For this week, read Ch 7 in C&K on eyewitness identification and testimony.
Summarize the chapter. What is the most interesting thing you learned? What surprised you the most? What is something you want to learn more about? Search on that topic and report on some additional information about that topic. Provide any links to resources.
Your posts should be getting progressively longer and more detailed. You should clearly link psychology to the legal context under evaluation.
Chapter 7 dealt with eyewitness testimony. For me most of this chapter was review because I am currently doing my own eyewitness memory research and have read many articles on the subject. It was a nice overview of everything and I still found it interesting. The chapter starts out giving an example of a real life case where eyewitness testimony was not accurate. The story shows that although an eyewitness may feel certain their identification of the perpetrator is correct, innocent men and women are still convicted of crimes they did not commit.
Historically people have viewed eyewitness testimony as one of the most compelling forms of evidence in a trial. Most of the time when an eyewitness identifies somebody, that person is convicted. This is a problem when the identification is incorrect and according to research, most of the time it is incorrect. Over time, courts have developed a list of criteria that are meant to judge the quality of an eyewitnesses account. These criteria are based on the witnesses ability to see the perpetrator, the witness’s level of attention, the accuracy of the witness’s first description, the witness’s degree of certainty, and the amount of time that has elapsed between the crime and making the identification. However, these criteria are hard to measure and most of them are measured based on the eyewitness’s information. Only they can tell the police how well they could see the victim or how certain they are, which make this an issue of reliability.
Research has discovered a number of variables that can affect an eyewitness’s memory or ability to recall a criminal event. These variables include: Cross-racial identification, amount of stress or presence of a weapon, unconscious transference, leading or suggestive comments, scripts, age of the eyewitness, and confidence of the eyewitness. All of these can affect an eyewitness’s ability to remember events correctly. Due to extensive research on all of these variables a set of seven guidelines has been created in attempt to eliminate some of these variables. The guidelines are as follows: 1) Blind Lineup Administrators, 2) Bias-Reducing Instructions, 3) Unbiased Lineups, 4) Confidence Ratings, 5) Video Recording, 6) Sequential Lineups, and 7) Expert Testimony.
What surprised me the most about this chapter was the number of cases that solely relied on eyewitness testimony and the amount of convictions these cases led towards. I always thought that there would need to be more evidence in order to convict someone. I would like to learn more about the use of hypnosis to retrieve memories. Although I am skeptical of its usefulness I do find it interesting. I am also interested in the use of children as eyewitnesses. I can definitely see how they would be very difficult to interview and somewhat unreliable.
Through my research I have read a number of studies. One such study was performed by Gudjonsson (2003). This study somewhat relates to the topic of children as eyewitnesses which was discussed in the chapter however, this can also be applied to adults. Interpersonal trust is a term used by the researcher, and it refers to when the “interviewee believes that the interrogator’s intentions are genuine and that there is no trickery involved in the questioning”. When an eyewitness is being questioned and the interviewer is using suggestive comments or leading questions, an eyewitness is very likely to fall for the interviewers biases. Many people view members of the criminal justice system as professional and honest so they don’t expect them to deceive them purposefully or accidently.
While researching articles for my own research, one of the first websites I came across was the Innocence Project site. The Innocence Project is a “national litigation and public policy organization dedicated to exonerating wrongfully convicted individuals”. The development of better technology has allowed this project to retest DNA and discover an alternate truth to some crimes. There are many organizations that have the same goal as the Innocence Project.
http://www.innocenceproject.org/
At the beginning of this chapter it tells a story about how eye witness testimony can go wrong. It is hard to believe that our memory can play such tricks on us. Eye witness testimony is one of the most unreliable types of evidence, but yet it is a very persuasive form of evidence to the jury because of the fact that the eye witnesses were there. The Manson Criteria has five factors that are looked at when taking eye witness testimony into consideration. The following are the five factors: 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. The problem with the Manson Criteria is that some of the factors can’t be measured. Also you have to rely on the witness to provide the measurements. There are a lot of weaknesses in eye witness testimony like time of night, distance, and whether the witness has good eye sight. Voir dire is done so that when the jury is being picked they can get rid of any potential jurors who have biases.
Researchers have come up with biases that have some influence in the eye witness’ memory. One of the biases is cross-race effect. Cross-race effect is when a person in one race has a better chance of describing someone of their own race rather than one in a different race. Own race identification is more likely to be accurate. The second one is the weapon focus effect. The weapon focus effect is when the eyewitness is distracted by the weapon, which causes them to not look at the person holding the weapon, but instead look at the weapon in there hand. The third one is unconscious transference. Unconscious transference is the eyewitness unconsciously puts a familiar face of someone they have seen before to the actually perpetrator who may look similar to the familiar person. A fourth bias is retrieval inhibition, which is when the eyewitness has a selective memory and only can remember certain things about the crime. A fifth bias is called scripts. Scripts is when you know what to expect about a certain situation so you are less alert and scripts fill in the gaps in your memory which can than make them false memories. A sixth bias is post identification feedback effect, which is when the eyewitness receives biased information and that causes them to have distorted memories. Post identification has to do with the confidence of the witness. The last bias is when the eyewitness is a child. Children are easily persuaded to make a decision and usually the decision they make will be wrong, but if it is what the adult wants then they will praise the child. Most of these biases have to do with social psychology because they are when the eyewitness is in the social situation. Also they relate to behavioral psychology because it is taking there behaviors into account. For example, the behavior of the people when a weapon is in play, weapon focuses effect.
Researches have come up with seven ways to improve eyewitness testimony. They are blind lineup administrators, bias-reducing instructions, unbiased lineups, confidence ratings, video recording, sequential lineups, and expert testimony. A blind Lineup administrator is when the person running the lineup or photo spread doesn’t know which person in the lineup or photo is the suspect. The bias-reducing instruction is when the eyewitness is told that the suspect might not be in the lineup or photo spread. Also the witness is supposed to be told that the person conducting the lineup doesn’t know who the suspect is either. Unbiased line ups are when people who didn’t see the crime look at the lineup or pictures to see if they can pick out the suspect based on some descriptions, if the person can pick out the suspect than the lineup may be biased. Confidence ratings of the eyewitness can change from the time of the lineup to the time of the trail. In order to get an accurate rating someone should record the confidence of the witness right after they pick out the culprit, but before anyone gives them feedback. Video recording should be used at every opportunity so that people are able to see how the eyewitness is reacting. For example video tape a person as they are looking at the lineup. Sequential lineups is when the eyewitness looks at one person or picture at a time, says if they are or are not the perpetrator, and then move on to the next person or picture. The final one is expert testimony. Expert testimony should be used in trail to give information on eyewitness testimony. I think that all of this relates to experimental psychology because of the fact that they had to try different types of experiments on people to see what would work well for eyewitnesses.
Some techniques for refreshing the memories of witnesses are hypnosis and a cognitive interview. Hypnosis is when the eyewitness enters a relaxed state and is highly away of suggestions made by the hypnotist. When the witness is in the trance they are asked to rewitness the event. The cognitive interview involves a subtle step-by-step procedure designed to relax the witness and to mentally reinstate the context surrounding the crime. The main goal of cognitive interviews is to retrieve accurate information while avoiding the suggestibility of hypnosis.
One of the most interesting things that I learned about was that people are more likely to remember what someone looks like if they are of the same race. I thought it was interesting that just because someone is a different race makes it harder to identify them. The most surprising thing that I learned about was that wrongful eyewitness testimony is a major cause of wrongful convictions. I find it surprising that our mind can play tricks on us like that. I would like to learn more about cross-racial identification because again I just found it interesting.
http://academic.udayton.edu/race/03justice/justice03.htm
On this website it says that the white race has a harder time of recognizing black subjects, but cross-racial impairment doesn’t affect black people.
http://www.innocenceproject.org/Content/Facts_on_PostConviction_DNA_Exonerations.php
The innocence project is where they use DNA evidence to get innocent people out of jail. On a section of this page it says that almost 75% of wrongful convictions were traced to eyewitness misidentification. It also says that of that 75%, 40% were related to cross-racial identification.
This chapter focuses on the validity and usefulness of eyewitness testimony for use in trial. It begins with the story of a man who was wrongly convicted for rape after a seemingly perfect eyewitness testimony was presented in court. DNA testing later proved the man’s innocence and led to the conviction of another. When determining the validity and usefulness of eyewitness testimony, one must consider the “Manson Criteria” involving evaluations of how long the witness had to view the perpetrator, the lighting at the time, and the level of attention, among other things. Cross-racial identification has proven to be more inaccurate than within race identification, probably because many people spend more time looking at people within their own race. Heightened stress levels present during which the witness is viewing the perpetrator have also shown to lead to more inaccurate identifications than low stress situations. This also relates to the weapon focus effect which states that an eyewitness’s ability to identify someone will be decreased if the individual is holding a gun or other weapon. Though eyewitness testimony still holds a lot of value to many jurors in courtrooms today there are obviously more factors to think about when determining the validity of it than there were 50 years ago.
Leading comments given by law enforcement and other conditions like scripts can also very easily lead to recounting false memories. It is becoming overwhelmingly important for law enforcement to take special care when dealing with eyewitnesses. This includes but is not limited to having a blind lineup, recording identification processes, and providing sequential lineups. While hypnosis may seem like the perfect way to help someone recount their experiences and remember what they saw, it has little weight among psychologists and courtrooms as they view it very suspiciously. The cognitive interview, however, is a process that has been developed to help put the witness at ease and recall the situation of the crime. Though research has shown that this technique improves the retrieval of accurate information, this procedure is not widely used in the United States.
What I found most surprising about this chapter is that children are almost as accurate as adults as eyewitnesses when they are identifying perpetrators via lineups or photo spreads, but only if the real perpetrator is there. I did not expect that children would be able to recall someone’s face that easily, especially since eyewitness testimony is so shaky to begin with. It did not come as a surprise, however, that children are more susceptible to suggestions and leading comments.
The most interesting thing in this chapter to me was the section about unconscious transference. As scary as it may be that our mind frequently tricks us, it is pretty cool how it works. With a familiar face from one setting being transferred into another, such as the scene of a crime, it may be easy to incorrectly identify someone. The short story about the misidentification of a psychologist from t.v. as a rapist is a very good example of this.
Stress can play a big role in whether or not an individual will be able to recognize someone correctly at a later time. The first study I read talked about how there is a very significant negative relationship between anxiety and the ability to correctly identify someone who was previously encountered in a stressful situation. When narrowed down to include differences in gender, it was also found that women are likely to experience higher stress and anxiety levels than men, thus leading to less reliable identifications. http://eyeid.wordpress.com/2008/07/23/new-study-shows-catastrophic-effect-of-stress-on-eyewitness-accuracy/
Eyewitness testimony is becoming more and more widely studied in the field of psychology because of its relation to human memory and the functions of the brain. Both physical and psychological factors come into play when determining the amount of stress an individual is under at any given time. Once the flight or fight response has been triggered, the ability to recall information is highly likely to decrease. Increased heart rate and blood pressure are likely to make the individual hyperaware of the anxiety he/she is feeling. Other factors such as phobias or social disorders may also lead to higher stress levels and therefore more inaccurate identifications. http://www.uclan.ac.uk/information/services/ldu/research/effects_stress_facial_composites.php
Chapter seven is about eye witnesses and testimony. It starts out with a case about Jennifer Thompson. She was a 22 year old college student that got beaten and raped one night. She saw her raper and gave a vivid description of the perputrator. She idenifed a man named Ronald Cotton, and he got convicted of the rape. The thing is that the man who raped Jennifer also raped another woman that night and the other woman didnt idenify the same man. Later Ronald Cotton got aquited of the charges because a semen sample was found at the scene that wasnt his. It was the other man. This just shows us that the relability of eye witnesses isnt as good as we as a people believe it to be. Then it goes and talks about eyewitness testimony and the legal system. This section just keeps going into how an eyewitness isnt as good as we think. Then talks about the manson criteria which is five factors that should be taken into account when evaluting the accuracy of an eyewitness's idenification. Then it starts to tell us how the legal system attempts to expose eyewitness bias, and this is done by cross examination by the defense attorney. These are things like if it was dark, or how far the witness was from the crime. Then chapter 7 goes on to tell us about cross racial idenifications. Which comes to some up that w people are better at idenifiying people in their racial group. Then it goes on to tell us about weapon focus effect, unconscious transfer, retrieval inhibition, and scripts. Weapon focus effect is if the eyewitness sees perp holding a gunn or knife their ability to recognize the perp is impaired, unconscious transference is when a person is wrongly idenified at the crime scene because they were near the scene or part of the idenification process, retrieval inhibition is the process of selectivly retrieving only some aspects of a scene ihibits recall of other aspects, and scripts are widely held beliefs about sequences of action that typically occur in particular situations. It also talks about the confidence of a witness. This leads into the idea of postidenification feedback effect and this helps cognitive dissonace. Children are worse at being an eyewitnesses. Now it talks about how to improve eyewitness accuracy and this can be done with estimator variables and system variables. This is done by blind lineup administrators, bias reducing instructions, unbiased lineups, eyewitness confidence, recording the idenification process, sequential lineups, and expert testimony. Then it talks about techniques for refreshing memories of eyewitness, and these things are like hypnosis because when hypnonized they can single in on certain factors like color of car, license plate, or type of car. The other is called the cognitive interview which is a subtle step by step procedure designed to relax the witness and to mentally reinstate the context surrounding the crime. The most interesting thing that I learned was the ineffectiveness of eyewitness testimony in cases. I had always went with the pop culture Law and Order eyewitness. By this I mean that the eyewitness unless a convicted liar is a solid idenification of perp. This was also the thing that surprized me the most. I would like to know more about weapon focus effect. If found out more on this topic on http://www.cacs.louisiana.edu/~maida/ICScolloqCurrent/fall03/saundersFall03.html
On this website I found out that weapon focus effect occurs only when crime witnesses focus on the weapon. This takes away from memorizing the face of the perp. This study explored the effect on the weapon focus phenomenon of the weapons location in the crime scene. Participants watched a video of a staged assault containing a weapon in the center of the scene, on the visual periphery, or no weapon at all. They expected that the peripheral weapon would draw attention away from the face, making the effect worse.The lineup recognition accuracy was poorer when a weapon was present. Recognition accuracy wasnt affected by the weapons position. The participants confidence ratings were lower when the weapon was in the visual periphery than when there was no weapon.
