Reading Blog Due 9/15 @ midnight

Most interesting thing that i learned is not all evidence is concrete and not all victims know their assailant, even though they swear that they did this, or that to try and memorize the perp who commited the crime against them. The fact that this man stated that he was not the man to commit these horrible acts of violence, they still arrested him put him in a photo line up then charged him for the crime. Even though there was physical evidence that didnt tie Cotton to the actual crime, they convicted him anyway.
What took me by surprise is the fact that people that are actually the victim of these such crimes cannot pin point who the assailant is or was. More importantly the police officers, detectives, csi, and anyone else who had anything to do with getting evidence talking to eyewitnesses and thouroughly investigating dont properly and effectively go through the evidence and just go off of what the victim said. Even though the victim went through all these diffrent situations and account to try and memorize her perp, she didnt identify the right man twice. And even after knowing that she helped convict the wrong man, she still tried to say that it was him so i believe that he total psychy was damaged and she recalled cotton from the resturant that he worked at thats how she identified him. I also believe that during the actual abuse, she was psycologically damged and wasnt fully aware of who did what.
i'd like to learn more about eyewitnesses or the way an eyewitnesses account is investigated and or thoroughly treated after the actual first icentities are given.
Since its founding following the 1998 National Conference on Wrongful Convictions and the Death Penalty, the Center has been instrumental in the exonerations of 23 innocent men and women in Illinois. Before the founding of the Center, members of its staff were instrumental in 14 additional exonerations — including that of Gary Dotson, who in 1989 became the first person in the world to be exonerated by DNA.

Of the 37 exonerees, 13 had been sentenced to death. In all, they languished 478 years behind bars for crimes they did not commit. At an average cost per prisoner of $25,000 per year. The taxpayers’ tab for the wrongful imprisonment of the 37 innocent men and women (three of the latter) was roughly $12 million — which pales beside the social costs of lives and careers destroyed and families devastated. Not to mention the death and destruction that resulted from leaving violent criminals on the street.

The Center was the first university-based innocence project to accept non-DNA cases as well as DNA cases. Of the 37 exonerations in which the Center or members of its staff have been involved, just over half —21— were non-DNA cases. Typical of the non-DNA cases are those of Gordon “Randy” Steidl, Tabitha Pollock, Julie Rea Harper, and Robert Wilson (see below). Among our pending cases they outnumber DNA cases more than two to one.

Non-DNA cases are moving increasingly into the forefront of the criminal justice reform movement as the era of post-conviction DNA exonerations comes to an end (because almost all DNA testing now is done prior to trial). Through our investigation and litigation of non-DNA cases, we have developed cutting-edge expertise in cases involving false confessions, jailhouse informants (snitches, in the vernacular), and fire deaths.

The Center was a driving force behind both the moratorium on executions declared by former Governor George Ryan in January 2000 and his decision to commute all Illinois death sentences in January 2003. In recognition of the Center’s role, the Governor chose Lincoln Hall at Northwestern Law School as the venue for his blanket clemency announcement.

Center research on factors leading to wrongful convictions also was a driving force behind a comprehensive package of criminal justice reforms approved overwhelmingly by the Illinois General Assembly in November 2003. Perhaps the most significant reform is a requirement that police — as a safeguard against coerced confessions — electronically record all custodial interrogations of suspects in murder cases. (Coerced false confessions were factors in 16 of the 37 aforementioned exoneration cases.) Illinois was the first state to address the problem by statute, which makes statements inadmissible unless the entire interrogation has been recorded. Six other states have since followed the Illinois lead — Maine, Maryland, Nebraska, New Mexico, North Carolina, and Wisconsin.

Although Center attorneys focus primarily on post-conviction cases, occasionally they serve as co-counsel with experienced trial lawyers, working pro bono, in the retrials of cases that have been reversed and remanded. Ronald S. Safer, the managing partner at Schiff Hardin LLP, joined Center attorneys in the retrial of Julie Rea Harper, who was acquitted of murder following a two-week retrial in Clinton County, Illinois in 2006.

In 2004, Center attorneys, students, and staff were instrumental in persuading Indiana Governor Joe Kernan to commute the death sentence of a young African-American prisoner named Darnell Williams, whose case became the subject of an American Justice episode entitled Countdown to an Execution that aired on A&E in 2005. In 2006, the Center won the posthumous exoneration of Clyde Kennard, a Mississippi civil rights pioneer who was framed in a 1960 burglary case and sentenced to seven years in prison after attempting to integrate the University of Southern Mississippi; Kennard died of cancer in prison in 1963. In 2008, the Center joined pro bono attorneys from Washington, D.C. to secure a sentence commutation for John Spirko, who faced imminent execution in Ohio for a murder he almost certainly did not commit.

The Center has been amicus curiae in seven cases before the U.S. Supreme Court and the supreme courts of various states in support of issues of importance to the wrongfully convicted. In 2008, the Japanese Supreme Court accepted a Center brief in a notorious mass murder case in which a confession of an 81-year-old defendant named Masaru Okunishi may have been coerced. It was the first such brief ever filed in Japan by a U.S. legal organization.

The Center regularly sponsors forums designed to raise public awareness of the causes and social effects of wrongful convictions and to foster reforms to improve the fairness and accuracy of the criminal justice system. One such forum, in February 2008, highlighted the plights of five innocent Center clients who, although officially exonerated, have been waiting years for compensation that is supposed to be automatic under Illinois law. After the forum, the Illinois General Assembly approved a bill that will make it possible for courts to speed the compensation process.

The challenges before us

Reforming the criminal justice system to reduce the numbers of men and women sentenced to prison for crimes they did not commit will remain a Center priority for the foreseeable future.

Needed reforms include:

Expanding the Illinois law requiring police to electronically record interrogations in murder cases to all cases, particularly child sexual assault cases.

Forbidding police interrogators to lie to suspects about the evidence.

Abolishing the use of polygraph examinations during interrogation.

Reforming police lineup procedures to reduce erroneous identifications by victims and eyewitnesses. (Psychological research has shown that replacing traditional lineups with a sequential double blind process reduces misidentifications by half.

Holding police and prosecutors accountable for misconduct in criminal investigations and prosecutions.

