating a false memory of the person they selected from the lineup as the person the committing the crime. In the opposite end of the spectrum, if a lineup was designed so that all of the people in it were virtually identical and the witness could not distinguish between them then it would be considered negatively biased. Thus, lineups must be designed to combat both of these biases by not enabling the witness to easily identify the suspect nor being too hard that the witness cannot correctly identify the suspect.
MacLin, MacLin, and Albrechtsen (2006) identified one of the most prominent problems effecting some police departments regarding photo lineup design, is that there is a lack of photos on file that would be acceptable to use as fillers that match the descriptions given by the witness. Therefore, MacLin, MacLin, and Albrechtsen (2006) proposed that police departments utilize image manipulation tactics on lineup photos as a suitable solution to the problem.
MacLin, MacLin, and Albrechtsen (2006) developed a dual study to test whether image manipulation would be a verifiable method to reduce police lineup biases. Using Adobe Photoshop, the photographs used in the Buddy Holly glasses case were altered so that all the suspects appeared to be wearing thick black framed glasses. To determine whether the photos looked altered to the naked eye, a new sample of students from the University of Northern Iowa were selected to evaluate the photographs. Out of the 25 new participants, no one could visually detect any manipulation to the images.
In the second part of the study, another sample of University of Northern Iowa students (none of which participated in the two previous studies) were selected to identify the suspect (like in the first study) out of the altered lineup. Using 71 students, only 27 (34%) could identify the suspect. Thus concluding, image manipulation is a suitable method to reduce police lineup biases.
Being highly interested in a career in the criminal justice field, I found this article fascinating. Through countless real-life crime shows, I have seen the consequences stemming from false convictions based on faulty police lineups. In fact, there was a show dedicated to exonerating the wrongfully convicted thanks to new DNA technology called Dallas DNA.
There was one episode that prominently stood out in my mind as I read this article. A man was convicted of violently raping and assaulting a woman some 20 years ago. The man was caught and falsely identified by the woman because he closely resembled the actual perpetrator. Thanks to the Texas Innocence Project and the advancement in DNA technology, the man’s conviction was overturned. The true perpetrator had been caught a few years after the commission of the crime for a different crime and sent to prison where he later died.
When the true perpetrator’s photo was compared to the falsely identified man’s, it was quite evident that the victim had created a false memory of the event based on a faulty lineup. Although the two men shared a few general characteristics (i.e., both men were black and around the same age), their facial features were extremely different.
Unfortunately for the falsely accused man, he will never regain the 20 years he lost while in prison. He missed his children growing up and other important family happenings that most of us take for granted. All of this happened because of a faulty police lineup design and the victim creating a false memory.
References
MacLin, K., MacLin, O., & Albrechtsen, J. (2006). Using image manipulation to construct fair lineups: the case of the Buddy Holly glasses. The Canadian Journal of Police & Security Services, 18(1), 17-21.
In my article, Jury Selection, peremptory challenges and discrimination by Jennifer Robbenolt and Matthew Taksin they discuss the case Snyder v. Louisiana. This case is about an African American man being tried for murder for his estranged wife's companion. During jury selection the prosecution used peremptory strikes(rejecting certain jurors who appear to have unfavorable bias without giving any reason) to remove five African Americans from the jury, making the jury as all whites. Snyder was convicted of first degree murder and sentenced to death. With this being said the U.S. Supreme court has said that peremptory strikes can't occur based on gender or race. Snyder appealed this basing it off of the fact that it was race based. The article continues to speak of how one has to justify the reasoning behind their peremptory reasoning.
I found this article to be interesting because in my opinion it's quite obvious that it is race based. Getting rid of ALL of the African American jurors is suspicious especially when their reasoning was given. You're supposed to be tried in front of a jury of your peers, but in this situation that was not the case.
My article was entitled Measuring Police Attitudes Toward Discretion by Richard K. Wortley.
This article looked at ways to measure police discretion. Throughout the article it gives many lengthy studies (that aren’t the easiest to make sense of) that are attempting to find scales to measure what influences police discretion. We have accepted the fact that discretion is something that must be involved with enforcing the law. It is something we can’t get away from, so we then must learn how to deal and manage it properly. The area of discretion needs to be studied because there is a true concern when it comes to how police use discretion. Police have a lot of power when it comes to either taking someone to jail or simply letting them go. Police are left with an “unchecked responsibility” to decide who gets locked up and who walks away without a scratch. The freedom police have to somewhat choose how the law is enforced allows police to have justice in their own hands. Sometimes police act in a way that shows their own priorities. They might just let the guy speeding off with a warning because it will be less of a hassle and the policeman doesn’t feel like carting someone going 160 MPH off to jail. Another police could see this speeding crazy man as a threat to society and cart him off right away. This article states that a lot of times police act in one of two ways. Acting for the good of themself at that moment or acting for the good of the community at that moment. It is when the decisions being made by a cop begin to be personally influenced we start to have a problem. This type of problem brings the justice of law enforcement to become biased and flawed. The use of discretion isn’t something that can be studied in a simple manner. It is a complex topic because it deals with social and psychological factors. Not only is the situation in which a police uses discretion important but so is the psychology of the situation. The personality of the cop, the personality of the offender, the attitudes and personal views of each come into play as well. The aspect of police personality is a big key factor in the studying of what kind of discretion police use.