Chapter 7 covers eyewitness identification and testimony. The beginning of the chapter tells of a case of a man who was found guilty of rape. There was very little evidence against him, but the woman who was raped positively identified him twice as the man who raped her. Later a second victim identified him as the one who raped her was well. Years later DNA testing showed that he was in fact not guilty of the crimes. This story tells how eyewitness identification can sometimes have flaws. The woman was 100% sure that she had identified the correct man, however an innocent man was sent to prison.
To help evaluate eyewitness identification, there are criteria called the Mason Criteria. These include five factors that should be considered regarding the accuracy of the eyewitness identification. These criteria include 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. There are some cons with this criterion. Many of these include the fact that these criterion are based on self-report.
There are several other issues regarding eyewitness identifications as well. There is something called the cross-race effect which states that it is more difficult for people to recognize faces of people outside their racial group. It also states that it is easier for people to identify faces within their own racial group. Stress also has an effect on eyewitness identification. Crimes trigger stress, but the stress has a relatively negative effect on the identifications made. Studies found that high stress impairs memory, which leads to incorrect identifications. In association with stress called the weapon-focus effect. This tells that when a weapon is present, the eyewitness is less likely to be able to the focus on the person holding it.
The American Psychology-Law Society did research to develop guidelines for obtaining information from eyewitnesses. They came up with reforms to decrease the amount of mistaken identifications. This includes blind lineup administrators, this helps to ensure that the suspicions of detectives are not communicated to the eyewitness. Another is that give bias-reducing instructions. This will made it known that the witness does not have to pick someone from the lineup. There should also be unbiased lineups created so that the true suspect doesn’t stand out from the others present. The eyewitnesses should also be asked how confident they are about the person they identified. Identification should be video recorded so others can see what happened during the process. There should be sequential lineups, and finally, an expert on eyewitness identification should testify to summarize research findings on the conditions.
The most interesting thing that I learned was that cognitive interviews and hypnosis can be used to refresh the memories of witnesses. I did not realize that these methods could be used to help witnesses to remember critical details. The most surprising thing that I learned was that when a weapon is present, the witness is less likely to be able to identify the person who was holding the weapon. I realized that it would increase the intensity of the situation, but I did not realize the consequences. I would like to learn more about wrongful eyewitness identification.
This website tells of a scenario that ABC News put together. They set up a robbery at an outdoor café. A person who was very close to the robber was wrong in his identification. 25% of the customers identified the wrong person as the thief. They also set up a cross-racial identification. In this, every African-American witness correctly chose the African-American thief. 70% of white individuals chose someone other than the thief.
http://abcnews.go.com/Primetime/WhatWouldYouDo/story?id=4521253&page=2#.TzCSQeTX9AU
This site says that eyewitness misidentification is the greatest cause of wrongful convictions. More than 75% of convictions are overturned by DNA testing. This website is called the Innocence Project. This group works to exonerate wrongfully convicted individuals by DNA testing. They also work on reforms to the criminal justice system. I was surprised that there was a group solely dedicated to ensure the wrong people do not serve time for crimes they did not commit, but it was also somewhat comforting.
http://www.innocenceproject.org/understand/Eyewitness-Misidentification.php
There has also been research done on wrongful convictions in regards to those facing the death penalty. The Northwestern Law School looked at cases of 86 exonerees. Eyewitness error, government misconduct, junk science, and snitch testimony are a very of the reasons why the wrong people were convicted.
http://deathpenaltyinfo.org/causes-wrongful-convictions
This chapter addresses the topic of eyewitness testimony and the many psychological components that are involved. The prologue to Chapter 7 addresses the problematic case of the rape of Jennifer Thompson. After extensive work with her witness testimony and police sketch artists, officials detained Ronald Cotton. Cotton was convicted and would spend his eight years in prison trying to overturn his verdict. Unfortunately, eight years later DNA evidence proved Cotton's innocence. Furthermore, this case provided a terrible example of how psychological interference can occasionally lead to conviction of innocent people. This has become a significant liability in the legal world, especially because eyewitness misidentification is main reason contributing to conviction of innocent individuals. This chapter discusses in detail psychological components involved eyewitness testimonty and the legal realm such as the Manson criteria, cross-race effect, unconscious transference, witness confidence, and methods that are being applied to improve the accuracy of eyewitness testimony in the legal system.
Several psychological principles prove to be especially problematic with eyewitness testimony. The cross-race effect is the principle that proves eyewitness testimony becomes less accurate when the witness is identifying a potential perpatrator of another race. Whereas the accuracy improves when identification is being made within the same particular racial group. Another principle that is problematic is the problem of victim unconscious transference. In this situation the victim will subconsciously transfer the identity of an individual who might have been present prior to or in the aftermath of a crime as the identity of the actual perpatrator. Additionally, victims may have trouble recalling specific components of the scene of the crime such as what the perp was wearing, how dark it was, the surroundings of the scene, etc. This is known as retrievel inhibition. This results from the victim focusing on some elements of the scene more than others. All of these psychological barriers result from errors that occur during the encoding phase of the memory and thought processes.
Efforts are being made to improve the accuracy and legitimacy of eyewitness testimony within the court room. These measures, if applied correctly, can lead to greater conviction of guilty individuals and fewer incidences of innocent individuals going to prison. The seven guidelines that have been implemented consist of Blind Lineup Administrators, Bias-Reducing Instructions to Eyewitnesses, Unbiased Lineups, Confidence Ratings, Video Recording, Sequential Lineups, and the use of Expert Testimony. The proper administration of these techniques will assuredly have a positive impact on eyewitness testimony for both the psychological and legal worlds.
The most interesting part of Chapter 7 was the portion that addressed the use of hypnosis to recover sensory memory. Hypnosis is usually used in cases where victims memory might be missing some small elements that are crucial to the case. Hypnosis allows victims to recall more information that was possible when they are conscious. This is known as hypnotic hypernesia. Although hypnosis can uncover crucial details at times, it can be problematic because victims sometimes subconsciously fill empty memory space with fictional material in order to fufill their account. Regardless, hypnosis is still an effective method to be utilized in eyewitness testimony.
I was truly surprised at how an individual's racial group can affect the accuracy of their eyewitness testimony. Personally, I have never had trouble discerning between individuals faces, no matter what racial group they're part of. The idea of "they all look the same to me" is universal across all racial groups. That sentence alone was a surprise to me. Fortunately, learning this has given me a more universal perception on racial interpretation.
One thing that I wanted to investigate a little more is how an eyewitness's confidence has an effect on the legal procedure. After visiting this particular website a learned a little more about this relationship. Jurors commonly invest too much confidence within the testimony of eyewitnesses, and they rarely can interperet whether the testimony being given is done in a confident fashion or not. Additionally, juror conclusions are rarely swayed by legal methods such as cross examination and judge instruction. Learning about this makes me question whether the seven procedures listed above have an influence in the trial proceeding at all. Fortunately, this site confirms that expert testimony can help to reveal the accuracy of eyewitness testimony. This chapter has revealed several interesting psychological issues that are relevant in the legal procedure today.
(Forgot to list the link behind the last paragraph of my entry, so here it is.)
http://psycnet.apa.org/journals/law/1/4/817.html
This was a very interesting chapter. It started off with another peculiar case about a rape victim who while the attack was taking place she studied her rapists face and still wound up identifying the wrong man. The chapter talked about all that eye witness testimony entailed and the actual witnessing of a crime. There are many psychological factors that go into eye witness testimony including, scripts we follow, perception, ane memory.
The most interesting thing I have learned from the reading is that humans follow scripts so basically what we are expecting to see can affect what we really see. Our brain does this to be more efficient so anything that we do not find aruosing it dosen't come up on our radar. I found this interesting because individuals who are very attentive would argue that this does not happen to them. Regaurdless, it's all about perception.
I wanted to learn more about stress and weapons focus because it correlated directly to a personal experience, my mother was held at gun point in our own home for about thirty minutes now, my mother is normally a very detailed oriented person so it shoked me whil listening to my mothers ststement and she could not tell the police anything, honestly with a gun to my head I do not know how much I could remember. I looked around the internet a found some research from a study done on weapons focus and it provided great clarity to me.
http://www.simplypsychology.org/eyewitness-testimony.html
The subject for chapter 7 was eyewitness identification and testimony. Now one of the most compelling things that they outline is that eyewitness identification and testimony is one of the most important things during the trial if not the most important thing. Now when the book was going into detail they talked about the Mason Criteria. The Mason Criteria had five separate parts to it. The first part of this is whether the witness actually has an opportunity to view the perpetrator committing the crime. The next part is what level of attention did the witness have. This means what was the activity the witness was doing and if the witness was under any substances like alcohol. Another factor is the level of accuracy that the witness showed when describing the perp. The more accurate the witness is then the more credible he is. Another part is how certain the witness is that he saw what he saw. Since there is a lot that can ride on a testimony this plays a huge factor in the trial. The final part in the lapse in time between witnessing and the identification. As time goes on then one might not remember certain details as well as when it is fresh in their mind.
Some other main points of the chapter talked about reasons the witness might not be able to identify the perpetrator. One of the main points of concern was if the perp had a weapon or not. When the perp has a weapon the witness is less likely to be able to identify the person because the witnesses stress level raises and they only focus on the weapon. Another thing I felt was pretty interesting is what the police and criminal justice system can do in order to help refresh a witnesses mind. One way that they can do this is by putting them under hypnosis. When thinking of this I think that this is able to give the justice system and upper hand because that potential witness might be influenced into making a certain decision.
When I decided to do research I used the website http://www.simplypsychology.org/eyewitness-testimony.html . They gave certain areas on whether the jury may or may not believe the victim. One reason was anxiety/stress. Now for this reason if the the witness is under a good bit of stress they are more likely not to identify the perpetrator correctly.
Another area this website went into was the witnesses reconstructive memory. Basically what they meant by this is that your brain is always story information from things you see, hear, or touch. Then at a later date your brain uses all of those key images to paint a picture in the form of a memory. The witness can then use this function to determine or explain how the crime went down and possibly identify the correct perpetrator.
The subject for chapter 7 was eyewitness identification and testimony. Now one of the most compelling things that they outline is that eyewitness identification and testimony is one of the most important things during the trial if not the most important thing. Now when the book was going into detail they talked about the Mason Criteria. The Mason Criteria had five separate parts to it. The first part of this is whether the witness actually has an opportunity to view the perpetrator committing the crime. The next part is what level of attention did the witness have. This means what was the activity the witness was doing and if the witness was under any substances like alcohol. Another factor is the level of accuracy that the witness showed when describing the perp. The more accurate the witness is then the more credible he is. Another part is how certain the witness is that he saw what he saw. Since there is a lot that can ride on a testimony this plays a huge factor in the trial. The final part in the lapse in time between witnessing and the identification. As time goes on then one might not remember certain details as well as when it is fresh in their mind.
Some other main points of the chapter talked about reasons the witness might not be able to identify the perpetrator. One of the main points of concern was if the perp had a weapon or not. When the perp has a weapon the witness is less likely to be able to identify the person because the witnesses stress level raises and they only focus on the weapon. Another thing I felt was pretty interesting is what the police and criminal justice system can do in order to help refresh a witnesses mind. One way that they can do this is by putting them under hypnosis. When thinking of this I think that this is able to give the justice system and upper hand because that potential witness might be influenced into making a certain decision.
When I decided to do research I used the website http://www.simplypsychology.org/eyewitness-testimony.html . They gave certain areas on whether the jury may or may not believe the victim. One reason was anxiety/stress. Now for this reason if the the witness is under a good bit of stress they are more likely not to identify the perpetrator correctly.
Another area this website went into was the witnesses reconstructive memory. Basically what they meant by this is that your brain is always story information from things you see, hear, or touch. Then at a later date your brain uses all of those key images to paint a picture in the form of a memory. The witness can then use this function to determine or explain how the crime went down and possibly identify the correct perpetrator.