Increasing and speeding compensation for the wrongfully convicted.

Non-DNA cases

DNA often is regarded as the gold standard or proof of actual innocence, but it isn’t the only standard as these Center clients illustrate:

Gordon “Randy” Steidl was sentenced to death for a 1986 double murder based on the testimony of two alcoholics who falsely claimed to have seen the crime. The Center won Randy’s release on a writ of habeas corpus in 2003 and the charges were dropped the following year. Tabitha Pollock was sleeping when her live-in boyfriend killed her 3-year-old daughter in 1995. Tabitha was convicted of first-degree murder based on the prosecution’s contention that she “should have known” the boyfriend posed a danger to the child. The Center won an outright reversal of the conviction in 2002.

Julie Rea Harper was wrongfully convicted and sentenced to 65 years in prison for the murder of her 10-year-old son in 1997 in Wayne County — a crime that in all likelihood was committed by a serial killer who committed similar crimes in Missouri and Texas. That killer, Tommy Lynn Sells, confessed to the crime. After Harper won a new trial, she was acquitted by a jury in Clinton County, where Center attorneys tried the case on a change of venue. In addition to presenting the Sells confession, Center lawyers introduced extensive forensic evidence demonstrating that there was a third person in the house who not only killed Joel Kirkpatrick but who also attacked Harper. This evidence included injuries to Harper that could not have been self-inflicted and bloodstains on her clothing demonstrating that she had struggled with a third person.

Robert Wilson was convicted of a 1997 slashing attack on a nurse based on an erroneous identification by the victim, who told police he was the wrong man — before they persuaded her otherwise. The victim came forward and apologized after the Center won a federal writ of habeas corpus in the case.
www.law.northwestern.edu/cwc/

Chapter 7 started out with the case of a woman being raped, during her rape she did everything that she could to get a good look at the offenders face, eventually she got a good look at his face and later after he was picked up she identified him in a line up. After being sent to prison he met the man that had actually committed the rapes, he was granted a second trial and was released, thus demonstrating problems with witness memory and eye witness testimony. The next main point that Chapter 7 discussed was about the Manson criteria or five factors that determine the worth of eyewitness testimony, these are things such as accuracy of description, did the victim get a good view of the offender, amount of time from crime to ID and how good of attention was the victim paying during the crime. Along with these there are many things they stated that could go wrong with an eyewitness such as lighting, how far away you are from the crime, even if they get a good look at the offender. Another main thing that they pointed out is that it is hard to identify people that aren’t the same race as you are, but most people can identify people of their own race better. Something interesting that I learned was unconscious transfer, this is "a face that is familiar from one context is transferred to the scene of the crime, (Costanzo and Krauss, 148). I found this interesting because even if you weren’t the offender and you were near the scene of the crime, you could be identified as somebody thought to have committed the crime. The chapter also outlined how to conduct a proper line up, most of these different methods for conducting line ups I had no idea existed before reading this chapter.
Something that I wanted to research more on and is directly related to psychology is the use of hypnosis to get witnesses to remember details of a crime. I want to find out how often this is used and hopefully what the outcome of some of the cases were. One interesting article that I found that wasn’t published in the United States but still gave some good insight in to this topic of eyewitness hypnosis, stated that hypnosis has a possibility of distorting the witnesses memory. In one case they sighted a man was in prison for 16 years until being released on DNA evidence after a witness provided evidence against him after hypnosis. I think that this is an interesting topic in the justice system because of the fact that right now it seems like an unreliable method to get a conviction and you don’t know exactly how the hypnosis may affect the person which may give you bad results on their testimony. I really couldn’t find many details on how many times hypnosis was used or very many trials that involved hypnosis.
http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/podium-how-hypnosis-plays-tricks-on-police-witnesses-1122774.html

In chapter seven it talked about the many roles in a case and the importance they play. We learned about the many problems with testimonies not only from the eyewitnesses and victims. The chapter talked a lot about how the memory can mess up the thoughts we experience during an event and during a crime.
I thought the most interesting thing was that even victims can falsely identify perpetrators. I feel like if I was victimized I would be able to identify someone but I guess it’s the same as the mix up that eyewitnesses face.
Another thing I thought was interesting was how many people were convicted of a crime they didn’t commit and sent to jail. It was also surprising at how many that were convicted got the death penalty.
I thought it was interesting how we can see something prior to a crime and that memory can become part of something that you thought you saw at a crime scene. This is called Unconscious transference. I feel like I sometimes do this with work or events those happen prior days I transfer to a new day. I want to learn more about this so I looked at a couple web sites and this is what I found.
People are often better at realizing a face that looks familiar than they are in recalling why a face looks familiar. The face is in your memory and it is unconsciously transferred to a new memory. In a court room when a victim points out the perpetrator it is very convincing to a jury even if all the evidence shows otherwise.
http://www18.homepage.villanova.edu/diego.fernandezduque/Teaching/CognitivePsychology/Lectures_and_Labs/s6LongTermMemory/sAppliedCog/unconscious_transference.htm

Chapter 7 discussed eyewitness identification and testimony. It discussed, how similarly a crime scene can be easily contaminated, so can the memory of an eyewitness or victim. In many cases, the psychological evidence is more crucial then the physical evidence in catching the perpetrator. So, with that being said, this chapter discussed how crucial it is to keep the victim or eyewitnesse's memory clean, and uncontaminated. In a further breakdown, this chapter discussed the role eyewitnesse's play in the legal system, and how false identification and contaminated memories is more prevelant than many realize. Chapter 7 also discussed construction and re-construction of memory and the cross-race effect and how it is usually easier for witnesses to identify and describe suspects of their own race. Furthermore, this chapter discussed the stress and weapon focus, stating the weapon-focus effect which happens if the eyewitness or victim see the perpetrator holding a gun, knife, or other weapon, their ability to recognize or describe the perpetrator later on is impaired. In addition, chapter 7 also discussed using research findings to improve eyewitness accuracy through blind lineup administrators, bias-reducing instructions to the eyewitnesses, holding unbiased lineups, noting confidence ratings, video taping the identification process, through sequential lineups, and having an expert on eyewitnesses in court to ensure credibility of the eyewitness. This chapter also discussed techniques for refreshing the memories of witnesses through such tasks as hypnosis and cognitive interview. Overall, this chapter continuously stressed the importance of the witness retaining an uncontamined memory, without any influence from the investigators or anybody else. Even the way investigators word questions or phrases and construct lineups, show photos of suspects to the eyewitness, and the likeness of their, "fillers," to the description of the perpetrator are all key in keeping the memory of the eyewitness in untarnished by outside effects.