If I were to create a study I would try and focus on the kinds of people who become cops and therefore how that affects discretion. I seem to think a lot of cops are the same. It would be interesting to study the kinds of people who become cops and how that affects discretion. I would expect to see that age, social class, and personality traits greatly affect discretion. I found study one to be quite interesting. In the end it found that police may decide not to arrest someone when they see a different solution would work better than simply arresting them. Study one gives the view that police seem likely to ignore minors offenses more frequently and really crack down on harshly punishing the more severe crimes. Study two describes a scale used called the S-L scale. It measures whether a police uses discretion because of service orientation or legalistic orientation. Service orientation shows that a cop would be more flexible and the legalistic orientation shows that a cop would be much more inflexible. Understanding police discretion is important when dealing with training cops properly. Police should be well aware of how psychology and social situations affect their discretion. The study of discretion hopefully drives us to a more just and fair legal system.
http://pegasus.cc.ucf.edu/~bapplega/Gordon_1988.pdf
Above is a link to my article which is titled "Perceptions of blue-collar and white-collar crime: The effect of defendant race on simulated juror decisions"
The article is pretty simple and straight forward. Basically, randomly assigned undergraduate students received one situation (out of four). These situations either involved and black or white criminal or the crimes of burglary or embezzlement. (white-burglary, white-embezzlement, black-burglary, black-embezzlement).
After reading the situation randomly given to them, the students recommended jail sentences as well as bail amounts. They also responded about their thoughts on the severity of the crime as well as their thoughts on how likely the defendant was to repeat such behavior.
When compared to white defendants, black defendants were thought to be more likely to commit the crime again under both circumstances (burglary and embezzlement). Black defendants who burglarized were given longer jail sentences than whites, white white defendants who embezzled were given longer jail sentences than blacks. When it came to perceived severity of the crimes, white participants felt as though embezzlement was more serious that burglary while blacks thought burglary was more serious that embezzlement (for some reason I would have thought the opposite).
These results supported the authors' hypothesis.
Though the results in this study are very interesting and came out as planned, I am going to try to find at least one more supplementary article since I don't feel this article is best representing this issue (it had a fairly small sample size of 56, so I'm going to try to find a larger study that found similar results).
The research article I read was on development of fMRI technology for lie detection. Firs the article described the technology and what it actually does, and what people believe can be done with it. The article then describes some of the history of lie detection technology including polygraphs, brain fingerprinting, and the use of PET and fMRI scanners.
The article then discusses controversies over lie detection technology, this are often philosophical arguments about the limitation of assuming that structure and function are the same. The article finishes up with an analysis of the current guidelines for admissability of evidence in court, and how unlikely it is that fMRI will meet these guidelines in the near future. This is demonstrated with an analysis of some of the key subgroups that fMRI technology is incapable of dealing with, including brain damaged patients and pathological liars.
I became interested in this topic for how it relates to the admissability of information obtained from "psychics" or obtained through psychic/anomolous phenomena.
The basic conclusion reached is that fMRI technology is a long way from demonstrating that the results do in fact indicate the person is lieing, although a growing database of "normal" brain activity will help this, there are relatively few pictures of some very common subgroups (e.g. brain damaged, unstable, or pathological liars) that are likely common in court proceedings.
These controversies make it seem impossible for psychics or psychically intuited information to ever be of use in courts, though it may still be effective as an investigative tool.
As a double major in Psychology and Criminology, I am interested in working with juveniles after graduate school. Specifically, I want to working with juveniles diagnosed with ADHD or other forms of behavior/conduct problems and PTSD. Therefore, I chose an article related to how ADHD affects delinquent behavior.
The article I found focuses on internalizing problems and their association with juvenile substance abuse.
"Developmental Aspects of Delinquency and Internalizing Problems and Their Association With Persistent Juvenile Substance Use Between Ages 7 and 18" by Rolf Loeber, Magda Stouthamer-Loeber, and Helene White.
Using a longitudinal design, this authors of this study examined the co-occurrence of persistent substance use with other problem behaviors, including ADHD, persistent delinquency, and persistent internalizing problems such as depressed mood, anxiety, and shy or withdrawn behavior. The results showed that having oppositional defiant disorder in middle childhood and persistent internalizing problems in middle to late adulthood increased the likelihood of persistent substance abuse and delinquency. What I thought was interesting was that the authors did not find ADHD to have an effect on persistent substance abuse of delinquency in any of their analyses. It may be that ADHD is not so much related to substance abuse as it is to delinquent behavior in general.
As a double major in Psychology and Criminology, I am interested in working with juveniles after graduate school. Specifically, I want to working with juveniles diagnosed with ADHD or other forms of behavior/conduct problems and PTSD. Therefore, I chose an article related to how ADHD affects delinquent behavior.
The article I found focuses on internalizing problems and their association with juvenile substance abuse.
"Developmental Aspects of Delinquency and Internalizing Problems and Their Association With Persistent Juvenile Substance Use Between Ages 7 and 18" by Rolf Loeber, Magda Stouthamer-Loeber, and Helene White.
Using a longitudinal design, the authors of this study examined the co-occurrence of persistent substance use with other problem behaviors, including ADHD, persistent delinquency, and persistent internalizing problems such as depressed mood, anxiety, and shy or withdrawn behavior. The results showed that having oppositional defiant disorder in middle childhood and persistent internalizing problems in middle to late adulthood increased the likelihood of persistent substance abuse and delinquency. What I thought was interesting was that the authors did not find ADHD to have an effect on persistent substance abuse of delinquency in any of their analyses. It may be that ADHD is not so much related to substance abuse as it is to delinquent behavior in general.
My article was entitled, "Eyewitness Testimony: False Alarms on Biased Instructions?". It basically summed up what we talked about in class with police officers giving leading questions out to the witnesses. There were two studies involved, one was conducted in Germany, and the other was in the United States. They did this to compare cultural differences.
They had to groups--one group was given biased instructions, and the other group was given unbiased instructions, and also some people in the groups were told that this was an experiment, and others were not. Results were the same for both the United States and Germany. The researchers found that those who received biased instructions (stating the perpetrator was believed to be in the line up) were more likely to make a false alarm than those who received unbiased instructions (stating that the perpetrator may or may not be in the line up). The researchers also measured reaction time, or how long it took each group to pick out the criminal. Results for this showed that the group that was not debriefed and who received biased instructions took longer time to make a decision compared to all the other witnesses involved in the experiment.