This chapter discussed the importance of an eyewitnesses testimony. The chapter with a story where a women had wrongly identified her perpetrator making an innocent man spend 11 years of his life in prison. This just goes to show that an eyewitness is extremely persuasive to the jury. Psychologists have broken down a person's memory into 3 components. The first is encoding, the process of gathering information and putting it together in a way to be held in the brain. The second is storage, which is the process of holding information in your brain for a period of time.The third is retrieval, which is later pulling out the stored information. These areas a critical to an eyewitness because people sometimes add to what actually occured. What I found really surprising in this chapter is how research has proven an eyewitness testimony is the number one use of evidence in convicting innocent people. This is why the courts have spmetimes used Mason criteria when determining the accuracy of an eyewitnesses testimony. They look at the witnesses opprotunity to view the prepertrator, their attention level, the accuracy of their description, their amount of certainty, and the amount of time between the crime and the identification. These factors can be affected throughout the court process because witnesses are more likely to become more certain when making an identification and they believe they know exactly what they saw. This can sometimes lead to more misidentifications.The court tries to decrease the levels of a witnesses bias through voir dire,cross-examination, and jury deliberation. Although these sound like good tools, they are not always the most effective. Some jurors do not properly know how to break down and understand the certainty of an eyewitnesses testiomony, and it is know that jurors put to much faith behind the idea that a eyewitness is accurate.
Something I found interesting in this chapter was the cross-race effect. This is stating that people within the same race will be more accurate in identifying a prepetrator. People from different races have a more difficult time identifying each other because people are known to think "they all look the same." This was shown at the beginning of the chapter between Jennifer and Ronald. I didn't know how much race played a role in the accuracy of an identification. Researchers are not positive of what causes this, but it is assumed that people of the same race take more time distinguishing other peoples characteristics within their own race.
Another interesting fact is when a person is under high amounts of stress it will negatively impair their memory. It was found that the rate of correct indentification declines when the witness is under high stress. The weapon focus attempt also ties in with this. A person is more likely to focus their attention on a weapon being pointed at them rather than the person holding the weapon. Unconcsious transference also alters a witnesses memory. This is when a witness tranfers a familiar face to the crime scene even though they weren't the prepetrator. An eyewitness may be influenced by the questions they are initially asked about the crime. A study shows by simply changing a couple of words in a question will receive very different recollections of what happened. Also witnesses are more likely to remember aspects of the scene if they were asked questions about them right away, but they tend to forget the objects that were not intitially asked about. This is known as retrieval inhibition. Scripts play a role in remembering a crime. Scripts are "widely held beliefs about sequences of actions that typically occur in particular situations." (p.149) When there are spaces in our memorys are brain tends to fill them with these scripts. A witness with lots of confidence persuades the judge and jury more than a not so sure witness would. Witnesses become more confident with their identification based on feedback. If they were told they picked the man from the crime, they will be more confident the next time they identify him. Cognitive dissonance makes a witness more confident too. Once they've identified a person they don't want to be wrong so they become more certain of what they saw. Child testimonys are usually less accurate than adults. They are easily persuaded by what they hear from police officers.
To help decrease the amount of mistaken identification the justice system should focus on sysem variables. These are how line ups are constructed, how a witness is questioned, and so on. This is why guidelines were created for the police and investigators to follow. First is the blind lineup administrator, which means the person constructing the line up should not know how the perceived suspect is. If they do they may accidentally show their opion to the witness, which may alter her identification. Second, administrators of the lineup should use bias-reducing instruction. This just tells the eyewitness the prepertrator may not be in the lineup. Third, all lineups should be unbiased, and the suspect should not stand out from everyone else. Fourth, the witnesses confidence level at the initial lineup should be recorded before she is given any feedback. This is done because confidence grows over time, and the witness will be more confident at trial than they were at the lineup. Fifth, it is suggested to video record the lineup to have a visual and audio of the actual lineup for the courtroom. Sixth, the witness should be given a sequential lineup where they can focus on one person at a time instead of comparing the characteristics of the fillers in the room. Lastly, an expert witness should be used in court to describe to the jurors what increases and decreases a witnesses accuracy of recalling a crime.
Since some witnesses cannot clearly recall what happened, there are different methods to help refresh their memory. For example, hypnosis is sometimes used. This puts a person in a more relaxed and focused state. Although a person may be able to fill in the blanks to their memory under hypnosis the information is not always correct. This is why the testimony of information found through hypnosis is not always allowed in court because the witness didn't remember it when he/she was in a normal state. Cognitive interviews are better to use because they are less suggestive. This a 5 step process which relaxes the witness, and then they are asked to recall the events of the crimes multiple times. They do this without any interruption to make sure the witness is not influenced by others.
What I would like to learn more about is the reasoning behind a person focusing on a weapon more than the prepetrator. After I looked at a website I found that a weapon in the victim's peripheral view decreases the accuracy of the indentification. It was also found that the position of the weapon had no effect on the victim's recognitihttp://www.cacs.louisiana.edu/~maida/ICScolloqCurrent/fall03/saundersFall03.htmlon accuracy.
On another website I looked at I learned that the presence of a weapon impairs the victims ability to describe the prepetrator. As the weapon gets becomes easier to see the victim become more scared and anxious; therefore, she is less likely to be able to accurately describe the prepetrator. Keri Pickel did a wonderful job reasoning why this happens. She said, "weapons attract witnesses' visual attention, so that other details receive less perceptual processing than when no weapon is present." (p. 299) This website helped be realize the brain is focusing on the weapon because it is creating a high stress environment for the victim, and they are too scared to focus on anything other than the weapon.
http://www.jstor.org/pss/1394355
This chapter began with a story of a woman named Jennifer who had been raped in her apartment by a man. Although she was terrified, she made sure to get all the information she could about her perpetrator as far as his characteristics go. Once she had a good idea of what he looked like, she ran for help. She identified Ronald Cotton who had all of the characteristics she explained and she picked him out of the lineup as well as the pictures. While in prison, Bobby Poole told Cotton he was the one to actual commit the crimes against Jennifer as well as another girl the same night. After DNA testing, Cotton was released and Poole was sentenced to life in prison. Jennifer says she still can only see Cotton's face and not Poole's. I found this story very interesting because there are many cases where the victim is not calm and is sure of the person he or she convicts, but in this case she was calm and made sure to get a solid look at him multiple times. This goes to show anyone can make a mistake because we rely solely on our memory trace, the biochemical representation of our experience in the brain, deteriorates over time.
The chapter then goes into eyewitness testimonies and the legal systems. This goes into explaining things to take into consideration when evaluating an eyewitnesses testimony. I learned there are five factors to take into account when evaluating an eyewitnesses accuracy which are known as the Manson criteria.; 1. Witness's opportunity to view the perpetrator 2. Witness's level of attention 3. Accuracy of witness's previous description of offender 4. degree of certainty displayed by witness 5. amount of time between witnessing the crime and making identification. It goes into explaining how the amount of time the witness was allowed to look at the person committing the crime is a large factor in determining the accuracy of the victim. Many victims will believe they were in the situation three or four times longer than they actually were because the event was very stressful. I also learned about voir dire, which is a term used to expose potentially biased jurors so attorneys can dismiss them from the case. The next subject of matter discussed the construction and reconstruction of eyewitness memories. The first thing explained is it is hard for people from one race to identify a person from a different race than their own. This is known as the cross-race effect. It started out with a story about a An asian man who wrongly identified a young hispanic boy because he said they all looked alike. This shows a person is more likely to be correct on identifications if the culprit is the same race as the victim. Explanations are not definite but some reasons to be believed for this effect is we observe our own race closer than we do other races. We generalize other races but we pay more attention to features of our own race because we have had more experience with our own race. When this subject turned over into stress and weapons, it started with a study done on soldiers during survival training. The soldiers who could accurately identify their interrogator were the ones in low stress condition (71%) and the ones who falsely identified their interrogators were the ones in a high stress condition (58%). I learned high stress impairs memory and reduces the rate of correct identifications , which really surprised me. I thought in a high stress situation you would focus more clearly and be able to remember such an experience. Many people who go through horrific experiences say they remember every bit of it like the back of their hand, but I learned that memory may be wrong. The weapon focus effect is when the victim's ability to recognize the assailant is impaired due to the presence of a weapon. This proved very interesting because I can understand how the person would be more focused on the weapon rather than the face of the perpetrator. The unconscious transference is when a person who is wrongly identified was in fact a person near the crime or seen as part of the process of identifying. I found this very interesting because it could in fact happen many times. A person can remember a face in the room or at the scene and it may stick and he or she may recognize that person right away but it may be wrong. The wording may also be something that may hinder the way a person responds to their testimony. An example in the book gave the phrase "did you see the broken headlight?" compared to "did you see a broken headlight?" These questions have only one word different which can make all the difference. The first reaction of the first phrase were twice as likely to say yes than the second phrase because the person felt like he or she should have seen a broken headlight. What eyewitnesses will also do is rely on scripts. As human beings, we expect a certain even to happen in specific sequences of actions. Even if all of the aspects we expect to be in the situation are not given to us, we will fill them into the blanks. Next, a very interesting subject, was about witness confidence. I learned confidence is not a good indicator of accuracy because the person may obtain more and more confidence as it goes on. As the witness give the description of the person identifies his or her photo, the witness then has a face to memorize and study. The picture in the witness's head becomes a very vivid picture. Biased feedback from the lineup identification tends to distort the memory of eyewitnesses is known as the post identification feedback effect. The witness believes he or she knew exactly who it was and remembers it vividly if he or she received confirming feedback. Those who received disconfirming feedback said he or she was unsure at the time of identification. Cognitive dissonace theory plays a role in this as well. When a person commits him or herself to a certain event or action, he or she becomes motivated to complete that event/action. Once someone has picked out the perpetrator, the person fully believes it is him or her. The chapter then discusses children as the eyewitness. Children provide less accurate information than adults based on what they saw. The chapter goes into using research findings to improve eyewitness accuracy. There are seven guidelines for the police and investigators to follow for the questioning. The first is blind lineup administrators. If a detective is involved, he or she may sway the witness to believe it is a certain person the detective thinks may have done it and this process avoids this. Second, Bias-reducing instructions to eyewitnesses, helps the witness rely on their memory more than feeling pressured to choose a suspect from the lineup. The administrator of the lineup tells the suspect he or she does not know who the person is and the person may not be in the lineup. Third, unbiased lineups, helps so the suspect does not stand out from the fillers, the alternative suspects in the lineup/photo spread. All people in the lineup should resemble each other and match the witness's description. Fourth, confidence ratings, is to obtain a clear statement about how confident the witness is that the person identified is the right person. Confidence rises over time so it may be different by the time of the trial. Fifth, video recording, is to help everyone in trial see and hear what instructions were given, whether members of the lineup resembled one another, what feedback was given, comments, and how confident the person is. Sixth, sequential lineups, is where the witness sees on person at a time to make sure the suspect is not judged in relation to the other fillers in the lineup. Seventh, expert testimony, summarizes research findings on the conditions that increase or decrease eyewitness accuracy. This helps make the jurors more aware of the viewing conditions and lineup conditions of the witness.
The next topic of the chapter discussed techniques for refreshing the memories of witnesses. Hypnosis was a method used in the book to help refresh a witness's memory of the crime. Hypnosis is used to help replay the scene and the witness is asked detailed questions like the license plate number or a face. Hypnotic hypernasia is a phenomenon when people recall more information while they are hypnotized than while they are not. A problem found with hypnosis to refresh a witness's memory is the person hypnotized may elaborate more imaginatively than what really happened at the scene of the crime. Cognitive interviews relaxes the witness and helps him or her mentally reinstate the context surrounding the crime. This basically is a different approach to hypnosis but not putting a person under in sleep, it is more of a relaxation technique.
The most interesting piece of information I have learned is the use of scripts in questioning a witness. I think it is amazing how one little word which may be the difference between the word 'the' and 'a' can determine how the witness reacts. If you say 'the', the witness feels compelled to say they saw that certain item but a makes it more generalized and feels like they can say no more easily. It's an amazing concept.
The most surprising piece from this chapter was the story at the beginning. It is crazy how someone can make sure he or she has seen the perpetrator's face numerous times with the purpose to memorize it and put that person away and have it be completely wrong. Jennifer made sure she saw his face a couple of times before she ran away for help and she convicted an innocent man because he had similar features to the man who actually committed the crimes. That story really surprised me.
I believe social psychology is a large factor in this chapter. When the cross race effect occurs, it is usually because other races are 'foreign' to us compared to our own race. Social psychology plays a role in this because our own race is who we primarily surround ourselves with making us generalize other races and believing they have the same features and all look alike while a person's own race is distinct. The use of memory and cognition in psychology plays a large role in this chapter. In fact it is this entire chapter.
A topic I find interesting and want to learn more about is hypnosis.
This website explains forensic hypnosis. The person performing the hypnosis needs to perform the hypnosis without accidentally installing a suggestion or a memory. Also, this website goes into the case of Ted Bundy where some witnesses underwent hypnosis in his trial. It also saved an innocent man named Sam Sheppard. It also goes into explaining the case of Albert DeSalvo and how he himself underwent forensic hypnosis in that case.
http://lifeloom.com/II1Ritzel.htm
This website below explains forensic hypnosis like the book does but it also taught me some new things as well. I learned hypnosis interview as well as cognitive interviews produced about 30% more correct information than standard questioning. This proved very interesting to me as well as why the person may have increased recall of the crime scene. During hypnosis, they person is relaxed with his or her eyes closed which help block out distractions as well as increase his or her focus on the crime scene itself.