Something interesting I learned in this chapter was cross-racial identification and the cross-race effect, or, "Own-race bias." The book stated that this bias an be present in babies as young as 9 months old! The cross-race effect is the notion that it is harder for people to recognize the faces of people outside their racial group than it is for people to recognize the faces of people within their group. This is something I had never even thought of before, until I read in the section about the Emilio Meza case of misidentification case. After reading this case, I thought about it, and did realize that it is harder for me to describe certain other racial groups. I thought this section was very interesting.

The section that suprised me the most was hypnosis as a technique for refreshing the memory of a witness. I knew that hypnosis had been used during psychotherapy and that Freud pushed hypnosis as a way of uncovering the unconscious; however, I never knew it had entered the legal system as a way for refreshing memory. I learned in this section that once a witness is hypnotized, they are usually instructed to, "rewitness," the event as if they were watching a documentary of the crime. I also found it interesting when the book stated that people usually recall more information when they are hypnotized than when they are not hypnotized, a state called hypnotic hypernesia. Also, it did make sense to me that where some witnesses may be embarassed or reluctant to divulge the investigators into their mind, hypnosis is a way of uncovering that information. I saw a lot of Freudian play in this section with references to the unconscious and I think that is why I found it so suprising and interesting.

When researching more on this topic, I found that there actually is a website called forensichypnosis.com. I found this website to be very interesting. It discussed traditional forensic hypnosis and also had a video clip on Rob Kelly discussing his Forensic and Investigative Memory Enhancing Techniques. (FIMET) Furthermore, this site divulged on the pros and cons on the use of hypnosis in the legal field, as well as some famous cases that forensic hypnosis played a successful role in the last century.
http://www.forensichypnosis.com/

The other link I researched discussed the everything from the origin of forensic hypnosis, and its first court case of Cornell v. Superior Court of San Diego in 1959, to the observation, conditions, and criticisms of forensic hypnosis. For example, when preparing to hypnotize the witness, the hypnotist must ensure the witness that no attempt will be made to elict information not relevant to the investigation. Although this may seem like common sense, this is one thing I had not yet thought about. Furthermore, to ensure proper procedure and questioning of the witness during hypnosis, it has become custom that all forensic hypnosis sessions are video taped and that the session is witnessed by independant observers. I found all of this information to be extremely interesting and suprising to know that as controversial as it may seem, hypnosis has and probably will continue to play a role in our legal system.
http://www.ehow.com/about_5049568_forensic-hypnosis.html

Lindsey Fails

Chapter seven talks about eyewitness testimony and identification. It begins with a story of a girl who was raped and studied the face of her attacker. She identified him on two occasions, and he was convicted. However there was little evidence other than the eyewitness testimony to aid the jury. Years later he was found innocent because of DNA testing. This sets up the rest of the chapter as it discusses the problems and inaccuracies with eyewitness memory.
One of the first things the chapter talks about is the Manson Criteria. This is a list of 5 things that evaluate the accuracy of eyewitnesses: oppurtunity to see attacker, level of attention, accuracy of previous description, degree of certainty, and amount of time between crime and identification. It turns out that these are hard to associate to crimes.
Cross Racial Identification is sometimes a player in the identification process. It is harder to identify someone of a different race than it is to identify someone of your own race. This is sometimes apparent in trial.
There is a focus on weapons. When there is an eyewitness who was also a victim of the crime, their memory of the perpetrator can be shaken. They are under the stress of a weapon threatening them so they are more concerned with their well being, than what the attacker looks like.
The eyewitness testimony can also be altered by police questioning. If caution is not taken, questions can be asked in a way that alters the answer. These Leading Questions can make the witness "remember" something that is not accurate. The confidence of the witness can change. As time moves on from the incident they can get more confident in their description even if it is wrong. This is because they keep being asked it and believe it to be true.
Toward the end of the chapter they lay out seven steps to attempt and improve accuracy through improving lineups, making instructions less biased and leading, and making the person identifying be confident in their answer.
The Cross Racial Identification is something that I found interesting as well as surprising. I remember people of different races that I have in my classes so why would it be different all of the time. The reading made since in its context of crime. If you witness a crime you may just notice the person's race and not focus on the features because you are focusing on the crime.
When researching a little on this subject I found that it is not true for all people. There were studies done that found that white people have trouble identifying more so than African Americans. And Black people make better witnesses in general. They also do not have the problem of identifying different races.
http://academic.udayton.edu/race/03justice/justice03.htm
I thought that it was interesting that whites were the people that could not identify people outside of their race and not all people.

This chapter was about Forensic and Legal Psychology. It talked about eyewitness testimony and memory and how those two things played a big role when trying to solve a crime, more specifically a violent crime. It also talked about identifying people and the bias that comes with that. The most interesting thing that I learned was that eyewitnesses are usually more wrong than they are right. The book said that the reason why people get convicted of crimes that they did not do is because the eyewitness was not correct and chose the wrong person. I thought that was pretty interesting. They also said that the cross-race effect can play a role when trying to accurately convict somebody because of the bias of this idea.

What surprised me in this chapter was in the end when it talked about techniques for refreshing the memories of witnesses. Various methods have been tried to "refresh" those memories because those can be so crucial. I thought that this was surprising because I did not think that such techniques would be useful because it is just that hard for someone to try to remember something, especially if it happened to them, when it either happened too quickly or they have already forgotten. "Hypnosis" is one technique used when trying to refresh an individual's memory and it is clear that skilled hypnotists have occasionally helped to uncover useful information during cases.