I think it's interesting how the information you received about a lineup can alter your response to who you think did it. All police officers should be required to state that the perpetrator may or may not be present in the line up. Failure to do this could result in a false identification, and could possibly send an innocent person to prision. It's surprising how much judges and jurys rely on eyewitness testimony, when in reality, it's not all that accurate. When in trial, I think an eyewitness expert should be required to give testimony on the many misidentifications made by witnesses in their line ups. This could help in limiting the number of innocent people behind bars.
The name of my article was When Our Eyes Deceive Us; Being Part of a System that Identified and Ultimately Convicted the Wrong Man became another form of Victimization.
This article brings about the issue of being wrongfully convicted because of a mistake from an eyewitness. This man, Timothy Cole, was convicted of aggravated sexual assault in 1986. He was sent to prison in Texas. He was exonerated by DNA testing and the real criminal, Jerry Wayne Johnson, was convicted and sent to prison. Johnson had been confession to the crime since 1995, but since the victim was sure that the rapist was Cole, no one really paid much attention.
This is a good example of what we just talked about in class with the mistaken identities of criminals by the eye witness. In this article, it also talks about another woman who was raped and she made sure that she knew every detail about her attacker so she could tell the police and make sure they could catch him. She was asked to pick her attacker out of a line up and picked the right one, but was then asked to pick him out again. She was hesitant the second time, but the police told her that she had picked the same man. It turns out that, even though she was the victim and the eye witness, she had chosen the wrong man. One way that this could have happened was because the police told her that she had picked the same man twice and that could have influenced her decision and given her more confidence that she was correct.
My article was “Beliefs about Factors Affecting the Reliability of Eyewitness Testimony: A Comparison of Judges, Jurors, and the General Public”. I found my article through PsychInfo. My article focuses on errors made by eyewitnesses. Researchers know that eyewitness errors cannot be eliminated, but better educating judges and jurors about the memory might make them look with more skeptical eyes toward the evidence. The article talks about two individuals, Thomas Campbell and Joseph Steele who were sentenced to life imprisonment for armed assault and the murder of six people. These two men were convicted on testimony of what police officers had heard Campbell say. The Scottish Criminal Case Review Commission thought that four people remembering the exact same thing was suspicious. They had a psychologist conduct experiments and the results led to the court over turning the two convictions. The article also presents a table of different topics and how these affect witnesses’ testimony. The article talks about how the judge’s knowledge about eyewitness factors is not much ahead of jurors or the general public. The articles main focus is on how much information about eyewitness factors judges, jurors and the general public know. If more information was given to these groups to increase their knowledge, would they be less likely to convict someone based on eyewitness testimony.
I found interesting the fact that judges don’t know much more than jurors and that jurors don’t know much more than the general public. I don’t think this is right. We present evidence to these people and they don’t even have the knowledge to know if it is true or not. No wonder so many people are wrongly convicted. This article was a real eye opener for me.
We have discussed eyewitness testimony in class already and how they can be mistaken on what they see. This article relates to that topic and what we can do to decrease the number of people who are wrongly convicted by eyewitness testimony.
I read the article Eyewitness identification procedures: Recommendations for lineups and photospreads. I found this article to be very informative and I believe ANYONE who is going to be in law enforcement should read this article. This article, sometimes known as the "white paper" mainly talks about how law officials can tamper with memory evidence and mess up lineups. It may seem obvious to the general public that investigators should asking leading questions because that could confuse the witness, but it happens all of the time. This article takes an in depth look at the many implications of lineups and then provides feedback on how these implications can be limited. This article really is something that everyone should read, not just people who will be involved in lineups or other law procedures. As a witness, they need to be able to realize that it is very easy for the legal system to tapper with their memories and they need to be certain so they don't convict and innocent person. Overall this is a very interesting article and has a lot of beneficial information that everyone should know about.
I read the article Reasons for choosing a correction officer career by Lewis Z.Schlosser,David A.Safran,and Christopher A.Sbaratta. I was as you might imagine about the reasons people had for choosing a career as a corrections officer the article claimed that unlike those who become police officers who claim that their reasons deal with providing service to the community. Those who become corrections officers cite financial reasons for joining the profession this could stem from the fact that their is a great deal of security in the corrections field as there are few people who want to enter a prison for any reason.
I chose to do a summary on an article called “WHERE SOULS ARE FORGOTTEN”: Cultural Competencies, Forensic Evaluations,and International Human Rights by Michael L. Perlin and Valerie McClain. I chose this article because it directly relates to psychology and law. The article discusses how cultural competency - understanding cultures and people enough to make decisions and opinions about certain situations - is important in court and how increasing cultural competency will cause better results in the court. This means that lawyers on both sides of a case and also witnesses need to be culturally competent. Perlin and McClain point out that this issue becomes important mostly in death penalty cases. The bottom line is that culture is integrated into every aspect of life and to be fair and just, all peoples in the court system must be aware and knowledgeable of all cultures.
I did another article summary because I'm reallly interested in the topic of false memories. I read an aricle called "False Memories: Phenomena, Theories, and Implications" by M.C. Steffens and S. Mecklenbrauker. In the first couple pages, they talk about the evidence of false memories. They go into this situation with explaining how leading questions can lead witnesses to believe things that were not actually there. They give the example of whether or not the witness saw "the car run over the stop signal" when in fact, there was no stop signal present. Witnesses who were asked this question were more likely to "remember" that there was a stop signal, when in fact, there was not. The authors also wanted to investigate the role of young children and false memories. They did this by conducting the "Sam-Stone experiment" in which they gave a description of a boy, Sam Stone, who was coming into class that day. It was a 2x2 factorial design. Before he entered, the children would either get a stereotype of him as being clumsy. His visit only lasted a few minutes, but upon his exit, there was a torn book and a dirty teddy bear. The other part of the design was whether or not the kids received leading questions as to whether or not Sam tore the book or soiled the bear. Both the stereotype and the leading questions caused the number of false memories increase within the kids, and false memories were happened more among the four year olds compared to the six year olds.