The opening of the paragraph was very surprising. The woman who was raped had 3 different opportunities to see the rapist's face. When she went to the bathroom and turned on the light, when a lap was turned on, and from the light on the radio system. But even that wasn't enough for her brain to be able to store the information and retrieve the correct image of his face. A man who was innocent of the two rapes was sentenced to life in prison. However his image was in the police records for other reasons that weren't provided in the text. But that doesn't mean he deserved to be sentenced to life for someone elses crime. The sketch of the face that the rape victim described didn't look anything like innocent Ronald Cotton or the guilty Bobby Poole. It was a tragic experience for her but at a time like that you would think that she would be able to remember key characteristics that the rapist had. But obviously the process of memory is more complicated than it seems. I couldn't believe that statistics of how many people where convicted with only one eyewitness. 76% were later found innocent. I think that eyewitness testimony shouldn't be able to be used unless they see and can describe certain traits that could not be mixed up. For instance tattoos, scars, or deep cuts. For instance things that can not be easily mixed up. There should also be a second form of evidence if only one eyewitness is the only form of evidence.
This chapter is about eyewitnesses and the many different factors that hinder the ability to capture the image of their encounter. There are many variables come into play when trying to identify their predator. When it comes down to the cross-race effect I believe that a persons enviroment has an impact on whether or not they are good and distinguishng between black, hispanic, Asian, and white. If a person is exposed to many different types of races on a daily basis they are more likely to be able to determine the race of their predator. I once was encountered by a masked man who looked as if he was going to rob me. He had his hands in his navy blue sweatshirt and he was at a bus stop but since I moved closer to the road and confronted him by asking him when the bus was going to arrive he was stuned and ran off. He was wearing a ski mask and his mustache showed through his mask. I worked with many hispanic people over the summer working for a landscaping company so I believe that helped with determining that he was in fact hispanic.
The stress and weapons portion was very interesting to me. When I read about the lady who was raped at the beginning of the chapter I thought she was going to remember the face of her predator because her senses were hightened but I was later surprised that there are other variables that go into account. The soldires who were in a simulated prison of war camp. Showed that 71 percent with a low stress rate had correct identification but only 38 percent showed the correct identificaton with high stress. That is a drastic difference. Also what was surprising was that when a predator is holding a knife or gun the person who is the victim is less likely to focus on the face and focus more on the weapon. I know from my experiences to stay calm and try to slow the process or situation down. If they want money or other material items to cooperate. But after reading this infromation I know that if I am encountered again I will look for key features to remember them and try to get them to talk and remember what their voice sounds like.
What interested me the most was that children are about as accurate as adults in lineup tests. It didn't surprise me that children do more poorly when the culprit is absent. I searched more information on children vs. adults in memory and found a very interesting study.
http://www.jstor.org/stable/1394573?seq=2
Chapter 7 talked mainly about eyewitness testimony. It shared that real cases of eyewitnesses were not accurate. Basically it’s saying that although an eyewitness may be confident in what they witness, doesn’t always mean they get the right perpetrator. Usually when an eyewitness steps forward and convicts someone of committing the crime, that perpetrator is found and convicted. The problem where identity is concerned comes in here and usually the eyewitness account of the perpetrator is incorrect, this seems to be happening more and more. There are plenty of innocent people, both men and women that have been convicted of crimes they didn’t do. So the court system has come up with criteria that they want to help the account of the eyewitness be more accurate. They measure the description they got firsthand, the degree of certainty the witness has on the perpetrator, the level of attention the witness has, the ability for the witness to visualize or see their perpetrator, and the time it took for the crime scene to happen until they witness can identify who they believe is the perpetrator.
Researches have been able to come up with influences that are biases that deals with the eye witnesses memory. One is the cross-race effect, which basically means the person has a better chance of describing someone who is considered to be in their own race, rather than someone else who is in a completely different race. The weapon focus effect is another biases that researchers have come up with, the third is unconscious transference, the fourth is retrieval inhibition, fifth is scripts, sixth is post identification feedback effect, and the final seventh bias is when the eyewitness is a child. Adults can easily persuade the children to come up with a decision that could potentially be wrong, because the children are easily persuaded to go with their adult role model, parent, etc. Social psychology deals with almost all of these bias because the eyewitnesses are put in social situations when they witness the crime and testify. Behavioral psychology also plays a role in how the eyewitnesses react on their accounts of the crimes being done. There are seven ways to improve eyewitness testimony. The first one is blind lineup administrators, bias-reducing instructions, unbiased lineups, confidence ratings, video recording, sequential lineups, and expert testimony. Experimental psychology would play a role in these seven ways because in order to find out what worked and what didn’t work for the eyewitness they had to go through different types of experiments.
Something interesting I learned was with the weapon focus effect, when the eyewitness only looks at the weapon, and ignores the person holding the weapon. That to me is interesting because you would think eyewitnesses would want to see who their prime suspect would be, if they had just witnessed a crime. I’m the type of person that will look at someone’s face first, before anything else. The children who are the eyewitness I find very interesting as well. Especially the part where they can easily be persuaded to say anything, since they are still, so young and naïve.
I’d like to find out more information on the weapon focus effect and child eyewitnesses, since they both interested me.
In this link it discusses how the weapons visibility increases, the performance declines. Some suggest that weapons attract witnesses’ visual attention, so less perceptual processing is received when no weapon is present. Also Loftus and Messo reported that the witnesses looked more harder and longer at slide that showed a gun, instead of one that had a neutral object.
http://www.jstor.org/pss/1394355
In this link, it discusses children being eyewitnesses. Just because children and adults have different imprints of memory, doesn’t mean the children can’t be as credible as the adult would be. A little six year old girl was able to save her friend by giving a close description of the perpetrator who had just kidnapped her friend. They were able to find the suspect because of that. But from two to three, the children tend to add on stories that didn’t really happen, so you have to watch out for that. Going off of that, children can create false memories. Creating false memories can be done, especially if the child’s memory is weak or non-existent. Then it goes on to say that children feel like they need to provide you with what they believe you want them to say, especially when the adult is an authority figure, so if you had them interviewed by a person in a janitor’s uniform they will inform you of the crime with more accuracy.
http://abcnews.go.com/Primetime/Health/story?id=965740&page=1
Chapter seven started out telling a story about Jennifer Thompson being raped and identifying Ronald Cotton as the perpetrator. He was then sent to prison and eleven years later exonerated by DNA proof. This is just proof that eye witnesses can be wrong and can unfortunately send innocent people to prison. Psychologists identified three processes that are involved in memory: encoding, storage, and retrieval. Errors can occur within these components causing some memories not to be stored, be revised, or decay over time. The eyewitness testimony is sometimes the most compelling evidence, in a study examining this 74% of the time the defendant was convicted and in 49% of those cases there was only one eye witness. This statistic seems crazy to me that one person could be convicted with the only piece of evidence being what one person may or may not have seen. I think there should have to be more evidence than that to convict someone. Especially when 76% of wrongful convictions are the result of eye witness misidentification. The Manson criteria was developed to evaluate eyewitness identification accuracy they consist of the opportunity the witness had to view the perpetrator, witness level of attention, accuracy of description of perpetrator given by witness, degree of certainty the witness displays, and amount of time between witnessing the crime and identifying the offender. Jurors are sometimes questioned to determine if they need to be dismissed if they are biased (void dire). Some of the things that influence the eyewitnesses memory are cross-race effect which is being able to identify people in your own racial group easier than other races. Another factor that influences memory are the level of stress you are under. In a study participants under low stress could correctly identify someone 71% of the time compared to high stress only 38% of the time. Another interesting statistic from this study is that if someone is under low stress they are not as good as identifying who it was not compared to high stress participants being able to identify the wrong person 58%. The weapon focus effect would relate directly to the amount of stress felt by the eyewitness. Unconscious transference is a possible reason for misidentification of the offender. This term refers to taking a face from a familiar context and transferring it to the perpetrators. By changing the wording of questions can potentially change what the eyewitness remembers, this is called retrieval inhibition. Preexisting expectations about how crimes happen also can change what eye witnesses remember. Eyewitness confidence in identifying the offender is not a good measure of accuracy because they have time to study the picture and become more sure of their identification. Police also sometimes give feedback which can sway the witnesses confidence. Blind line up administrators, telling the witness "the true criminal might not be in the lineup or photo spread," unbiased lineups, and video recording the identification process for court to see all help improve eyewitness accuracy. Along with having sequential lineups opposed to simultaneous lineups helps focus on system variables. Hypnosis and cognitive interviews are sometimes used to help the witness refresh their memory and maybe remember something more. Memory and all the processes related to it are directly related to psychology along with the how different wording can change what you remember and trick your mind. Careful measures should be taken during questioning the witness and evaluating the accuracy of what they say to make sure more people aren't wrongfully convicted and punished for something they didn't do. Cognitive interviews are in my opinion the best way to get information from the witness and it is something that I would like to learn more about.
http://www.simplypsychology.org/cognitive-interview.html
This site tells a story about a woman noticed two men in the office after they left they murdered someone in the office. After a cognitive interview she could tell the way one of the men brushed his hair as well as him wearing a silver earring. This seems amazing to me that someone can go from not really being able to describe someone to knowing the kind of earring. During cognitive interviews it says that you have the witness state things from a different perspective as well as in order from end to beginning which I thought was interesting.
http://grajfoner.com/Geiselman%20Fisher%20Cognitive%20Interview.pdf
This is a link to a research study conducted at University of California Los Angeles. It talks about how both hypnosis and cognitive interview helped subjects remember more accurate things compared to a classic regular police interview. Also that there was not a difference in the amount of incorrect things between any of these forms.
Chapter seven discusses the legitimacy of eyewitness identification and testimony. It starts off discussing a case of a college student asked to identify her rapist. Even though she had a hard time identifying him, the police still took her testimony to full extent. The man was placed in jail, where many years later were found to be not guilty due to new DNA testing capabilities. This case started off a good lead into the rest of the chapter.
Often, eyewitnesses are regarded as the best evidence a department has. However, they misidentify a suspect on many more occasions than most assumes. The Mason Criteria supports five factors that should be used when validating an eyewitness identification claim. Unfortunately, these steps are hard to evaluate because they are also based on the witnesses judgment and perception. For instance, one of the factors is how long the witness was able to look at the perpetrator. It has been found that may people over estimate the length of time in a situation. A study concluded that estimation of time is three to four times greater than the actual length when someone is frightened. This suggests that one’s self-report, even when using the Mason Criteria, should be taken lightly. In order to correct the problems with self report, the legal system uses techniques such as looking at the details surrounding the case, such as the lighting and other weaknesses, to help verify the eyewitness testimony.
Reconstructing memories is great deal harder than it looks, especially when it is reconstructing memories of what the perpetrator looks like. There are many factors that can diminish accurate identification. One concern is cross racial identifications. Not only is it hard for individuals to accurately describe people, identify people within a different race is even harder and less accurate. Studies have shown that an individual is less likely to be able to describe people of another race than their own due to the lack of noticeable differences between people in that race. Another concern is unconscious transfers. An individual can see a person at the crime scene, or even at the store before hand, and transfer that image to the perpetrator. This leads to them making a wrongful accusation on an innocent person. If a weapon is present, the individual is less likely to focus on what the perpetrator looks like and focus on the weapon—leading to inaccurate identification. The eyewitness is also more likely to misidentify an individual with suggestive comments are presented. Sentence structures and word chose can affect the witness picture of the suspect. For instance, a detective’s remark after a eyewitness chooses a suspect from a line up can reaffirm or discourage the eyewitness confidence in their choice—leading the eyewitness to build inaccurate pictures of the perpetrator. This in turn, builds a witness confidence over time. The feedback from officers or others involved in the case can increase the confidence towards the wrong suspect.
In order to prevent these things from taking place, research propose seven different guidelines to follow when doing a lineup. The first one is to build a lineup where the individual running the lineup is not aware of the potential suspect. This eliminates any nonverbal communication swaying the individual. The second suggestion is bias-reducing instructions to the eyewitness. This recommends that the suspected criminal should not be involved in the lineup. With this knowledge, the witness is shielded from the assumptions that the criminal must be in the lineup, and allows them to accurately choose or not the person they remember seeing. The third guideline is creating lineups that are unbiased. Lineups should consist of subjects that are closely related to the witness verbal description in order to prevent an attention to the suspect. Confidence ratings are the fourth guideline. The objective to this guideline is to gather clear statements from the witness directly after their viewing of the lineup in order to avoid directive feedback. The fifth suggestion is to video record the lineups. This way the procedure can be played in the courtroom. The jury and judges can gather their own thoughts without skew from any individual. Sequential lineups are the sixth guideline. This promotes the use of using one photograph at a time rather than several people side by side. This way the subjects are not judged against each other. The seventh and final guideline suggests having an expert on eyewitness identification testify in court.
One interesting thing I learned about was cross-racial identifications. I think describing anyone would be difficult because our vocabulary doesn’t hold specific words to describe people’s details. However, I would do even worst describing someone else of a different race. It would be hard to descriptively take the image in your head and be able to portray it to someone else with words. I find it interesting that we still use eyewitness testimony to convict someone when we know that this is difficult. It is so easy to imprint an image in someone’s mind from a sketch.