It was kind of sad to know that someone can spend eight years in prison for a crime that they did not commit and then eventually get released. Knowing that in the first place, if there was no DNA that linked this person to the crime, when DNA was present, they should not have been locked up anyway especially for that many years. After reading stuff like this, I have always been wondering why it takes so long to overturn a conviction. I want to know why they have to be locked up anyway for so long when these people were clearly not at a scene if it was something like a rape, like there was in chapter 7. With no DNA of theirs, they should not be involved. I looked deeper into that and found that there is no question that DNA testing could definitively prove a defendant’s guilt or innocence in many cases, as shown by the 238 post-conviction DNA exonerations that have occurred in the United States to date, DNA testing has still proved to be an elusive goal for many post-conviction defendants, for a variety of reasons. Most states place restrictions on the ability of defendants to obtain DNA testing, and in other jurisdictions, prosecutors actively resist DNA testing following a defendant’s conviction.

Many states have their own laws on post – conviction DNA testing but I still did not get much on why it is such a long process to exonerate the people who have been in prison for years for a wrongful conviction. http://resources.lawinfo.com/en/Articles/Post-conviction-Appeals-Criminal-Lawyers/Federal/overturning-wrongful-convictions-through-dna-.html

The basic idea of this chapter was how difficult eye witness identification can be. The parts that I thought were most important in the chapter was the section on cross racial identifications and stress and weapon focus. I thought these were the most important to the study of psychology and law because I believe these are the biggest problems to giving an accurate eyewitness identification. Cross racial identification can be very closely related to the concept of racism. Basically what racial identification is is that someone of a certain race has a more difficult time determining someone of another race. The example in the book was that an asian man had a difficult time identifying a hispanic man and said that they all looked the same. For someone who doesn’t know much about psychology, you would think that it was a racist comment and may even find it offensive. But in all reality, it has a great deal to do with cognitive psychology. For some reason our brains categorize someone of another race differently than we do for someone alike us. This is a great problem in accurate eyewitness identification and it is something that we need to get more research on and why it happens. I believe that stress and weapon focus are also very important concepts of the chapter. I can understand how your recollection on someones facial features and other distinguishing characteristics are flawed when you have a gun in your face or are extremely scared. This is important to the law enforcement career for obvious reasons. Being scared or stressed can greatly alter your memory and knowing so might help officers get better eyewitness information and help avoid mistakes.
The part that I wanted to know more about was the section on children as eyewitnesses. I didn’t realize that children are as accurate as adults when the perpetrator is in the line up. The article that I found online gave a basic reason of why this is true and gave other important information. The study showed that children pick an innocent man in 60 percent of the occasions while adults do so in 50 percent. This shows that children are more reliable than we give them credit for but still may not be correct. The article stated that the reason children are more accurate than we thought was the fact that children have had much fewer severe situations than adults and it made sense to me. Basically what I learned is that while eyewitness identification may be very inaccurate children may be more credible than previously thought.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/09/110909111528.htm

While reading Chapter 7 I found many things interesting and the way Chapter 7 started out with the story of Jennifer Thompson made me first realize what just an eye witness can do to someone's life when they are really innocent, and its good that Ronald Cotton got an attorney to look into the DNA testing and then years later it proved his innocents. But this chapter was about eyewitness identification and testimony. Then is goes on to talk about the Manson Criteria and the 5 factors that should be accounted for when evaluating the accuracy of and eyewitness's identification. I feel that the Manson Criteria would be very useful but like the book said it would be difficult to actually apply to crimes, seems easy on paper though.
After, the chapter talks about Cross-Racial identification and this is one part I found interesting while reading. Its harder for people to recognize the faces and facial features of others outside of their own race. I never really thought that the race of the person would matter, but the way they explained it in the book made sense to me. Next is the stress of weapons and its focus during a crime. The lower the stress condition is for the person the more correct the identification will be because high stress will impair and effect the rate of the identification.
When and eyewitness sees mugshots prior to the lineup then that could lead to the witness mistaking the identification. Then adding to that the recall of the eyewitness can be altered by the wording of the questions being asked.
Something that I found surprising was the witness confidence section. The book points out that confidence is not a good indicator of accuracy because the confidence will increase over time. Confidence could increase over time because the witness will have to look through a book of pictures of the witness will have time now to go from a brief description to a particular face. Then when the line up comes the witness already has a photograph of what the person looks like, even if its not the correct one. Looking through that book gave the witness a certain person to look for. Lastly was the 7 guidelines for the people who administer the lineup and those who obtain the information from the eyewitness.
I want to learn more about the eyewitness testimony and how accurate it is in other cases, because the book showed that 76% of cases were wrongly convicted and then released because of DNA testing.
http://www.simplypsychology.org/eyewitness-testimony.html
http://www.caught.net/cases/eyewit.htm
Many factors can go into affecting the witness. Anything from being too confident to there was a weapon so they were more stressed, over time the witness could put more of the 'false' story together an think they have the right person but it really isnt.

Chapter 7 is all about the eyewitness. It brings to focus that witnesses are not always much help because of their reliability. Law enforcement must take into account that the witness can easily be wrong. It is normal for a person to forget or see something differently during a time of crisis. Race can also be an issue along with stereo types, making it hard for witnesses to identify specifics when they all look similar. There are many procedures that law enforcement can use to spark the memory or witnesses and help them remember things that they may have forgotten.

The most interesting thing I found was how victims can falsely identify perpetrators. It makes sense that after being involved in something tragic, your mental state can be affected and you may not be able to remember specific details. This is obviously understandable, but it is crazy for me to think about the innocent person who may suffer jail for something they honestly did not do. It is a benefit, I think, to the perpetrator, that they have a 50% chance of getting away with a crime. There is no certainty when it comes to the decision of guilty or not guilty. I’m sure there are tons of guilty people out there that flipped the lucky side of the coin and got away with a crime. I also believe there are innocent people out there sitting in jail for a crime that they did not commit. This is always an interesting topic to me because of the mystery behind the legal system. Crime also is mysterious; therefore there will always be parts of the story that we will never know which makes it impossible to be 100% about anything. If I were to go into a profession involving psychology and crime, I would find this interesting to research. A witness falsely identifying perpetrators is the biggest cause of wrongful convictions. DNA has proven various times how frequently eyewitness identification is inaccurate. Identification reforms are set up in hope to make the witness be as accurate as possible.