The authors also talk about the DRM Paradigm. Here, they are investigating "How can false memories be efficiently investigated if there are many differences between the events that are subject to false memories, and if every study used only one or a handful of different events" (Steffens & Mecklenbrauker, 15)" The did this by showing subjects a table of many random words, and the after they read them, they were to look at Table 2 and mark which words were on the first Table they looked at. Even though subjects marked words on Table 2 that they supposedly saw on Table 1, no words on Table 2 were present on Table 1.
The authors never did any studies of their own, but they went back and examined other researcher's studies to gather information on what produces false memories. They found that there is evidence of false memories in both adults and children. Another finding was that experts on memory cannot accurately decide with confidence if a memory is false, or if it is in fact recovered. With this information, therapists should not produce leading questions when working with a client, and should not ask them to imagine certain things. In conclusion, even if someone is confident intheir memory, it may be false, and on the other hand, even if a memory is recovered, it still may be true.
The article I found was "Lineup Administrator Influences on Eyewitness Identification Decisions."
It was a study on the influences of different eyewitnesses. The study had 153 participants where they were to identify a suspect after viewing a video. They were asked to look at a lineup of suspects and pick out the person they saw commit the crime. After they did this, they were handed a questionnaire about the lineup administrator and if they believed their decision was influenced by them.
What was found was biased instructions from the administrator lead to correct and false suspect identifications. Also most of the witnesses were unaware of the administrator's influencing behavior on their decisions in this study.
Anther fact from this study was that witnesses who had a clear memory and were more self-directed were more likely to be correct in picking out the suspect and they also did not allow the lineup administrator to influence their decision. This was opposite from the less self directed people who watched the administrator for cues to pick out a suspect.
I thought this article was very interesting because it shows that police do have to watch what they say and keep their own biases out of the lineup. The article also stated that even saying "take your time" or "look at each photo carefully" can lead a witness to choose someone from the lineup who may be innocent instead of going with their gut feeling that the person is not there. I found this very interesting because it shows that a lot of people who may be serving time are innocent and are only there from the biases of a police officer or the witness feeling like they HAVE to choose someone from a lineup when in fact the person who committed the crime may not be in that particular lineup.
The article I read was called Are Adolescents Less Mature than Adults? It was about the American Psychological Association (APA) and how they "flip flopped" a decision they made in two different cases. First,they stated in an abortion case that adolescents are just as mature as adults and they should be able to have the right to have an abortion without the consent of their parents. Second, they contradicted themselves by saying that adolescents are not as mature as adults in a case to abolish the juvenile death penalty.
Personally, I do not think there should be a death penalty for juveniles, because juveniles are not as developmentally mature as adults and a child does not deserve to die in the dawn of life. If they commit a serious crime such as murder, they should have to go to prison and face criminal charges, but not death. I am glad they abolished the juvenile death penalty.
I also think that there shouldn't be an age "limit" on how someone can be morally responsible for their decisions. This article states that people under the age of 18 are morally irresponsible about the decisions they make. There are a lot of people that are way older than 18 who are still not morally responsible for their decisions. Just because someone has become a legal adult at the age of 18 doesn't make them automatically morally responsible for what they do.
My article was about the impact of race on the decisions the jurors make. The article was called “Race Salience” in Juror Decision Making: Misconceptions, Clarifications, and Unanswered Questions. It was actually a follow up to an article written earlier in the decade, which was inspired by trials such as the O.J. Simpson Murder Case. This article itself was to clarify definitions over “Race Salience” which is a term the authors coined, meaning how important race is depending on how racially charged the incident was. Because of how many people cite and use the article, this one was written to rid any misconceptions that still existed.
I thought this was an interesting article because this is something you hear about so much. There is a lot of information how the prisons are not proportionately represented by African-Americans. This article could provide some information about how this phenomenon has occurred, providing insight on what jurors think.
The article I chose to analyze this week dealt with the differences in age groups (40 participants aged 20-35, 40 participants aged 40-55, and 40 participants aged 60-75) in the "accuracy, confidence, and verbal recall" of a crime scene. The participants viewed two filmed theft scenes that had three characters: the victim (female), a theif, and a bystander (both were males). In the first film, the bystander was the most visible during the theft incident and the theif was seen briefly and from a distance. In the second film, this situation was reversed: the bystander was seen from a distance for a short period of time and the theif was seen for the majority of the time.
The study found that the accuracy of identification decreased with age, the more educated the participant was, the more likely they were to incorrectly identify the their, and males did better recalling the crime scene than did females but this finding did not differ across the two age groups. They also found that the easier it was to see the crime scene, the more confident the participants were in making their identification.
Below is the citation, though not totally accurate because I can't use italics!
Adams-Price, C. (1992). Eyewitness memory and aging: Predictors of accuracy in recall and person recognition. Psychology and Aging, 7, 602-608. doi: 10.1037/0882-7974.7.4.602
This week I read JUROR'S DISCUSSION OF A DEFENDANT'S HISTORY OF CHILD ABUSE AND ALCOHOL ABUSE IN CAPITAL SENTENCING DELIBERATIONS. The article was written by Margaret Stevenson, Bette Bottoms, and Shari Diamond. The article tried to find how the factors in this case would affect juror discussion and decision. The researchers found that liberals are more likely to be against the death penalty, but are more likely to listen to deliberation and sometimes change their immediate decisions. Conservative are pro death penalty and stand by their opinions, sometimes due to attributional error. In this mock trial it seemed as though the defendant's child and alcohol abuse actually worked against him. The article was interesting because what I was reading were thoughts that I imagined I would have if I was a juror on the case. Also, the researchers broke down juror's decisions in a simple, sensible way.