I decided to look up more information on sketch artist and their accuracy. I found an article on News Week that discussed this topic. It gave many different sets of pictures of criminals and their sketch’s. Many of them had no resemblance what so ever to their picture. However, in a few, they were relatively accurate. It was amazing to see the difference in photos.
http://digg.com/newsbar/topnews/How_Accurate_are_Police_Sketches
The next website I found was from How Stuff Works. Out of all the pictures drawn, only 9% of sketch artists are accurate. The article suggests that our brain works better with recognition memory, or memory that relies on clues and tips to help us remember the whole picture. When an eyewitness is creating a sketch, their brain is forced to use recall memory which the memory based fully on what we saw at one time. In knowing this, it is hard for us to generate a mental image. When we do, the sketch is drawn based on our description of the person, and then we view the picture. By viewing the picture, we are using our recognition memory which could produce images that weren’t there before. This could cause us to create inaccurate pictures of the suspect.
http://people.howstuffworks.com/police-sketch3.htm
This chapter discusses eyewitness identification and testimony. The chapter starts out with a gripping story about a women named Jennifer Thompson who was raped. Jennifer identified a man named Ronald Cotton as the rapist. Cotton spent 11 years in prison until DNA evidence had developed enough to where it was determined that Cotton did not rape Jennifer Thompson like she had thought. This story is an example of eyewitness testimony not being very reliable, eyewitnesses are not always reliable because in the process of encoding an event some aspects are ignored and errors in memory can occur.
The legal system has a technique called voir dire, which is the questioning of potential jurors during jury selection, that helps to reveal truth. This technique is supposed to see if there are any biased jurors but there isn't a way to tell how jurors will view eyewitnesses. Research has shown that jurors view eyewitnesses as being reliable sources and jurors also place too much wright on eyewitness confidence. Another flaw with eyewitnesses is the cross-race effect which says that it is harder for people to recognize the faces outside their racial group. To prove this a meta-analysis was done and its findings showed that own-race identifications were more likely to be correct than cross-race identifications. The reason for this difference could be due to people of the same race classifying facial features in better detail than they would if they were identifying a person of another race.
Stress plays an important role in the identification procedure. It is common to think that an arousing event will have more accurate memories but in actuallity the details of that memory might not be any more detailed that a ordinary memory. A study done on soldiers during survival training showed that the soldiers who were under low stress were able to identify their interrogator at a way higher rate than those who were under a high amount of stress. Preexisting expectations also influences a witness. We have Scripts for many situations because they enable us to process information, but when we don't have all the information sometimes we let scripts fill in the gaps.
In order to find a solution to all the flaws of eyewitness testimony there are 7 guidelines: blind lineup administrators, bias-reducing instructions to eyewitnesses, unbiased lineups, confidence ratings, video recording, sequential lineups, and expert testimony.
The most interesting part of the chapter to me was unconscious transference. A woman who was raped gave a detailed description of a man named Donald Thompson who she said raped her. Turns out Thompson was on a television interview that the woman was watching at the time of the rape and the woman transferred her memory of his face onto the actual face of the rapist.
http://www.mendeley.com/research/unconscious-transference-eyewitness-identification/
This article is about a study that was given to 50 undergraduate students. A tape was played of a mock crime involving 6 characters and one of the characters committed assault. The students were shown the faces of each of the characters. After 3 days they were to choose which person was the criminal from a set of 5 pictures of different faces. The results show an example of unconscious transference.
It was very surprising to me that mistaken identifications played a role in 76% of cases where wrongly convicted persons were released from prison after DNA proved their innocence. My guess would have been that there was a lot of other evidence against the innocent person to put them away, not just a mistaken identification.
Chapter 7 covers the credibility of eye witnesses based on how, when, and under what circumstances they gave the information to the proper authorities. It talks a lot of the ways that eye witnesses to a specific crime may identify the wrong person in a line up or through a serious of photographs. How well or how long the alleged victim of a crime can be a major deterrent in allowing their testimony into court; like for instance depending on what time of day it is and the lighting conditions can severely alter what one thought they saw and what they actually saw. Just like the old saying the difference is literally night and day. Chapter 7 also provides some new techniques that people administering eye witnesses interviews and line ups whether actual or through photos can do to try to ensure that they are getting the most accurate answer that they can from the witness(s).
The most interesting thing that I learned is how much a supposed eye witness can be swayed in identifying a perpetrator. I guess I just figured if they were there doing the line-up they would probably know who the person was that committed the offense and therefore would have no problem making the right selection, however this was not the case. What surprised me the most is that at the beginning of the chapter when it was giving the account of the rape victims is how much they made it sound like that this person did a great job to get a good look at the offender, but when it came down to actually picking someone out of a line-up she was wrong and wasted eleven years of a innocent mans life.
Two things actually spark my interest to learn a little more about them. The first is how many states in the United States have made it so that eye witness testimonies are very hard to get approved to use in a trail. and the second is what happens to the unfortunate people that have been convicted of a crime and later found out to be innocent after serving a substantial amount of time behind bars? Do they just say sorry and let them out or is there some kind of reimbursement, obviously they can't get the years they lost back so it would have to something else like money.
After looking for some information on my first question I learned that just Recently the United States Supreme Court rules that eye witness testimonies require no extra cautions or inquiry to make it admissible in the court of law. In researching my second question I learned that every state is different when it comes to the compensation of the wrongfully accused. From what I read I learned that only 26 U.S. States have some form of law that will help out the wrongfully convicted individual once he/she is released from prison. I also learned that different types of the wrongfully accused get different sums of money.
http://floridainnocence.org/content/?tag=unreliable-witness-testimony
http://219mag.com/2009/07/15/wrongful-conviction-unfair-compensation/
Chapter Seven was about eyewitness identification and testimony. It started off by telling a story about a lady who misidentified her rapist twice. He went to prison and got let out 11 years later because of advancements in DNA testing. Many psychological factors played a role in this opening story, but the main one is that the police who conducted the photo lineup gave Jennifer a confirming comment that wrongfully increased her confidence in her identification.
Memory plays a huge role in eyewitness identification and testimony. There are three processes involved in memory; encoding, storage, and retrieval, and mistakes can happen at any of them. Most cases rely too heavily on eyewitnesses and they put too much credibility in their accounts. This is great if the witness is correct, but very tragic if they are wrong. eyewitness misidentification is the number one cause of wrongful convictions. The Manson criteria was put into play in order to calculate the likelihood that the witness is correct. The criteria are: opportunity to view, witness's level of attention, accuracy of the previous description of criminal, degree of certainty, time between crime and identification. It must be taken into consideration how long the witness studied the criminal and under what conditions. Defense attorneys will try and point out these margins for error to the jury. Voir dire is used in order to weed out jurors who might hold a bias.
Cross-racial identifications can be very dangerous. We typically tend to think that members of a different look more similar to one another than the members of our own race. The text pointed out that this could be caused by that fact we are generally around our own race more and have a lot of practice differentiating between their facial structures. That being said, most people have difficulty when it comes to identifying people outside their own race. I was shocked to learn that 9-month old babies can even show this tendency.
The stress level during the witnessing of a crime can help determine how much, and in how great of detial, a witness remembers. Contrary to popular belief, levels of higher and lower stress cause witnesses to remember the least, or inaccurately. Moderate levels of stress cause the best memories. The weapon focus effect can seriously hinder a witness's ability to study and focus on the perpetrator. The witness becomes more focused on the weapon because it is the primary source for danger.
Unconscious transference is a very interesting aspect of witness misidentification. It can be utilized in many forms. A witness could have seen them near the crime scene, two suspects could look very, very similar, and the witness could even transfer a face from a TV show to the crime scene.
It is very important for police, detectives, investigators and interrogators to avoid leading or suggestive comments at all costs. These are very dangerous. Recall of critical information can be altered if a professional says or implies something. They can plant, sometimes unknowingly, a characteristic or detail of a crime in a witness's mind. After, the witness actually starts to believe that they saw whatever it was. The words that professionals use when questioning witnesses is also important. More dramatic and specific words, like the and crash, often lead to more confidence in a memory.
Another factor in eyewitness identification and testimony is that of scripts. What is normal for a certain situation or what is expected can hinder the memory of a witness. They might recall something happening only because it usually happens that way in typical circumstances.
The confidence of the witness can be either good or bad, depending on whether they identified correctly. If a witness says, "I am positive that's him," jurors and judges will most likely believe the witness because they seemed very confident in their identification. There are two reasons why confidence can be misleading. It has been found through research that the confidence of the eyewitness increased over time, regardless of them being right or wrong. Also, comments made by the officers and other professionals during the identification process can increase a witness's level of confidence.
To improve the validity of eyewitness accounts, courts should focus of the variables they can control rather than the ones they can't. For example, it is easier to control lineups and questioning, than it is to control the race of a suspect, the duration of a crime, or how attentive a witness was. Guidelines were made for trying to control the system variables. They consist of blind lineup administrators, bias-reducing instructions to eyewitnesses, unbiased lineups, confidence ratings, video recording, sequential lineups, and expert testimony.
Hypnosis is sometimes used in order to help refresh a witness's memory. I thought it was very interesting that they are actually asked to go back and relive the crime and focus on specific details. It is hard to know, at times, whether this information in correct or fabricated by the individual. I was shocked to learn that, in some instances, hypnosis has actually unveiled some important information. Hypnosis can also take away feelings of fear and embarrassment, which can be helpful. It does, however, have many flaws, like false memory, suggestive questioning, and confidence.
Another technique used to refresh a witness's memory is the cognitive interview. There are many phases to this type of interview. First, the witness is calmed and tells exactly what happened. Then they are asked to put themselves back in the crime, mentally. the interviewer prompts some details about the crime out of the witness. The witness puts themselves in the shoes of the criminal or victim and answers more questions.
I was most intrigued by the “own race bias” so I decided to research more in that. The article I found focuses on why white people have such difficulty correctly identifying a black person. The researcher brought up an interesting perspective. We tend to be more comfortable around those who we are more familiar with. We incorrectly identify those of other races simply because we are not familiar with them.
http://academic.udayton.edu/race/03justice/justice03.htm
Chapter seven was about eyewitness testimony. The chapter talked about how important eyewitness testimony is and what a big part it takes in a case. The chapter talked about a real case where a woman had been raped, but she didn't get a good look at the rapist. When she was questioned by police to accurately describe the man she picked him out and he was charged with the rape and sent to prison. Years later he was found innocent due to DNA testing. There are a lot of different factors that go into the eyewitness like, what time of night it took place, the distance, and the eyewitness' vision.
The most interesting thing I learned was about voir dire, which is a technique that helps pick the jury for a trial. It helps the jurors tell the truth so it's easier to select people for the jury making sure no one is biased to the case. I liked learning about this because I never really knew exactly how the jury was chosen. I know there are a number of questions that they are asked but I didn't know there was a special technique to tell if they were telling the truth or not.
I'd like to learn more about cross race identification. I think it's pretty interesting that people can't identify other people of a different race. It's difficult for them to pick out certain features of someone else when they aren't the same race as them. I think it would be interesting to see cases in this situation.
This website talked about how important eye witness testimony is in a case. It's important for the witness to identify as much as they can from the perp. Even if the identification is not right the jury will still favor the eye witness.
http://agora.stanford.edu/sjls/Issue%20One/fisher&tversky.htm
This is a story about a woman who had been raped and she studied the man's face while she was being raped. Her eyewitness testimony put him in prison.
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2009/03/06/60minutes/main4848039.shtml
The chapter begins by giving the reader a detailed description of a rape trial in which Ronald Cotton is wrongly sentenced to prison for a rape he did not commit. The reasoning behind the unjust conviction rested in the eyewitness testimony of two women, one of whom would identify Cotton as the assailant. This case is a great example of how bad things can get when the eyewitness has it all wrong. I, for example, thought that Poole and Cotton could have been twins (they look identical). People who look like other people are a dime a dozen. Eyewitness testimony in this case exemplifies how one woman identified a man as her rapist who looked very much like her actual attacker.
The Manson criteria is discussed. There are five things to take into account when checking out the accuracy of an eyewitness: 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 4) the degree of certainty displayed by the witness and 5) the amount of time between witnessing the crime and making the ID. It is said that although these criteria seem to be the most logical, they are ofen difficult to apply in real-world crime scenarios.
Some of the more interesting things I read about in the first few pages was that I found out that voir dire is defined as the process of questioning jurors during selection process and that the primary reason for lack of witnesses to crimes is concern for their own safety.
Cross-racial preferences are talked about as being a phenonmena where people have a harder time recognizing people's faces outside of their own ethnic group (compared to within their own). A study done by charles Morgan tested eyewitness accuracy whilst under stress. The finding were not surprising to me as the most correct identifications were made by those under low stress. What I did find very surprising was what we learned in class today (that you remember better under a little stress than none or a lot).
Another fascinating section of this chapter deals with the weapon focus effect. It makes so much sense, but I have never given this much thought. The weapon focus effect states that the victim will not remember much about the offender's features because they are so focused on the dangerous weapon in the hand of said offender.
I did not find too much useful information over the next few pages (dealing with leading/suggestive comments & pre-existing expectation). Most of what I read here I have either learned in the past or seems to me to be "common sense material". Not to say this is unimportant information; rather, it is just more of a refresher. The section on child eyewitnesses was also not too surprising. Kids are often so scatterbrained that I believe it would be difficult for them to focus their attention on details as pertaining to the offender's physical characteristics. I think the reason children do worse if the perpetrator is not in the lineup is that children have a much greater imagination that we do as adults. For this reason, I feel it is easier for children to conjure up images or experiences from nowhere.
The next section of the chapter gives us a detailed look at seven different method that can be used in order to improve the accuracy of eyewitnesses. Blind lineups are a good idea in that detectives or officers are less likely to try and persuade the eyewitness. Unbiased lineups really shouldn't be happening anyways. When I read the example of Richard Pryor with six old white women, I cracked up. Hopefully our justice system isn't so bad that we feel the need to use "fillers" in the lineup. I have mixed feelings about sequential lineups. I suppose it is because I think it is good for the eyewitness to be able to compare similar-looking suspects. I don't like the idea of video recording mainly because there is so much that can be altered or corrupted (maybe I've watched Tango & Cash too many times). Expert testimony rarely makes sense to me because often there are discrepancies in beliefs between teachers of ANY field of study.