http://www.innocenceproject.org/understand/Eyewitness-Misidentification.php

This chapter begins by telling a heartbreaking story of a man who was stuck in prison for 11 years all because an eye witness identification that turned out to be wrong. This introduces us into a discussion about memory and how it can be flawed. There are three processes the brain goes through: encoding, storage, and retrieval. They all mean exactly as they say they sound, and they all go about an imperfect process. In the storage stage, for example, there is a problem called memory trace which basically means we will eventually forget and become more susceptable to allowing changes to our experiences that are stored. Another problem with eye witness testimonies is that the jury seems to make it the deciding factor almost every time. The book actually states that in a study of 347 cases, 74% of the defendants were convicted with only eye witness testimonies. The book also states that wrong witness identification "leads to more wrongful convictions than any other type of evidence.
Due to these problems, there are now 5 criteria/questions that must be asked:
1. Are they actually able to get a good look at the perpetrator?
2. What is the level of attention the witness has?
3. How accurate is the first description of the offender compared to now?
4. How certain is the witness?
5. How much time has elapsed between the actual crime and the identification?

This chapter also examines how "stress and weapons" affect memory. Charles Morgan did an experiment that showed that heightened arousal does not enhance memory. It in fact decreases-a lot. Sometimes what had happened can be so traumatic that investigators must try different techniques to try and get the information they need. Hypnosis is something they have been experimenting with for a very long time to help enhance witness memory.

I was surprised to learn that eye witness identification can mean so much to a jury. I guess just because I know how faulty memory can be I forget that other people may still buy into the idea because the witness/victim can be so terrified and so "certain" that the defendant is the perpetrator. What I would look more into is about the hypnosis and how it works to enhance memory.

Hypnosis is used to help slow down the thinking process which makes sense to use it in the retrieval process of memory. It can also allow you to relive/retrace your steps during the storage process. It can also cause problems in the legal system because it has been shown that it is possible for the hypnotist to give you the wrong information which would intern create a false memory.

http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/hypnosis-the-power-trance/200909/does-hypnosis-improve-memory

Amazon sent my book to the billing address rather than the school address I had listed for them to send it to. My book is in and its at the post office in my hometown. I will be picking it up tomorrow night and will make up all of my reading assignments this weekend. Sorry for the inconvenience, this is the second time this has happened. Thank you for your understanding.

Eyewitness testimony has been a controversial issue in the judicial system and has been under careful scrutiny for a long time. Ever since DNA has become more advanced and since the start of the Innocence Project, it was discovered that 76% of cases were wrongly convicted because of eyewitness misidentification. The witness’s opportunity to view the perpetrator, the witness’s level of attention, the accuracy of the witness’s previous description of the offender, the degree of certainty displayed by the witness and the amount of time between witnessing the crime and making the identification are all important factors to consider when looking at witness credibility. However, it is hard to determine the time the witness gets to spend with the perpetrator because during a stressful event, it is estimated to be reported 3 to 4 times longer than the actual length of the event. Another problem is the confidence of the eyewitness and how it has been proven to strengthen over time, whether they are right or not. This can be very influential on jurors as well. Investigators are encouraged to use many methods to reduce the bias and increase accuracy in eyewitness testimony during interviews and lineups. The methods like technology, confidence ratings, bias-reducing instructions, sequential and unbiased lineups, blind lineup administrators, and expert testimony all help to reduce false identifications and reduce biases from investigators. There have been efforts to also improve the memory of witnesses, through hypnosis or cognitive interview. Hypnosis has been excluded in a number of court cases and throughout some states all together. Cognitive interview is a more reliable way of getting information out of witnesses, which involves relaxing them and building rapport, and then going through the incident step by step forward and backward to remember anything they can. The problem with this strategy is many officers are trained to do interrogations and are not trained with the proper interview skills the carry this out properly.

What surprised me the most was in relation to the confidence of the witness and how it influenced the jury. Research has shown that jurors also place too much faith in the reliability of eyewitnesses and are not very good at distinguishing between inaccurate and accurate witness. Some people become so convinced that they are right that they can be very persuading to the jury. If 76% of cases have been proven innocent after being found guilty because of eyewitness misidentification, then I begin to wonder how many more prisoners have the same situation.

What I found most interesting about this chapter was the cross-race effect. I never really thought that it was easier to identify with members of my own race than others. Even though the reason is still unclear why this happens, I also realized that I would be more observant of someone in my own racial group because I can find identifiable features in their face or structure.

What I would like to learn more about is retrieval inhibition. This is where a witness is asked leading questions that require them to access certain information and when they are later asked about more detail, it is harder for them to remember because they are more focused on what they were asked initially. When I looked into this more, I found a study where a group of researchers were interested in how misleading information can affect a person’s ability to retrieve certain information. They concluded that postevent questions that were misleading caused the ability of subjects to retrieve information incorrectly and distorted their memory. They imply that they are not arguing that this happens to everyone in every situation, but it can be applied to real life situations, such as an eyewitness to a crime. They also had a control group that was not exposed to the misleading information, and their results on the retrieval test were much better than those who had been misled. The study suggests that some memory distortions may be a “function of a normally adaptive inhibitory mechanism that is activated in response to unwanted competition from related memories”. This creates conditions wherein misleading postevent information can unknowingly be reported instead of original material. They also offer a few suggestions to help this phenomenon. The first is to exhaustively get as much information as possible as soon as you can from a witness before they have any chance to get their memory contaminated. They also say that there needs to be adequate time between the time of the initial interview for information and then have a final statement. Although the underlying causes of this are still unknown, research will continue to be done over the incredible possibilities of the human brain.