For this project I found an article on Psych Info titled False Confessions and Influenced Witnesses. This article discusses many of the topics we focuses on in our class discussions specifically information on interrogations and memory of the witness. One thing that caught my attention was a discussion on a study done where students were asked to type on a computer and not to hit a certain key otherwise the computer would crash. Last Tuesday we talked about this study in class as a reference to false confession. In this article the author went more into detail about the situations the students were evaluated in. In class we touched on how the undergraduate students had to talk to a confederate out in the waiting room and were evaluated on whether or not they stated if they caused the computer to crash or if they say that the computer crashed. In addition to this evaluate students were also brought back into the room and asked to recreate the situation. In this evaluation all the student who tested under the circumstances of having to type fast and have a “false witness” present admitted to making the computer crash in their recreation of the event. Interestingly enough, another topic discusses in the article is that of maximum and minimum interrogation techniques. Maximum is where the interrogator provides the strongest evidence. In the computer situation this would be when the instructor said that you pressed the button causing the computer to crash and we say you do it. The other technique is the minimum approach. In regards to the computer situation this would be illustrated if the instructor said, “its okay that you pressed the button to make the computer crash, its not that big of a deal. As long as you admit to it then everything will be okay. Personally I feel as though this is the tactics used on people who the interrogator feels is immature and not does understand the situation. As we discussed in class—how can someone think if they admitted to killing someone they would get to go home?
This article provided me with a lot of information on how false confessions are created and the psychology behind why people admit to things they did not do. In addition to the information provided in class this article take the ideas and concepts of step further linking studies and reasoning behind why the outcomes of these interrogations unfold as they do. With these types of interrogations legal it makes me wonder when (if ever) there will be a guideline developed to prevent false confessions from occurring in the future.
After doing my previous article summery I decided to attmpt another due to me heightened interest in the subjects of false confessions, false memory, and interrogation. Recently I found an article on the psychinfo database titled: False Confessions-Causes, Consequences, and Implications for Reform. This article was written by Saul M Kassin for the John Jay College of Criminal Justice. In this article Kassin talked about the three reasons in which people are lead to falsely confess. The three reasons are as follows:
1. Police sometimes target innocent people for interrogation because of erroneous judgments of truth and deception.
2. innocent people sometime confess as a function of certain interrogation tactics, disposition suspect vulnerabilities, and the phenomenology of innocence.
3. Jurors fail to discount even those confession they see as coerced.
These three reasons are elaborated on throughout the article. Kassin also defined three types of false confessions: Voluntary, Compliant, and internalized. Voluntary is one in which the person comes forth and admits to the crime for reasons such as attention, self-punishment for feelings of guilt. This was seen in the black Dahlia killing where nearly 50 people came forth and confessed. Compliant confession is that when a person feels that are forced to confess. This type of confession is demonstrated in the Milgram obedience study. Internalized confession is seen in people who truly feel they did the crime after police and other investigators tell them and present them with information leading them to believe they were the criminal. An example of this would be Michael Crowe who was lead to believe he killed his sister and he didn't realize he did this at first because he had a multi personality disorder.
After reading this article I feel the next step process for our legal system is to educate jurors on the likelihood and tacts used in false confessions. Although jurors feel they know the confession was false this step could prevent something from being wrongfully convicted!
I found a study that looked at the memory of children. Specifically if children respond to warnings about leading questions when being questioned about previous events. The study was entitled "Does a Warning Help Children to More Accurately Remember an Event, to Resist Misleading Questions, and to Identify Unanswerable Questions?" by Eva Beuscher and Claudia M. Roebers.
The researchers showed a group of children a video. Then, a week later, they split the children into two groups before questioning them about the events in the video. One group was given a warning about leading questions and similar tactics they might encounter. The other group was given no warning.
The researchers wanted to know if children would be more helpful in a trial or as a witness if they were fully aware of what they were doing and different tactics that may be used against them. When the researchers performed the test, they found no difference between the groups. They thought this might be because the children didn't really understand the activity or the warning given to them.
The memory of children is even more delicate than that of adults because at younger ages they are not aware of much that is happening around them, nor are they sometimes able to deal with it as well as an adult. This holds true for traumatic situations. More research is needed in order to properly retrieve good memory evidence from children.
The article I chose deals with recommendations for eyewitness identification procedures, specifically with lineups and photospreads. The article brings together findings from a bunch of studies and then discusses how the findings should be used. The authors of the article pose four recommended rules for conducting lineups and photospreads: the person who conducts the lineup shouldn't be aware of which one the suspect is; eyewitnesses should be told that the conductor doesn't know who the suspect is and that the suspect may or may not be in the lineup or photospread; the suspect should not stand out from the others in the lineup or photospread; and finally, a clear statement should be taken from the eyewitness at the time of identification, prior to any feedback about their choice, as to how confident they are in their choice.
I found this article to be very interesting in that it discusses how to apply the findings from various studies to lineups, mostly because most articles just show findings and then leave it up to other people to draw conclusions from it.
I read an article titled, "Preventing Parolees From Returning to Prison Through Community-Based Reintegration." I chose this article because I find it interesting to research what rehabilitative programs are out there for parolees and what things are most successful. This article presents a program out there that experimentally showed modest results in success rate meaning the parolee were more likely not to re-enter prison. The program was entitled PPCP (Preventing Parolee Crime Program). A study was completed using the PPCP and in turn this study gave positive results. Included in this program was the following: drug abuse treatment and education, job training and placement services, math and literacy training both in the community and residential areas. Recidivism rates have been increasing in the U.S. over the years so finding a program that may decrease these rates would be very beneficial. Two community-based employment programs, Substance Abuse Treatment and Recovery program, the Computerized Literacy Center, and six Residential Multi-Service Centers collaborated efforts in order to complete this study. The goal of this study was to only focus on results that dealt with whether or not a person ended up back in prison (recidivism) or whether or not they were absconded (parole suspension).
Method: Participants in this study were all California parolees who were released from prison on parole in between July 1,2000-June 30, 2002. Certain categories of offenders were not used in this study like for example, sex offenders. The method for this study included keeping detailed tabs on California's records found in the Offender-Based Information System and the Statewide Parole Data Base. Participants who were involved in rehab programs were also extensively studied and recorded.