The chapter closes by taking a look at hypnosis. I have always been intrigued by hypnosis. On three different occassions, I have had people attempt to "put me under". In all cases, I was one of few who was not affected at all. I won't say that I do not believe it to be possible, as I used to think (when I was younger, I just thought that hypnosis was an excuse for the shy to not be shy). I just think that it is too unreliable a procedure to have any place in court proceedings.
I wanted to find out why I have not been able to be hypnotized, so I looked up some information on hypnosis:
http://www.jasonmystic.com/hypnosis_faq's.htm
I was unsure of what would be considered a "credible" website when talking about hypnosis. The following paragraph from the site explains why I may not have been able to successfully be hypnotized:
"Another important factor is EXPECTATION. If you have never been formally hypnotized before, you may be expecting "fireworks." When that doesn't happen, you think, "Oh, it's not working on me," and you STOP TRYING, open your eyes and sit there waiting to be let off the stage. The people who will do well as volunteers are the people who do not expect to be transported to another realm. They understand that they will still "know what's going on" and still "hear everything the hypnotist says." They stay with it and follow the hypnotist's instructions, even when they're not sure if it's working. You cannot simultaneously BE the show and SEE the show! You have to pick one and stick with it!"
http://www.infinityinst.com/articles/hyp_whatis.html
So much for my view on hypnosis as being hocus pocus. I had no idea that the American Medical Association, American Psychiatric Association, as well as British Medical Association have all deemed hypnosis as an appropriate therapeutic tool. Also, this site lists many of the problems that hypnosis has been known to help assist or cure. Among them was nailbiting. I may need to look into this. Sports improvement?
Chapter seven focused upon eyewitness testimony. It begins with a real life example, in which an innocent man was convicted for a rape that he did not commit. He spent years in prison based upon her testimony, but was finally let out when DNA evidence proved him innocent.
The chapter then went on to discuss the role of eyewitness testimony in our legal system. The book says that eyewitness testimony is often the most compelling evidence presented in court. Then readers are exposed to the Mason Criteria, which is 5 factors used to evaluate the accuracy of identification by an eyewitness. The book then has a section that tells about the checks and balances the legal system has to expose eyewitness bias.
Next the book shifts the focus to the construction and reconstruction of eyewitness memories. It begins by listing various obstacles that are encountered in daily life that could affect the way memory is formed around a crime. The book then shifts to cross-racial identification. Cross-race accuracy is worse than within-race accuracy. Then the chapter discusses stress' affect on memory. Table 7.1 illustrates different stress conditions and the effect in different identification procedures. The table shows in low stress situation a higher percentage of the population can have a true positive response in all three different identification procedures. The book the uses the term "weapon focus effect" which if the perpetrator is holding a weapon their ability to recognize the assailant is impaired. The section the turns toward a situation called unconscious transference. This is when a face that is familiar it transferred to that of the perpetrator.Next the chapter discusses the effect language, through leading or suggestive comments has on memory. Preexisting expectations also influence what an eyewitness sees and remembers from a crime.Witness confident is the next topic discussed in the book. the chapter then switches to complications of eyewitness testimony. This includes when an eyewitness is a child.
The book then moves onto seven ways in which accuracy of an eyewitness could be improved based upon research findings. These suggestions include: blind lineup administrators, bias-reducing instructions to eyewitnesses, unbiased lineups, confident ratings, video recording, sequential lineups, and expert testimony. Next techniques for refreshing the memories of witnesses are listed. The book discusses hypnosis and the cognitive interview.
I found the cognitive interview to be most interesting in this chapter. I had not previously heard of one before. The different phases were interesting. This style can be much more useful and accurate to help witnesses remember the crime. It is surprising the in the US do not routinely use this technique, especially because it would increase more accurate information and not increase witness suggestibility.
I chose to further research child as eyewitnesses. PBS provided an article titled, "Child Witnesses In Court: A Growing Dilemma" by Stephen J. Ceci and Eduardus de Bruyn. This article discusses how age can influence believability. It states "One implication of this conclusion is that the trial testimonies of alleged preschool witnesses resulted in fewer criminal convictions than for cases involving older child witnesses." I find this not fair. Children do not purposely lie to get a stranger in trouble. A preschooler may not be as far developmentally as an older child, but s/he should be believed. The article concludes by saying, "Regrettably, pronouncements by extremist advocates on both side of the bench are simply unfounded. Children are neither as hyper suggestible and coachable as some pro-defense advocates have alleged, not are they as resistance to suggestions about their own bodies as some pro-prosecution advocates have claimed." I find this to be interesting as I have heard many arguments for both sides. The book focuses more on how easily children can be influenced.
ttp://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/innocence/readings/childwitnesses.html
Summarize the chapter. What is the most interesting thing you learned? What surprised you the most? What is something you want to learn more about? Search on that topic and report on some additional information about that topic. Provide any links to resources.
Your posts should be getting progressively longer and more detailed. You should clearly link psychology to the legal context under evaluation.
Eyewitness testimony was the focus of Chapter 7. It starts off with a scary but true story about a man that spent seven years in prison for two rapes he didn't commit. He was later released after DNA proved his innocence. Although eyewitness testimony can be a great help, it can be damaging if they are wrong, and we find that more than half the time, they are. The Manson Criteria says that there are five things that need to be taken into consideration when determining whether an eyewitness account is accurate, 1)whether the eyewitness could see their perpetrator 2)their ability to pay close attention to their attacker 3)the eyewitnesses accuracy of the description of the offender 4)the degree of certainity the witness has about his or her attacker and 5) the amount of time passed between the crime and the identification of a perp. There are things that the legal systm does to try and avoid eyewitness bias. Such things include being selective in their jury selection to avoid bias with them, cross-examination, and jury deliberation.
There are many problems that can occur with eyewitness testimony, things like cross-race effect, which means it is difficult for people to identify the faces of people that are outside of their racial group. The level of stress during the event must be considered, because high stress can have negative effects on a person's ability to accurately remember things. This is also true when the assailant has a weapon. The witness being a child, being lead to say things they may not mean, unconscious transference, which is the transferring the face of one innocent person to the crime, having preexisting expectations about what happened, and witness confidence, which has been shown to grow as a trial grows closer, are all things that can negatively affect what a witness recalls about a crime.
Few techniques have been developed to refresh the memory of witnesses. Hypnosis and the cognitive interview, which involves a step-by-step process which is designed to relax the witness and mentally reinstate the context of the crime.
The part of chapter seven that surprised and intrigued me the most was reading about hypnosis beng used to help witnesses recall events of a crime.
The following link discusses the use of hypnosis in witness testimony. It is a long and detailed page about people being put under hypnosis and the influence it had on their memory. In most cases it helped, however there are concerns about whether being asked to recall an event that never happened can cause confusion and confabulation.
http://mcadams.posc.mu.edu/hypnosis.htm
The second link is from the FBI website and discusses hypnosis and cases as well. Number 21 on the list talks of a case of a victim that had no memory for 20 years and then after hypnosis therapy accused aunt and uncle of sexual abuse.
http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/lab/forensic-science-communications/fsc/oct1999/abstrctc.htm
The use of eyewitnesses during trials is crucial. Unfortunately, sometimes our memory fails us, either completely, or even a small mistake that can cost someone else their life. Fortunately, we are coming to better understand how the mind and memory works. Although we may never be able to fully manipulate the mind to completely recall memories, hopefully, we will be able to come up with methods to better help people with memory recall.
This week’s chapter was on eye witness testimony. Since I am such a procrastinator, I didn’t do this assignment until Tuesday night. Therefore, I had the opportunity to listen to this morning’s lecture before doing the assignment. I like this way much better – it made me understand the reading easier and I feel like blogging is easier as well.
Eye witness testimony is so important to trials, and it makes sense. Society has come to know “seeing is believing” now of days. Therefore a jury can easily be bought into eye witness testimony. However as we talked about in class and read in the chapter, this is definitely not the case. Unless you are aware something is going to happen to focus your attention, it is likely you pay little attention to the close details of the crime. I really liked today how MacLin talked about how clothes were not as big of detail as they make them out to be. I never thought of it, but she is exactly right. I think people try and explain clothes because it is hard for them to describe facial features in detail.
On another note, this chapter showed us how important DNA testing can be. I really like reading about stories in the criminal justice world, and this was didn’t disappoint. Fortunately for DNA testing, the man who was wrongfully convicted of rape was relieved of all charges, and the real perpetrator was prosecuted. Without technology where it is and having the ability to test for DNA, this man would have lost his life. This also shows just how damaging false eyewitness testimony can be. Luckily, researchers have realized this and have came up with ways to help eliminate such catastrophes.
Another problem with eye-witness testimony is cross-race. Cross race simply states that it is harder for people to identify those outside of their race. I found this to be the most surprising thing of the chapter. My initial thoughts were that if things looked similar to you, they wouldn’t stand out as much. Therefore you wouldn’t pay more attention too and have a harder time remembering. People of different races than yourself look different from you (obviously). I would think that that would make them stand out more rather than having a harder time identifying.
What stood out in the chapter and I found most interesting was using hypnosis on eyewitnesses to have them recall more details. I had no idea they did this in real life. I honestly thought that this was just done on crime television shows, so I found this was interesting and way cool that it’s legit. This type of hypnosis is called hypnotic hypernesia.
http://www.apa.org/monitor/apr06/eyewitness.aspx
The above link told a story about a crazy night in Alaska (I know, I couldn’t believe it either). The state population was out celebrating due to government payoffs for pretty much just living there. Unfortunately the night took a deadly turn and a teenage boy was raped and murdered. There was also an older man who was violently assaulted. Luckily (ha) there was an eyewitness who spotted four men beating the older man. After looking through a lineup, the eyewitness declared who the four perpetrators were and testified two years later at trial. The trial also had an expert witness who discredited the eyewitness’ testimony, saying that she was too far away to ascertain any descriptive details of the accused. However, the jury still sided with the eyewitness over the expert witness. The site then goes on to talk about the importance of distance and what it does to your perception.
Chapter seven in our book discusses eyewitness identification and testimony. The chapter starts out with a story about a rape that put an innocent man, Ronald Cotton, in prison for an excruciating eleven years. Jennifer Thompson was rape early one morning at 3:00 am in her own home. After the rape she was able to get a few clear looks at the man’s face. During a police lineup, she identified Ronald Cotton as the rapist. She was entirely sure that Ronald Cotton was the rapist, and he was convicted. In prison Bobby Poole admitted to Ronald Cotton that he was in fact the rapist. Even after a second trial, Cotton’s conviction held. If it wasn’t for an attorney named Richard Rosen, who discovered 11 years later that Cotton’s semen sample excluded him as a possible perpetrator, Cotton would have served the full sentence. The semen sample did in fact match Bobby Poole who was later convicted.
Memory involves a process of three distinct progressions. The first part of this process is called encoding. Encoding is the part of the process where our brain gathers the information. The next part of the memory is called storage. Storage is the part of the process in which we hold the information in the brain until it needs to be retrieved, which brings us to the last part of the process: retrieval. Retrieval is the final part of the process in which we access and pull out the stored information.
In one study, there were 347 cases studied in which the only evidence was the eyewitness testimony. In almost ¾ of those cases, the defendant was convicted. This does not seem right to me. People often lie and can be very deceiving. In other instances, people just don’t know exactly what they have seen, or the police have persuaded them to believe something that wasn’t real.
The next subject of interest was interracial identification. It is much harder for a member of one race to identify a member of another race due to different facial structures and the cross-race effect. In my personal experience as a victim to a crime, I have to admit that I was also the victim of the cross-race effect. Luckily, I had learned enough in psychology about the cross race effect that allowed me to stop and really take a good look at the defendants. Unfortunately, I was unable to identify any defendants as the perpetrators; not because they were innocent, but because I simply did not remember. Another reason that people fail to remember the faces of their attacker is due to stress, and the fact that many crimes involve weapons. The victim can be so focused on looking at the weapon that they don’t get a very good look at their attacker. When you combine the cross-race effect and the stress and weapons effect, the chances of identifying the culprit go down even more.
Psychology links to this discussion because part of psychology is memory and how it works. We’ve learned that stress affects your memory, so of course this is relevant in the court room. If the witness was extremely stressed out at the time of the crime, or the defendant was extremely stressed during the interrogation, it can have very negative outcomes.
Here is a scholarly article that I found that shows us even more about the cross-race effect. This article discusses that the cross-race effect is evident even in babies! This trend continues from infancy to adulthood.
http://infantlab.fiu.edu/Articles/Pedzke%20et%20al%202003.pdf
Here is an article that I found about the adverse effects of stress on someone’s memory. This could explain why sometimes we don’t do as well as we could on an exam if we were super stress in the week preceding it.
http://www.fi.edu/learn/brain/stress.html
The most surprising thing that I learned in this chapter was that there are so many trials that only have eyewitness testimony and no other physical evidence.
This chapter was about the importance of not only preserving the physical evidence of a crime scene, but also preserving psychological trace evidence, such as eyewitness memories. There are many things that can go wrong with eyewitness testimonies, whether it's the distortion of memory because they verbally described the perpetrator's face or an attorney asks leading questions that assume certain things in the testimony.