http://psy.swan.ac.uk/staff/saunders/memoryandperception/MS2008.pdf

Eyewitnesses must rely on memory to do their job. Memory can be broken down into three processes: encoding, storage, and retrieval. When creating or recalling a memory many errors may occur, making our memories not as reliable as we’d like to think.
Eyewitnesses often provide the most compelling evidence during a court case, but mistaken eyewitness identification leads to more wrongful convictions than any other type of evidence.
The Manson criteria were created to help evaluate an eyewitness’s accuracy; unfortunately, they are hard to put into practice. In short, the criteria measure the witness’s opportunity to view the perpetrator, level of attention, accuracy of precise description of offender, degree of certainty, and amount of time between the crime and identification.
The legal system does its best to reduce eyewitness bias, but techniques such as voir dire, cross-examination, and jury deliberation do not provide enough of a safeguard against eyewitness inaccuracy.
Some specific biases include cross-racial identifications, stress, weapons focus, unconscious transference, leading comments, suggestive comments, preexisting expectations, witness confidence, and witness age.
Psychologists are trying to come up with theories that can become practical solutions to the bias problem. Focusing on the system variables is one suggestion. There are also 7 guidelines suggested in the book. The guidelines are the following: blind lineup administrators, bias-reducing instructions to eyewitnesses, unbiased lineups, confidence ratings, video recording, sequential lineups, and expert testimony.
Some techniques suggested to help refresh the witnesses memory and improver recall include hypnosis and cognitive interviews.
In conclusion, it is important to treat eyewitness evidence like physical evidence, meaning do what you can to keep it from being contaminated or tampered with. This is to ensure that the innocent aren’t put in jail because of false identification.

I found the cross-race effect interesting. To know that memory recall is imprecise in the best of circumstances causes unease when you realize that witnesses are an additional 1.56 times more likely to misidentify a suspect of a different race. The joke, “they all look alike to me”, is not so funny when you take the time to analyze your own ability to remember and distinguish features of others who differ in race. After reading this chapter, I would like to know about more theories of what causes own-race bias and how to decrease my own bias.
Most of the information in this chapter were things I have been introduced to before with less detail, so I did not find any items in this chapter that surprised me. The fact that an interviewer could cause witnesses to remember seeing things that aren’t there is a continually stunning and a little bit unsettling.
Earlier I mentioned wanting to know more about how to reduce my own race bias. The book suggested spending more time in diverse environments. A study called Fredrickson’s broaden-and-build model suggest that positive emotions may help because they “broaden our thought-action repertoire, and in the case of visual perception, cause us to perceive things more globally. So maybe positive emotions would cause more holistic face processing, and therefore reduce the own-race bias” (1). Another suggestion is to assimilate young children to diverse races. Several studies have found “the effect of early visual experience may be erased as a result of immersion in a totally novel face environment” (2).

(1) http://generallythinking.com/they-all-look-the-same-to-me-countering-the-own-race-bias/
(2) http://www.pallier.org/papers/SangrigoliPallier_finaldraft.pdf

Chapter 7 starts out with a story of a woman who gets raped and described the man to police who then gave her a photo lineup where she identified a man named Ronald Cotton. Cotton heard the police might be looking for him so he went to the police station to clear it up and tell them they were mistaken. The cops put him in jail and he was sentenced to prison. In prison a man said Cotton was innocent because he was the one who raped the two women that night. Cotton then got a second trial where he was convicted of raping both women and was sent back to jail. 8 years later, when DNA evidence technology was much better, the semen sample was confirmed to be that of the man who said he did it while Cotton was in jail and Cotton was set free after 11 years in prison.

One of the most interesting items I found in this chapter was the section of the "Mason Criteria". The Manson criteria is based on two key court cases in the 1970's about factors that should be taken into account when evaluating the accuracy of the eyewitness's identification of suspects. There are five main criteria that are considered the Manson criteria. They are: 1) the witness's opportunity to view the perpetrator; 2) the witness's level of attention; 3) the accuracy of the witness's previous description of the offender; Four) the degree of certainty displayed by the witness; and 5) the amount of time between witnessing the crime and making the identification. I think it is interesting how ineffective these criteria may be. It is said in the book that there are many things that corrupt the memory of the eyewitness such as leading questions and determining the amount of time the witness actually saw the perpetrator.

Something I want to learn more about is the use of hypnosis to try and refresh the memory of the witness. In one of the articles I read on hypnosis use to refresh an eyewitness's memory. In this article, they discuss the tricks and how to use hypnosis effectively. They said that one benefit to the use of hypnosis is that if a witness feels uncomfortable or embarrassed to say what they saw in an incident, hypnosis leads them to feel more comfortable telling the police about the incident. On the other hand, hypnosis can also lead to false memories and make it so a witness says something that may have not actually ever happened as stated in an article by Elizabeth Loftus.
http://www.grajfoner.com/Geiselman%20Fisher%20Cognitive%20Interview.pdf
http://faculty.washington.edu/eloftus/Articles/sciam.htm

Chapter seven was all about eyewitness identification. This chapter talked about how people that believed they knew exactly how the assailant that attacked them was, but they were not correct. The people were not lying, because they truly believed they had the person that harmed them in custody. The thing is that the mind and memory can fade and people can look like other people. This begins to make the account very blurry and cause a misidentification that can throw people in jail for many years. The chapter ended with was to increase validity of the eyewitness testimony and reduce the misidentification.

The most interesting thing I learned involved the eyewitness being of one race and the assailant being from a different race. They mentioned this is called the cross-race effect or own-race bias. This really does happen. I know a lot of people that think many African-American, Asian-American, and Mexican-American people all look alike. This would definitely cause a problem when I would be picking the assailant from the lineup. Unless the person had a prominent mark or something of that nature to them, I also would probably give a misidentification on the attacker.

Something I want to learn more about is the way hypnosis is used to help the eyewitness recall the event that took place or the assailant. It is neat to be able to take the conscious mind away and bring out the memory from the unconscious state. From what I found in the link below one study tested hypnosis for recollection purposes and found there to be little to no significant effect in recollection. http://psycnet.apa.org/index.cfm?fa=buy.optionToBuy&id=1985-21901-001.