Groups used: This study broke participants into two clear cut categories. Either a participant was in one group because they were involved in rehabilitavie programs or they were in another group because they never entered a program.
Dependent Variable: In this case it was whether or not a participant re-entered prison within 1 year.
Independent Variable: Two variables were looked at and they were whether participants were in a program or not and how long they were involved in these programs.
Results: Results showed that PPCP participants had an 8% lower recidivism rate than non-PPCP participants. Also, an individual who was involved with at least one program had a 20.1% lower recidivism rates than a non-PPCP participant. It is interesting to note that parolees who successfuly completed their programs had a much lower recidivism rate than those participants who tried programs but failed them. It averaged out to almost be the same amount of parolees who re-entered prison was the same for parolees who failed their programs and those parolees who never took a program.
Conclusion: In conclusion to this study I would have to say I predicted these results would occur. I have taken a few criminology courses and by what I am learing in class and reading in textbooks matches the results from this study. This study can be easily seen in how it relates to law, but it is not so clear cut on how it relates to psychology. In my opinion parolees who participated in programs had a lower recidivism rate because within those programs they became aware of their self identity and may have figured out that they can be a productive citizen. Also, social psychology could point out that since these programs took in groups of people to learn together that they were more likely to succeed together than if they individually participated in programs. Overall, I found this article intersting and beneficial to the psychology and law community.
I looked at an article called "The hindsight bias and attitudes toward police deception in eliciting confessions".
This study look at the attitudes of people regarding the use of deception by police officers during investigations. The researchers wanted to know what the subjects (undergraduates) thought about police officers when they performed these questionable activities. Police officers are able to lie to a certain extent when questioning people.
The researchers wanted to know how this information might affect juries and their attitudes about police methods and if that would affect how they would view a "confession" by a defendant if they knew all about police techniques.
For my third and final article summary, I chose an article titled "Does Jury Deliberation Really Improve Jurors' Memories?"
I find juries very interesting and like to learn/read about how individual jurors affect the others. This article pointed out that the court system feels that juror deliberation is effective at correcting memory errors which in turn makes their memories more accurate. Prior to the current study, research found conflicting results regarding whether or not jury deliberation was actually effective in improving the memories of the case at hand. The authors of this article point to the possible reason behind these conflicting findings. According to the authors, prior research has failed to track whether or not juror memories changed after the deliberation process. The current study fixes this issue by questioning the "jurors" prior to deliberation and after deliberation.
The results of the current study support the courts assumptions that juror deliberation is effective at increasing memory accuracy among the jurors; however, the study found that the difference in increased memory is not as significant as expected.
The study also examined the confidence levels of the jurors prior to and after deliberation. The research found a significant difference in confidence levels prior to and after deliberation with jurors feeling more confident after deliberation.
The study then looked at whether or not the most confident jurors are also the most accurate. The study found that confidence was only "weakly" related to the accuracy of their memory indicating that confidence is not really that great of an indicator for accuracy.
Although this study fixed the main problem that plagued the prior literature, it still has limitations. This topic is very interesting, but because of the lack of methodically sound empirical studies, more research would be very beneficial to the field!
Here is the link to the article if interested! http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/cgi-bin/fulltext/95515549/PDFSTART
Pritchard, M. E., & Keenan, J. M. (2002). Does jury deliberation really improve jurors' memories? Applied Cognitive Psychology, 16, 589-601. doi: 10.1002/acp.816
The article I looked up was Biased Lineup instructions and face identification from video images. The article talks about how the usually lineup is not very accurate, people are not clarifying very well who they saw or what that person said. So now, officials use videos and put the photos to the videos, to see if they show any similar resemblance. The authors of this article tested the accuracy between a lineup and putting pictures to a face on a video. Their first experiment, was effective when there were photos laid out for the participant to choose from. But when the participant had to pick out a person from a video, it was much more difficult. Then when the authors put the two together, photo spread and video, the results were impressive. They come to a conclusion in the article that investigators should pay more attention to photos that people match up with a person on a video, because they may be accurate most of the time. I found this article very interesting, and the fact that our changing world today includes more and more video surveillance, it would be stupid to not start this new method up. I like how they did three experiments, one first with just photos, then just video, then both to see how it really affects the outcome of the results.
my article is called JURORS’ DISCUSSIONS OF A DEFENDANT’S
HISTORY OF CHILD ABUSE AND ALCOHOL
ABUSE IN CAPITAL
SENTENCING DELIBERATIONS. The article discuses how jurrors establish attribuition to crimes when child abuse and alcohol is involved. Are the jurrors more likely to not blame the criminals for their behavior because of these factors or are they more likely to give them a harsher sentence because they believe they are damaged goods and are unable to be rehabilitated. Its a 38 pg article it claims that child abuse is not looked as an agrvating factor but they are looked as responsible for crime but able to b rehabilitated, even if the child was depicted as a hero. With substance abuse they were still held responsible but were found less likely to believed to be able to be rehabilitated since the jurors believed one drink and the bad behavior would come back.
My second article is called Eyewitness Memory for Vehicles by Amy Booth, Matthew J. Sharps, Brianna Satterthwaite and Sarah Chisholm. I found it in the PsychINFO data base.
This article is about the ability to recognize a vehicle during the time of a crime or right after a crime occured. There was a total of 69 college students who participated in this experiement for credit for a class. The students had to have an eyesight of atleast 20/40 in order to participate.
There were many different vehicles that were in this experimetn. These vehicles were sedans, sport utility vehicles, and pickup trucks that varied in shades of blue, red, yellow, and olive green in this experiment.
The students were shown a slide show of the vehicle, which were shown for 5 seconds. The car in which the students were suppose to rememeber had an X in which was shown after the slide of the car.
Once the students were done watching the slide show they were shown pictures of "get away cars." Some of these did not match the suspected car in model or color, others were the correct color but not the correct model, and some were the correct model of car but not the correct color. Out of 69 students only 15 made the correct vehicle identification.