This wouldn't be much of a problem at all if every single person brought to trial were guilty, but the problem is the few that aren't guilty. It is unfair for even one innocent person to be in prison, because the burden of proof lies on the prosecution!
That is my problem with district attorneys who brag about high conviction rates...statistically that means that they have probably put innocent people in prison. If the (professional) prosecution is only concerned with convicting everybody that they try, and the (professional) defense is only concerned with exonerating all defendants, then that makes the (non-professional) jury's job of deciding the truth extremely difficult, and very subjective based on which side does a better job.
The part of the chapter that I found most interesting was the part about Leading or Suggesting Comments. I didn't really know that there was a way around that, but in an article online, I read about blind lineup administration. This is similar to the use of a double blind study in scientific research. This is where the person interviewing the witness is not aware who the suspect is. It can be very beneficial in preventing unconscious suggestions, however if someone is determined to unethically suggest one person's guilt, they can still succeed.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eyewitness_identification
This chapter stressed the importance of eyewitness testimony to criminal trials, but also exposed how they are not reliable. Usually we can trust our criminal justice system to put the "bad guys" away and keep the "good guys" safe, but it is up to all of us as members of the community to understand the potential flaws in our system, so we question the validity of certain kinds of evidence- that is, if we are on a jury or involved with the criminal justice system in any other way.
Chapter seven in the textbook was about eye witness identification and testimony. It is important to note that eyewitness testimony isn’t always the most accurate and reliable. Sometimes people give false or misleading information about a suspect that can ultimately lead to a wrongful conviction. This is essentially what happened to in the case that was at the beginning of the chapter. Jennifer Thomson was a college student at North Carolina who was raped and had a knife held to her throat late at night. She never really saw it coming as the man broke into her apartment late at night. Then man did not kill her and eventually left. Jennifer informed the police and went to the police station to look at sketches. She identified a man named Ronald Cotton to be her perpetrator. Ronald had heard police were looking for him so he went to the station to claim his innocents. He was arrested and convicted for rape and sentenced to 11 years in prison for a crime he didn’t commit. Unfortunately this happens more than just a few times in a year which is really unfortunate because it can ruin people lives.
Now, eyewitness testimony has some guidelines to it in the courts to test its reliability and accuracy. As stated in the textbook this is referred to as “The Mason Criteria.” Within its guidelines are five different parts. First, the court takes into account the witness’s opportunity to view the perpetrator. Secondly, they look at the witnesses attention, then the accuracy of the witnesses past description of the offender. Next, they look at the degree of certainty displayed by the witness. Finally, they look at the amount of time between witnessing the crime and making the identification. It is good that they do not just assume what the witness is saying is accurate and they are trying to take these steps to make the testimony more accurate but I still see some problems with this criteria. As I have learned from this chapter and previous one, our mind can play tricks with us. Sometimes what we thought we saw isnt what we really should have. Part of this criteria is how certain you are. You may be really certain in what you saw because you saw it, so you believe it to be true. This could be a one of the flaws I believe. Also, people generally have a bad idea of a sense of time and distance. They may think the time and distance they gave is completely accurate when in fact it is not. All of these things can go into wrongfully convicting someone.
Adding on to why we should be cautious of eye witness testimonies as stated in the textbook are various factors. The first one I want to talk about is cross-racial identifications. Essentially what is meant by this is that it is more difficult for people to recognize faces of people in their own race category. This is also referred to as the cross-race effect. Also one needs to take caution when a child is a witness because they are often less reliable. Discussed in this section was the idea that children may be suggestible. This implies that child when asked to pick out the suspect from a group of people, this means that the suspect is present but in reality may not be. Issues such as these get people locked of more times than you would think. It’s not only the witnesses fault though as sometimes they are asked questions that may be leading or suggestive. Here eyewitness’s memories can be changes depending on the types or wording of questions asked. There are many things you have to take into account and be cautious about when dealing with eye witnesses.
One interesting thing I learned about was the unconscious transference. In reading this chapter I found out that this means that we sometimes wrongfully identify people because maybe they were close to the crime scene and that is what sticks in our head. Adding on to this I means a face that is familiar from one context is transferred to the scene on the crime. I just find it amazing how complex our brain is but how sometimes this complexity can lead to bad things like wrongful convictions.
After reading this chapter I found myself wanting to learn more about the weapon focus effect. First I wanted to look at some of the research behind this idea. I went to the website below and found a study that was a meta-analytic review. This study looked at 19 different tests of the weapon focus effect. The author’s hypothesis was that the presence of a weapon during the commission of a crime would negatively affect the eye witness’s ability to identify the perpetrator later. After looking through these 19 tests her hypothesis was confirmed proving that the presence of a gun can affect the eye witness’s ability to identify the perpetrator later.
http://web.augsburg.edu/~steblay/WeaponFocusMetaAnalysis.pdf
Chapter 7 dealt with eyewitness identification and testimony. I thought the introduction of the chapter was very interesting and proved a very good point. A woman was raped and was smart enough to look at her attacker when the lights were on for a brief minute. She had identified the rapist and was absolutely positive that he was the right man who raped her. In court, the man was convicted and sentenced to prison. Ultimately, she was wrong about the man who raped her after DNA ruled him out. This story proves that no matter how confident a person is, they can be wrong because their memory was not correct.
The chapter mentioned a study where 347 cases dealing with eyewitness testimony. Of these, 74% of the defendants were convicted, based on the eyewitness testimony. Furthermore, in 49% of the cases when the defendant was convicted, there was only one eyewitness. The Manson criteria are five factors that should be evaluated when looking at the accuracy of an eyewitness testimony. The five factors are the opportunity of the witness to see the perpetrator, the level of attention, the witness's accuracy of previously described description of the offender, the degree of certainty, and finally the amount of time between witnessing the crime and an identification. I find it very interesting that we rely on eyewitness testimony so much in court cases, but in reality, there are so many things that need to be taken in account and so many variables that can influence our interpretation of a crime. The book provides a few examples such as lighting, distance, and eyesight of the witness. If the lighting is not ideal, the witness may think they see certain facial features or some other distinguishing features that may affect their perception of the offender. The distance at which the witness sees something is very important. This also ties into their eyesight. Up close they may see something, but at a distance, that could be totally different. There are ways that the legal system tries to correct for this. A good defense attorney should be able to correct these biases.
I found cross-racial identifications to be very interesting. The beginning of that section describes a story where a man was arrested for robbing someone at gunpoint. The man who was robbed identified the man but in court, he basically said that "they all look alike." I have heard a lot about this topic in the past. It stated that there is no difference between races in witness accuracy, but there is a difference between the race of the witness and the race of the offender.
One thing I found surprising but when I think about it makes a lot of sense, was that of the weapon focus effect. This means that when a victim sees a weapon such as a gun or knife in the attacker's hand, they lose focus on the attacker. Instead, their focus is on the weapon because that poses a danger. When this happens, their ability to identify the attacker is weak. Another thing that I found very surprising was that children are just about as accurate as adults when they are presented with lineups. This is only true, however, if the actual perp is in the lineup.
I found a website that described a study in which a mock trial was conducted. There were two separate juries and one jury was presented with an eyewitness and one was not. 18% of the jury found the offender guilty when there was no eyewitness. The other jury who was presented with an eyewitness, 72% voted guilty. This just shows how much jury members are influenced by an eyewitness. The website also noted errors sources in lineups. The first is that the witnesses are not explicitly told the the perpetrator may not be in the picture. Without being told this, they automatically think that the person is there and that there is pressure on them to make an identification, which can lead to mistakes. The second source is the "distractors" are poorly chosen. When there is a lineup, the suspect must not stand out from "distractors". The height, race, weight should be similar to the other suspects in the lineup and the photos should be in the same nature. The coloring of the picture, background, location, and view angle are subtle differences that can have an effect. The third error is that the person conducting the lineup knows who the suspect is. When they know who the suspect is, they can intentionally or unintentionally give off expressions or clues as to who that person is. This can inadvertently influence the witness trying to make the identification. Eyewitness testimony is more accurate when the witness knows the offender. Otherwise, there are a lot of problems with eyewitness testimony, even though the legal system puts so much weight on them.
http://www.visualexpert.com/Resources/mistakenid.html
Chapter 7 was all about eyewitness identification and testimony. The chapter begins with a story that is an example of how easy it is to incorrectly identify the perpetrator of a crime. A man named Ronald Cotton spent over 10 years in prison for allegedly raping a young woman. This woman saw her attacker multiple times and gave the police a description of her attacker. She even chose Cotton out of a line-up, but he wasn’t the man who committed the crime. Cotton was almost set free when the real rapist stepped forward temporarily. Cotton wasn’t a free man until a law professor and attorney, Richard Rosen, had the DNA samples of Cotton compared to the semen sample.
Eyewitness testimonies are a very persuasive form of evidence. But just like other trace evidence they can become contaminated easily. This is great when the witnesses are correct, but it can be devastating when they are mistaken. Mistaken eyewitness identification leads to more wrongful convictions than any other type of evidence. Mistaken identifications played a role in 76% of cases where wrongly convicted persons were released from prison because of DNA testing later proved their innocence. The courts have now come up with five factors that should be taken into account when evaluating the accuracy of an eyewitness’s identification: 1) the witness’s opportunity to view the perpetrator 2) the witness’ level of attention 3) the accuracy of the witness’s previous description of the offender 4) the degree of certainty displayed by the witness 5) the amount of time between witnessing the crime and making the identification.
Studies have shown that it is harder for people to recognize the faces of people outside their own racial group. Cross-race accuracy is worse than within-race accuracy when identifying criminals. Many people believe that heightened arousal enhances memory. This is true to an extent. A moderate level of arousal is best for enhancing memories. Too little stress and too much stress are not ideal conditions for making memories. Witness testimonies are easily swayed by leading questions. They also can be harmed by cognitive dissonance. Dissonance theory predicts that once you commit yourself to a particular course of action, you will become motivated to justify that course of action. The textbook discusses several solutions to prevent eyewitness bias 1) blind lineup administrators 2) bias-reducing instructions to eye-witnesses 3) unbiased lineups 4) confidence ratings 5) video recording 6) sequential lineups and 7) expert testimony.
I found the story of Ronald Cotton to be very interesting. It surprised me that there could be so many other people around that world who have been wrongfully convicted due to eyewitness testimony, just like him. This whole chapter ties in very well with psychology. Humans make errors, especially when it comes to memories. As psychologists we need to think of ways to reduce errors when it comes to witnesses and their testimonies. We need to preserve the correct memories and prevent contaminating them.
I wanted to know more about people who are exonerated of crimes they hadn’t commited. I compared the number of exonerations of each state. Iowa hasn’t had any exonerations.
http://www.innocenceproject.org/news/StateView.php
This website talks about similar eyewitness problems. It discusses the possibility of exonerations with DNA evidence. I also found it interesting when the author talked about an experiment that had been performed with college students. Students were shown a thief and then asked to identify him in a lineup. However, he was not actually in the lineup and they weren’t forced to choose a person if they didn’t think he was there, yet 173 people identified a suspect from the lineup.
http://reason.com/archives/2009/04/08/eyewitness-testimony-on-trial
Chapter 7 dealt with eyewitness identification and testimony. The first part tells a story about a woman who was raped in her apartment by a man who she thought she knew what his face looked like. However it turns out that she wrongfully accused a man named Ronald Cotton and he spent 11 years in prison based solely on the eyewitness evidence given by Jennifer Thompson. However the man who actually did it was a man named Bobby Poole. This just goes to show how wrong eyewitness memory can be.
Memory has three processes to it. The first is encoding which means gathering information and putting it into the memory. The second is storage refers to holding the encoded information in the brain over time. The third is retrieval refers to accessing and pulling out the stored information at a later time. If the information is not well encoded it could cause error at all three processes. This can become a serious problem when it comes to eyewitness testimony. Research on people who have been wrongfully convicted shows that mistaken identifications lead to more wrongful convictions than any other evidence.
Another item discussed in this chapter was something called the Manson criteria. The Manson criteria emphasized five factors that should be taken into consideration when evaluating the accuracy of an eyewitness's identification. The five factors are 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. These criteria seem logical but are very difficult to apply to actual crimes.
In order to attempt to expose eyewitness bias the legal system has a few techniques. One of them is called the voir dire which is intended to expose potentially biased jurors. The second is cross-examination which can be used to bring out weaknesses and deceptions in the testimony and lastly is jury deliberation which places fact-finding in the hands of a group of citizens.
Another interesting thing discussed in this chapter is cross-racial identifications. A meta-analysis of 39 studies found that own-race identifications were significantly more likely to be correct than cross-race identifications, and that the number of misidentifications was significantly higher when it was cross-racial. This can be caused by the cross-race effect. This is referred to as the tendency for people to have a harder time recognizing the faces of people outside of their racial group rather than faces within their racial group. A common saying with this is "they all look alike to me". Along with this is the use of weapons in a crime. Usually if eyewitnesses see the perpetrator holding some sort of weapon they are more likely to be focused on the weapon rather than look at the perpetrators face. This is known as the weapon focus effect.
Another important thing discussed is when victims or eyewitnesses are being interviewed, the way a detective or police officer words a question can have an impact on the way the eyewitness answers a question especially if they are children because they feel as if they need to help them find a criminal. If a leading question or comment is asked it can give an eyewitness who wasn't so sure more confidence on what they saw.