Another website I found that is linked below mentioned the idea of hypnosis and creating false memories. So the psychological person in charge used hypnosis to make false accusations that their client would later testify as true. Obviously hypnosis is a serious topic that must be addressed inside and outside of the courtroom. http://faculty.washington.edu/eloftus/Articles/sciam.htm

Memory works in three ways. First there is the encoding process. Information is gathered and encoded into the memory. This process can be imperfect. Storage is the process where the encoded information is held in the brain. At last, there is retrieval. It gives access and use of the stored information at a later time. The problem is that distortion can happen during the retrieval.
Another problem with the memory is that memory traces, which are the biochemical representation of our experiences, fade away with time.
As it is said in Chapter 7 on page 141: “In sum, when we encode an event, we select some aspects and ignore others. The images and sounds we store may decay over time, and the process of retrieval includes some reconstruction.”
Very important to the topic Psychology and Law is the persuasiveness of the eyewitness testimony.
The Manson Criteria should be used to make a statement about the accuracy of eyewitness memory:
the witness's opportunity to view the perpetrator
the level of attention of the witness
the accuracy of the witness's previous descriptions
degree of certainty of the witness
the amount of time between the crime and the identification
One of the most interesting aspects of the chapter was that the time of a crime seems to be longer for the victim than it actually might have been. The victim might think he or she had spent several minutes with the perpetrator, which where in fact only a few seconds. This is an problem for the identification process.
Self-reports are not very reliable, however, the eyewitness testimony has to be considered for the identification and has a big impact on the investigation and on the jurors during the trial.
Biased procedures during the questioning and identification process is another major aspect to think about when considering the accuracy of an eyewitness testimony. The way police officers talk and question can influence the eyewitness memory.
Other ways in which the eyewitness's memory can be influenced are:
Cross Racial Identifications: People have troubles identifying persons of other racial groups than their own (“own-race-bias”)
Stress and weapon focus: Arousal does not enhance memory. The weapon focus effect says that if the eyewitness detects a weapon the recognition is impaired.
Unconscious Transference: Familiar faces are transferred to the scene of crime. Wrong identifications can be meaningful.
Leading or Suggestive Comments
Preexisting Expectations: Scripts of situations as we believe they might occur.
Witness Confidence: The level of Confidence increases during the investigation and trial situation.
Surprising was the fact that also jury can be biased, since I concentrated mainly on the crime,the eyewitness's memory and the investigation. I did not spend much time thinking about the trial situation so far. “Unfortunatly, research shows that jurors place undue faith in the reliability of eyewitnesses, ...” (Ch.7, p.144). During my research about eyewitness testimony I found several articles about studies concerning the inaccuracy of eyewitness's memories and the effect on the jury. Most jurors are not aware of these studies which is the main problem. How the court handles this situation is different from state to state.
http://www.forensic-evidence.com/site/Behv_Evid/expert_Lester.html
http://www.pdsdc.org/Resources/SLD/Beyond%20the%20Ken,%20Testing%20Jurors%20Understanding%20of%20Eyewitness%20Reliability%20Evidence.pdf
http://writ.news.findlaw.com/dorf/20010516.html

When the proper procedures aren’t taken, eyewitness testimony can lead to more wrongful convictions than any other type of evidence. In addition to improperly conducted procedures by the police and investigators, cross-racial identification and high stress situations result in faultier witness memories, which are more susceptible to contamination by leading questions or postidentification feedback. It is the duty of psychologists to take research findings, apply them to the law and court systems, and suggest plausible solutions to the problem being researched. Juries and judges should be alerted to the unreliability of a witness’ confidence level, as it is no indicator of whether or not they are right or wrong. Basically, investigative procedures surrounding eyewitness testimony need to be better structured and then properly followed for the testimony to be taken into consideration as evidence.

I found the cross-race effect to be interesting. I was never quite sure whether race affected a person’s recollection of a perpetrator. On top of that, I found it interesting that people with more exposure to a different racial group are better at identifying perps of that same racial group. Something that surprised me was that lawyers can hire psychologists to use psychology to essentially trick the jury into taking the lawyer’s side. I find it suave and cunning for the lawyers to do this, but that isn’t what the law is supposed to be about: winning your case. The law should be about finding the real criminal and getting justice. Isn’t that what they advertise?

Deffenbacher, Bornstein, and Penrod conducted a study that gave evidence that witnesses exposed to mugshots before a lineup were more likely to pick an innocent person than those who weren’t. According to http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1174&context=psychfacpub&sei-redir=1#search=%22exposure%20mugshots%20before%20lineup%22, “eyewitnesses… did indeed identify persons seen previously only in mugshots at significantly higher rates than they did [before].” This is known as unconscious transference. The victim sees a face after the crime that looks similar to the real perpetrator’s face, and they transpose the new face into their memory of the incident (http://psycnet.apa.org/journals/apl/86/6/1280.pdf). In other words, cops need to be extremely careful in how they handle eyewitnesses before they are asked to select a suspect in a lineup if they want proper results.