This article was very intersting to me because I am always wondering how we remember details. I also found it very interesting in that only 15 students out of 69 were able to correctly identify the "suspects" car. This really makes me think aobut how accurate eyewitness testimonies really are. One last fact that really caught my attention was the fact that when students chose the incorrect vehicle, the results showed that the COLOR of the vehicle was more important factor than the MODEL of the vehicle. This really suprised me.
My second article is called Eyewitness Memory for Vehicles by Amy Booth, Matthew J. Sharps, Brianna Satterthwaite and Sarah Chisholm. I found it in the PsychINFO data base.
This article is about the ability to recognize a vehicle during the time of a crime or right after a crime occured. There was a total of 69 college students who participated in this experiement for credit for a class. The students had to have an eyesight of atleast 20/40 in order to participate.
There were many different vehicles that were in this experimetn. These vehicles were sedans, sport utility vehicles, and pickup trucks that varied in shades of blue, red, yellow, and olive green in this experiment.
The students were shown a slide show of the vehicle, which were shown for 5 seconds. The car in which the students were suppose to rememeber had an X in which was shown after the slide of the car.
Once the students were done watching the slide show they were shown pictures of "get away cars." Some of these did not match the suspected car in model or color, others were the correct color but not the correct model, and some were the correct model of car but not the correct color. Out of 69 students only 15 made the correct vehicle identification.
This article was very intersting to me because I am always wondering how we remember details. I also found it very interesting in that only 15 students out of 69 were able to correctly identify the "suspects" car. This really makes me think aobut how accurate eyewitness testimonies really are. One last fact that really caught my attention was the fact that when students chose the incorrect vehicle, the results showed that the COLOR of the vehicle was more important factor than the MODEL of the vehicle. This really suprised me.
The article I read was titled, "A Different Kind of Jail" by Katherine Mason and Nina Williams-Mbengue.
When a criminal goes to jail we tend to think, “Good. They deserve it!” However, they are not the only ones who suffer. I think we easily forget the lives they leave at home. This article opens with a paragraph explaining a child doing a simple routine without a mother nearby. Looking at this from a psychological perspective, I am concerned as to how this child will be brought up. Parents are shown to have a great influence on how a child is raised and, in turn, who they become. Another theory I have been learning a lot about in my psychology courses is the theory of social learning. Children observe their parents and then learn to model their behavior. Who’s behavior will this child model? Not only is that lacking, but emotional support from a parent is also extremely important as a child is developing in their younger years. It scares me to read the statistic that says that nearly 2 million children are in this same situation as the child mentioned in the opening paragraph. The effects of having a parent in jail are by no means the best on the well being of a child. Children are more likely to lose contact with their parent in jail, to struggle in both social and financial matters, as well as have a harder time in school.
When criminals are placed in jail, the legal system by no means is intending for these negative effects to happen to children. The legal system is doing what it can to limit crime and to serve justice. This is obviously just an unfair side effect. However, the states of Illinois, Missouri, Oklahoma, Hawaii, New Mexico, Oregon, Washington, and Vermont have task forces that are working to help the children of incarcerated parents. Other things like resource centers that focus on helping families when someone is incarcerated is one of the ways these states are working to help. There are other law procedures that demand police officers make sure the children of a home are cared for when arresting a parent so a child will not be left at home alone. Due to the nations hard economic times funding for these types of programs isn’t the easiest to come by. The suggestion of getting communities involved to help these families is another possible solution that would help families of those incarcerated. There is also a strong call for people to speak out on children’s rights. After all, children are the future of this country, so there should be laws and rights that protect their wellbeing on many different levels.
Again, I feel this is a direct call to the well being of children. How unfair it is that these children have to suffer psychologically, socially, and financially due to a parent being incarcerated. I feel the psychology and law could study this is greater depth to find out how a parent being away in prison is negatively effecting their children left at home. These studies could possibly help find ways to better support children and families of those in jail.
http://find.galegroup.com/gtx/retrieve.do?contentSet=IAC-Documents&qrySerId=&inPS=true&tabID=T002&prodId=AONE&searchId=R1&retrieveFormat=PDF¤tPosition=1&userGroupName=uni_rodit&resultListType=RESULT_LIST&sort=DateDescend&docId=A189874239&noOfPages=3
I found another article about the influence of ADHD on juvenile delinquency. This article is titled Juvenile Delinquency Entry and Persistence: Do Attention Problems Contribute to Conduct Problems by Forehand, Wierson, Frame, Kempton, and Armistead (1991).
The researchers investigate the co-morbidity of ADHD and conduct disorder to determine their combined role in early involvement in delinquency. This study was done as part of a larger project assessing the mental health problems of incarcerated juvenile delinquents, so the verbal intelligence and reading level of each participant was also examined. All participants were required to meet the diagnostic criteria for CD. They were then split into two groups, one meeting the criteria for CD but not ADHD, and the other for both CD and ADHD. The CD and ADHD group had more arrests at an earlier age than the CD only group. The delinquents with a diagnosis of CD and ADHD also had a lower verbal IQ and lower reading grade level that their comparison group. The two groups, however, did not differ on the overall number of charges against them. Forehand et al. (1991) recommends intense preventative or early intervention programs, focusing on these youths that are diagnosed with both CD and ADHD.
As you can see from the study, ADHD increases the likelihood of youth engaging in delinquent behavior, especially when combined with CD. If we can figure out methods to treat these two behavioral problems better, hopefully it will also help in the reduction of juvenile crime.
For my second article I'm reading "What Do We Really Know About Witness Preparation" by M. T. Boccaccini. In the article it discusses several things witnesses are told when meeting with a consultant prior to trial. For instance, they are told how to use effective communication to be persuasive and seem more credible. Factors include both verbal and nonverbal communication. The article discusses what is known about witness preparation, if it can be used to manipulate, and what needs to be researched more.
The article I read was entitled, "Cold calculation predicts death row executions"
In 2006, only 53 of the 3228 inmates on death row were actually executed. Researchers may look at why this number is low, but instead researchers decided to study a different aspect. Why were these 53 chosen? Is there some random data base that picks out who is going to die and when? Obviously not. This is largely based on the case of the individual. However, these researchers wanted to look deeper into these 53 executions for patterns. Much of psychology is finding patterns within our research and deciding the things that correlate with other things. But when the researchers looked at the data they found no patterns in the reasons why the 53 people were chosen. We might think that this would be the end of our study. It was only the beginning. The researches chose a different approach to this research. They decided to use an artificial neural network or ANN. This is a computer system, but an extremely smart one. It is actually designed to be like the human brain. It works to find the reasons and factors that are affecting things within a large amount of random or “jumbled” data. It finds out how these factors all affect each other. The computer can also take what it has learned and use that to make relationships and then to predict outcomes in the future. ANN had been used in the past to predict if juvenile offenders would commit crimes again, and what types of students were most likely to drop out of college. ANN again worked wonders with the research on people being executed. The factors plugged into the ANN system were the inmate’s age, education level, marital status, race, and sex. They used a sample of 1000 inmates, half of which had been executed and half of which were still on death row. They came up with astounding numbers. Normally in psychology research is far from a +1 correlation. However, the numbers from the ANN system predicted 90% of the inmate’s life outcomes right. 90% is an extremely high percentage. The relationship between the factors and the outcome was clearly a strong relationship. In order to find out which factors most strongly predicted an inmate’s outcome, the researchers plugged all the factors in, except for one. They did this until each factor had been taken out of the ANN. The biggest factor is one that wasn’t too shocking, gender. We hardly ever hear about women being executed, so it is obvious that being a man increases the likelihood of an inmate being executed. Race, which may have been thought to be another key factor, was not found to be important or to predict execution. The kicker comes with the factor of an inmate’s education level. This referred to the years in which an inmate spent in high school. The reason for this finding, researchers believe, is that these inmates may not be able to manage their cases, and therefore their appeals, in the proper way. Someone who was more educated in the matter would probably understand the system better. Simon Shepherd explains, "This finding confirms that being executed is not about what you've done, but more about your ability to defend yourself". I feel like this makes a lot of sense. Your education might indeed influence how you are treated throughout the judicial system. Although this is an extremely good finding, the researchers explain that it won’t affect much. A concern however, is lawyers possibly preferring to take up cases of inmates who are educated compared to those who aren’t. With research it seems that there always comes politics right along with it.
Another article I found is called "Children's Identification of Faces From Lineups: The Efffects of Lineup presentation and Instructions on Accuracy" by Jayne Berestford and Mark Blades. I found this article in the Journal of Applied Psychology, and if you want to read it is located here: http://psycnet.apa.org/journals/apl/91/5/1102.html
This article is about children ages 6-7 and 9-10 and whether their age affects their accuracy for identifying a perpetrator. The procedure for this study was to use two lineup procedures. These two procedures are standard or elimination. And there was also two types of instructions that were used. These two types of instructions were standard and cautioning about false identification.
From this study it was found out that standard lineups with cautioning instructions tended to decrease targets-absent errors with no decrease in correctly identifying the perpetrator. It was also found out that children ages 8 to 9 years old were as accurate as adults when making correct identifications from lineups that contain a previously witnessed criminal.
I though this article was very interesting and I thought it really related to class from a presentation on Tuesday about a case where two children witnessed their father kill their mother. They were both over the age of 9 years old, so their accuracy in correctly identifying their father as the killer was as accurate as an adult who may have seen the same crime.
This is also very interesting when you look at how many children will testify to crimes that they witnessed. It shows that children are very accurate in correctly identifying a perpetrator when they are not "helped" out by the police. I think this article will really open people's eyes to how the memory of a child is very accurate and they can help a case more often instead of harming one.
The article I read was State REthinks adult time for adult crime. It was about a 16 year old being charged as an adult for stealing gum from one of his peers. Connecticut just changed their law from 17 to 16 for adult crime do adult time. So now not only will he be charged with this crime and could serve time with adult men, but his record that would typically be sealed will now follow him for the rest of his life because of stupid pack of gum.
I found this very interesting because juvenile systems have the opportunity to charge juveniles with adult charges if the crime is worthy, to me, a pack of gum is not. Not to mention no suit should have ever been filed and this shouldn't have ever been a situation where he was arrested. It's petty.
The article i read was about the rescent Times square terrorist plot attempt. They caught the suspect Faisal Shahzad 30 years old whom was just about to board his flight back to Dubai and then to Pakistan. The car that he drove to the airport, a white Izuzu jeep had a 9mm handgun with the full clip locked and loaded in the glove box with the Faisal's finger prints on it. its a good thing this guy was caught at the right moment and that his attempt was just that and that it wasnt a successful mass killing in Times Square.
I found an article on Probation officers and the stress related to their work. This article is called Probation officer stress: Is there an organizational solution? It is written by Risdon Slate, Wesley Johnson, and Terry Wells. I found this article through Psych Info on the Rod Library page. In this article it talks about three ways to alleviate stress among probations officers. The first is to eliminate the casus of stress, the second is to increase a person’s ability to cope with stress, and thirdly is to help the stressed person. The article goes in to discuss J.T Whitehead, who was one of the first researchers to research stress and probation officers. A lot of his research talks about the burn out of the job and boredom for certain people. These three authors of this article base a lot of their research off of his. What I found the most helpful was the section of more implication based research. Basically they want to find out if having dual tasks as a probation officer more stressful or if it keeps you at the job long because of always staying busy. This article is interesting to learn about. Below is the link to the article.
I chose to do an article that is titled Relationships between psychotic disorders in adolescence and criminally violent behavior. The article includes a study of 39 patients that were diagnosed with a psychotic illness at a young age. The article goes on to conclude that emotional or physically abusive behavior was more closely related to violent behavior than was the psychosis alone. Thought the article was interesting, I think studying criminally insane people is interesting. Creepy but interesting...