1) Chapter 7 is about eyewitness identification and testimony. This chapter goes into great detail about how eyewitness’ can affect the outcome of a trial by only on what they can recall from a crime. This chapter was broken down into four main sections. The first section was eyewitness testimony and the legal system. This section explained the concept of the Manson Criteria which are five factors that need to be taken into account evaluating an eyewitness’s identification accuracy. This section also explained ways the legal system attempts to expose eyewitness bias. The idea of voir dire which is the questioning of potential jurors to expose potentially biased jurors. However, even through questioning it is still unsure whether jurors with take eyewitness testimonies with skepticism. The second section is the construction and reconstruction of eyewitness memories. This section explains factors that can potentially contaminate or make eyewitnesses less reliable. Cross-Racial identifications are when a person is more biased to races other than their own. It is harder for people to recognize faces outside of their own racial group than people within their racial group. This section also explains how stress and the effects of a weapon being present during the crime can have an effect on eyewitnesses. Even though stress does trigger a person’s senses to be heightened, this can have a negative effect on what they are able to recall later about the crime. Also when a weapon is present, the eyewitness is more likely to keep their eyes on the weapon and not on the assailant, therefore making it harder for them to recall who the criminal was. Other things that can affect an eyewitnesses reliability is unconscious transference, which is taking someone you have seen earlier and putting their face onto the perpetrator. Another is leading or suggestive questions. This is when prosecutors will ask questions and just by changing a few words, can completely change a person’s memory of what really happened. Pre-existing expectations, this is when a person has an idea of what should happen in a situation and their mind unconsciously fills that into a scenario, these can be detrimental, especially if these expectations are wrong. The third section is using findings to improve eyewitness accuracy. The seven ways to do this is 1) blind lineup administrators, 2) bias-reducing instructions to eyewitnesses, 3) unbiased lineups, 4) confidence ratings, 5) video recording, 6) sequential lineups, and 7) expert testimony. The fourth section is this book is techniques for refreshing the memories of witnesses and they were through hypnosis, however hypnosis has a way of eliciting false memories while raising the amount of suggestive questioning and heightening the witnesses sense of confidence. The cognitive interview is a more effective way of refreshing a witness’s memory.
2) The thing I found most interesting was the fact that eyewitness testimonies are almost more important than the actual evidence in a case. On page 141 there was a study done on 347 cases in which the only evidence was an eyewitness testimony. If I was a person on trial and I sincerely had nothing to do with the crime, I would hope to God that the witness has impeccable memory because that would be the difference between me living my life behind bars or as a free person. I think as an eyewitness that would be psychologically draining on you if you were the ONLY evidence in a trial. As a witness, even if I was right, I think I would second guess myself a lot! “Is that what really happened? Was his coat black, or was it dark blue?” Those questions start to jumble in your head when you think about the whole picture and how you have someone’s life in your hands.
3) The thing I found most surprising in this chapter was the idea of leading or suggestive comments. I don’t think it seems fair to do that in a trial. The evidence even shows that by doing this it leads jurors/witnesses etc. to see things they didn’t actually see. Prosecutors can almost make people believe what they want them to believe just by how they word a question or state a phrase. Guess that goes to show, if you have a very smart, manipulative and charismatic lawyer, you are going to win the case. It is scary to think how the attorneys can not only affect you emotionally but psychologically and get into your head to lean the way they want you to in a case. Another thing that surprised me was how much of the things we do are unconscious. How we unconsciously transfer faces, or use scripts to fill in a scenario, also how an eyewitness could be wrong about what they are saying, but they truly think they are right and so you can’t call them a liar.
4) The issue I want to learn more about is the statistics on people found guilty when really innocent, and the reasons behind these huge mistakes.

http://www.innocenceproject.org/Content/When_the_Innocent_Plead_Guilty.php?gclid=COinwKuZrKsCFQLBKgodjjRc6w This website covers people who pleaded guilty even though they weren’t because of the way they were psychologically manipulated by the system.

http://www.forensicscience.net/innocent-people This website reveals the stories of 5 people found innocent after spending time in jail. In the case of Ralph Armstrong the witness was hypnotized! Also, in the case of Luis Diaz, even though he didn’t fit the description what so ever of the assailant, he was picked out of a lineup and pointed out in the courtroom!

This chapter was about eyewitness memory and how unreliable it is when not taken with a grain of salt. Memory can be affected during any stage of it. Whether it is encoding the information, storing it, or retrieving it, there is always a potential for the memory to get distorted. Not only that, but this chapter went on to explain that higher stress situations, which victims and suspects are usually under, make a person more prone to forget valuable information. Also, misleading questions during interviews make a person more liable to give inaccurate information. Things such as cross race biases affect memory as well. People trying to identify a suspect of a different race tend to have a harder time identifying someone correctly, as compared to someone of the same race. With problems like these, the book went on to tell me that it is a problem for jurors to weigh eyewitness testimonies as highly as they do. One of the things that affect how the jurors view a testimony the most, is the confidence that the witness has in his or her testimony. This is a problem because as time goes by, witnesses tend to become more confident in their usually uncertain decisions concerning suspects and memory recall. This gain in confidence, more times than not, is not accurate of what really happened. It is the witness rationalizing that they were right so that they can reach a comfortable level of cognitive dissonance. So when jurors take into consideration more strongly how a witness feels based on confidence, you run into some major issues.

So how does the book suggest improving eyewitness accuracy? by seven, inexpensive ways. The first is having a blind administrator. Many times an administrator knows who the suspect is in a line up, and the witness tends to look for ques from the administrator. Second, just letting the eyewitness know that the criminal may or may not be in the lineup. Also tell them that their administrator doesn't know who it is as well. Third, an unbiased lineup, one where the suspected criminal doesn't completely stand out from the rest of the sample, will help reduce eyewitness bias. Fourth, confidence ratings should be taken immediately after the lineup, because confidence tends to increase inaccurately over time. Fifth, recording the eyewitness identification procedures will allow people to have an objective record of what occurred during the process. Six, sequential lineups. Showing a witness one photo at a time makes it so that they are unable to compare the photos to one another, thus avoiding choosing the one that just looks most like the suspect they remember. And finally, seven. Expert testimony during trial to make aware how reliable eyewitness testimony might or might not be in any given case. These seven things are inexpensive solutions to help make eyewitness memory and testimony more accurate.

the most interesting thing I learned was about hypnosis. I didn't realize that it was used in law enforcement the way it was. I've always been familiar with it as the power of suggestion, and suggestion being a keyword, I figured it wouldn't be applicable in law enforcement really. The idea is when you're hypnotized, you enter a state that allows you to recall information that you wouldn't otherwise. While occasionally this has been found to be useful, more often than not, it brings about false details. When a person is in a hypnotic state, they may fill in the crime unknowingly with plausible situations that could have gone along with the crime. This happens regardless of whether or not certain events actually occurred. Then afterwards, the witness has a tendency to become more confident in what they remember, adding to the problem.

The thing that surprised me most was the idea of unconscious transference. The idea that something from another context can be distilled to the memory of another context. As in the case of Jennifer Thompson in wrongly convicting Ronald Cotton. Even after they learned of his innocence, Jennifer to this day claims that she only sees Cotton's face when she looks back at it. The case that surprised me most was that concerning the man who coined unconscious transference, Donald Thompson. A woman identified Donald as the man who raped her, but at the time of the rape, Donald was at a television studio giving an interview about how unreliable memory could be. This is a great example of what unconscious transference is!

http://www.mayoclinic.com/health/hypnosis/MY01020/DSECTION=risks this website is brought to you by the Mayo Clinic. It shows how it can be used to treat medical conditions, and which ones. It should also be noted that it too points out that memory recollection is controversial and not very reliable.

http://www.hypnosis.edu/?gclid=CMqP26yRzqwCFQfsKgod0xOMgw This website takes you to an accredited hypnosis training college. Information about the college and staff can be found here. I had no clue that there was a school for hypnosis.