Also discussed are seven guidelines used to improve eyewitness accuracy. The first is blind lineup administrators which is where the person administrating the lineup or photo spread isn't aware of what photo or person is the suspect. The second is bias-reducing instructions to eyewitnesses. Bias-reducing instruction removes the presumption that the witness is obliged to choose someone from the available options. The third guideline is unbiased lineups which makes it so that in the lineup there must be other "fillers" in the lineup in order to not make the suspect stand out. The fourth guideline is confidence ratings. This is important because confidence of a eyewitness can change over time so their statement must be taken before any feedback is given so they have on record what was first said. The fifth guideline is video recording which is having identification procedures recorded in order to show what transpired during that time so no bias was involved. The sixth guideline is sequential lineups which is where eyewitnesses are shown one person or photo at a time, decides whether or not it's the perpetrator, and moves on to the next person or photo. However, simultaneous lineup is much more common which is where people or photos are side by side and not shown one at a time. And the last guideline is expert testimony. This is where you have an expert on eyewitness identification testify in court.
The most interesting thing about this chapter in my mind is when they talked about asking leading questions or saying comments to an eyewitness which can tamper with what the eyewitness recalls. You never really think that by someone saying a certain word and framing a question in a certain way that it would make you say something completely different than had they used a different word.
I also found it surprising that in 76% of cases where wrongly convicted persons were released from prison was based on mistaken identifications. It makes me think about how many people are trapped in prison for something they didn't do while the person who actually committed the crime could still be out in the world committing crimes.
One thing I wanted to learn more about from this chapter was the use of hypnosis to help eyewitnesses "recall" information. I feel like although in therapy ways it can be useful I still feel like when someone is in a hypnotic state the person doing the hypnosis can still ask leading questions that may persuade them to say something that didn't really happen. After doing some research I found a website that talked about forensic hypnosis. It said that a study done in 1985 showed that a hypnosis interview produced 30% more correct information than compared to a standard interview. It does however say that hypnosis doesn't increase or decrease the quantity or accuracy of the information recalled but that the use of suggestion, direction, or leading questions along with internal factors to the witness have an impact upon recall.
www.forensichypnosis.com/
2/6/12
This chapter basically summarizes eyewitness identification and testimonies and their accuracy or, a lack thereof. The most interesting thing I learned was the cross-race effect (own-race bias). The book said that this effect is apparent as young as nine months old. This part in particular surprised me. Nine months seems so young to be noticing these differences. I have always been told stories about children not being able to see color – which we are taught to see the differences. From that we see the extreme versions of racism and cruelty (may be this is because I have recently watched the movie The Help). It is very interesting to me that there is research that suggest or supports the notion that we are programmed to see differences between races. This seems like racism is something inevitable – it is kind of discouraging to think about.
What surprised me the most was just the overall inaccuracy of the American justice system. It worries me. How can a truly innocent person get through all the biases and memory-fouls? It’s very troubling not only because we seem to be putting many innocent people in jail. Also, because when we wrongfully convict someone that means that the real criminal is going without punishment, correction, or surveillance. However, in class today I did gain a little more trust when Dr. MacLin talked about several countries and their ‘justice’ systems. In perspective ours is still one of the best in the world, in my opinion. But, we have many areas that are in need of improvement.
A topic that I would like to know more about is when the eyewitness if a child. The book says that when asked to pick someone out of a line or a group of photos that they are about as accurate as adults (either children are just as cognitively strong as adults or maybe adults/people are just bad at identifying people in such a context – it is an ineffective approach). I looked up a few sites dealing with children as eye witnesses. Up until the 1970’s children were not considered viable eyewitnesses. As mentioned above children are just as accurate as adults when it comes to ability. But, there are a few other factors that affect children more so than adults and thus makes them less capable of making an accurate identification as an eyewitness. The sites I looked at discussed suggestibility and compliance as determining factors. Adults can be affected by these issues as well but, not the extent of a child. If a child is presented with a lineup of persons and a police officer asked them to pick out the person that they saw committing a crime the child will, more likely than not, pick someone. This is because when the officer asked them to pick out the person that committed the crime suggesting that the person had to be in that group of people. Children are also more compliant. So at the slightest suggestion then the child will see approval from that adult and go along with whatever they suggest. This means that lead-questions are very dangerous or damning in these situations. I came a across a great example of this when I was watching a Law and Order SVU episode. A young girl said that her P.E. teacher had molested her. Then two other girls from her class came forward with similar stories. Come to find out that the P.E. teacher was innocent and the second and third girl that came forward were heavily questioned by their mothers. As not to disappoint their parents that girls said that they two had been molested.
http://www.eaplstudent.com/component/content/article/126-child-eyewitnesses
Another site I looked at had an article that discussed how we experience/interpret, store and retrieve memories based on our passed experiences. The younger the child the few experiences they will have to use to store accurate or detailed information. For that reason six-year-olds are better at recalling memories that 2 or 3-year-olds. This sight also references compliance and suggestibility. They discuss a case where multiple children were asked leading question enough times that they inadvertently became ‘memories’ for them. So when the children answer questions they did not know they were lying; they believed these lies/inaccuracies to be the truth drawn from their own memory.
http://abcnews.go.com/Primetime/Health/story?id=965740&page=1#.TzIEyFxAZK0
This chapter was all about eyewitness testimony. The chapter begins with a story of a girl who testified in a case against a man who raped her. The girl, Jennifer Thompson, identified Ronald Cotton as her attacker in both a line up and in pictures. Cotton was sentence to life in prison. However, 2 years into his sentence, another of Cotton's inmates told him that he knew he was innocent because he had been the one who raped Jennifer. That man was Bobby Poole. Finally after 8 more years, Cotton was able to get a retrial and was acquitted when DNA testing of the blood and semen matched Poole instead of Cotton. The thing that I found most interesting was that even after discovering that she had identified the wrong man, Jennifer Thompson still pictured Cotton when she thought of her rapist, not Poole.
The psychology involved in eyewitness identification is largely encamped in cognitive psychology where most information about memory is found, but there are also some bits of social psychology, especially in this case. In this case, Jennifer, a white woman, falsely identified Ronald, a black man, as her rapist. In social psychology, we studied that is is more difficult for us to distinguish between people of different groups, in this case, races. This is called out-group homogeneity. This social psychological idea may have played a role in Jennifer's misidentification of Ronald as her rapist because she could not easily distinguish his features from another black man's.
The chapter went on to discuss eyewitness testimony. It turns out that juries rely heavily on eyewitness testimony when it is available, and eyewitness misidentification of a defendant is the leading cause of known wrongful convictions in the US. Afterward, the chapter described the Mason Criteria, which are factors that are considered when evaluating the accuracy of eyewitness testimony. The five criteria were: 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, 4) the degree of certainty displayed by the witness, and 5)the amount of time between witnessing the crime and making the identification. These criteria are something that the jurors should consider carefully when an eyewitness is testifying, but I doubt that this actually occurs. Most jurors would probably be caught up on the emotional trauma that the eyewitness faced and not the accuracy of the information they were presenting.
The book continues to break down flaws in eyewitness identification starting with Cross-Racial identifications. This section describes that it is harder for a witness to recognize the faces of people not within their racial group. I spoke about this before when talking about out-group homogeneity. It's the same principle, but the cross-race effect is implemented in forensic psychology instead of social.
The chapter then describes the effect that stress can have on an eyewitness's accuracy. The sections shows that high levels of stress can hinder a person's memory. This seems backwards because of all the things we hear about adrenaline and PTSD make it seem like we would remember stressful events better. However, stress makes it harder for our brains to encode information, meaning that we won't store the memory. Going one step further, the chapter spoke about the weapon focus effect which says that if the eyewitness sees the perpetrator using a gun or know, their ability to recognize the perp is impaired. Instead, they focus their attention on the weapon because they know it is dangerous and can cause them harm. This idea makes me think of the saying "Guns don't kill people. People kill people." Sure we all know that, but we still see a gun as a dangerous object, even if it could do nothing to us without a person wielding it. Therefore, it's only natural that in a situation that a person is being held at gunpoint that their attention would be drawn to the gun, or more specifically, the hand holding the trigger.
The chapter also discusses mishaps in eyewitness memory such as unconscious transference, where a witness transfers a familiar face from one context to the scene of the crime. They also speak about the dangers of leading or suggestive comments that could be mistakenly or purposefully used by police, investigators, and attorneys that can influence the way an eyewitness thinks.
An interesting fact that the chapter pointed out was about witness confidence. It seems that as the legal process develops from the time of the crime to the conviction, an eyewitness's confidence in their own testimony increases, regardless of whether their information is accurate or not. This can be very dangerous because as was mentioned earlier, jurors should judge eyewitness testimony based partially on how confident they are in their testimony. If an eyewitness is falsely confident, jurors can be mislead into convicting innocents.
The chapter then goes on to talk about ways to improve eyewitness testimony. This includes blind line up administrators, bias-reducing instructions, unbiased lineups, confidence ratings, video recording, sequential lineups, and expert testimony. I previously read a study about the benefits of sequential vs. simultaneous lineups and the results showed that it decreased the amount of false identifications, but didn't increase the amount of correct identifications.
The chapter ends speaking about techniques for refreshing the memories of eyewitnesses. The techniques they highlighted were hypnosis and cognitive interviews. Of the two, I'm more willing to believe that a cognitive interview would be beneficial because hypnosis can elicit false memories.
Overall, I thought this chapter was really interesting and will be relevant for me our class crime occurs because I am one of the eyewitnesses. What I wanted to research more about actually ended up being the story that was told at the beginning of the chapter. I wanted to know more about the trial and how the people involved were affected by it. As it turns out, Jennifer Thompson and Ronald Cotton wrote a book together, appropriately and cleverly entitled "Picking Cotton" with another author, Erin Torneo. The book actually debuted on the New York Times Best Seller List in March of 2009. Both Thompson and Cotton are now advocates for judicial reform and frequently speak about their experience. I have to admire both of them for their courage. For Ronald to have been able to forgive Jennifer for assisting in his wrongful placement in prison for 11 years shows that he is a man of high character. Jennifer also shows tremendous strength in her ability to admit to her mistakes and try to make something good come from them. This book is one that I just might have to read sometime in the future.
http://www.pickingcottonbook.com/home.html
Summarize the chapter.
Chapter 7 begins by telling a story about how Ronald Cotton was wrongful convicted of a crime. He was convicted because Jennifer Thompson said he was the guy that raped her, but he really wasn't. He was sent to prison for 11 years before DNA testing proved him innocent and Bobby Poole guilty.
Psychologists distinguish between three processes. The first is encoding,, gathering info and putting it in a for that can be kept in the memory. Second is storage, its keeping the info in the brain over time. Last is retrieval, which is retrieving the info later. An error can occur in any of these processes at any time. An error with memory trace happens because our brain wrongfully represents our experience, and almost every memory decays over time.
Being an eyewitness is a very powerful thing. The jury will most likely agree with you and convict whoever you say did it weather you are right or wrong. People assume since you saw it you know exactly who it was and wouldnt make any error, but they are wrong. Mistaken eyewitness identification is the leading cause of wrongful convictions.
In some cases the courts used a model called the manson criteria when evaluating an eyewitness identification. The first is the witness's opportunity to view the perp, second is the witness's level of attention, third is the accuracy of the witness's previous description of the offender, fourth is the degree of certainty displayed by the witness and lastly is the amount of time between witnessing the crime and making the identification.
There is alot of things that are open ended with this criteria so it can be hard to follow.
There are opportunities for error at every stage of the criminal process from when the crime happens till the trial ends and hopefully any good attorney would be able to identify those errors and poit it out to a jury. The legal system uses Voir Dire to expose biased jurors so they can be dismissed which is good, but there is nothing to tell weather the jurors will value the eyewitness testimony or not.
It has been shown that it is harder for someone to identify someone within a different race than within their own, this is referred to as the cross-race effect.
Its been said that you remember this better when you arousal is heightened, but that was basically disproves by charles morgan who studied soldiers in survival training. He found that the soldiers under less stress were more likely to correctly identify the right person and less likely to positively identify the wrong person.When an eyewitness takes part in the weapon focus effect they see the perp has a weapon and their ability to identify the assailant is impaired, because they focus their attention on the weapon and not the assailant. When an eyewitness experiences unconscious transfer they unknowingly transfer a familiar face to the scene of the crime. Sometimes just the wording of a question can skew the response of a witness. So even questioners need to be conscious of what they say because it can easily influence a witness's response. We also unknowingly create scripts in our mind, which are widely held beliefs about sequences of actions that occur. If we are entered into a situation where we are not exactly sure what happens we may use a script to fill in the blanks.
The confidence a witness has about a recognition of a person can be altered by the response they get. Telling someone they were right makes them think they were more confident about their identificaion and they had better attention when they saw the crime than someone who was told they were wrong. This effect is known as the postidentification feedback effect. This could be explained by cognitive dissonance. People have to justify a course of action once they choose to believe or not believe it.
Children have been proved to be less accurate than adults when identifying a line up with the culprit absent are are equally accurate with the culprit present.
There are many things in a crime that are out of anyone's control called estimator variables, but they are things that can be done after the crime to make witness identification more accurate called system variables. Research suggest a few guidelines. One is blind lineup administrators. this is when the person who makes the line up is not aware of which person the suspect is. Next is bias reducing instructions to eyewitnesses. This begins by telling the witness that the criminal might not be in the lineup. This removes the assumption that the witness has to pick someone. Third guideline is unbiased lineups, in which the suspect cant standout from the fillers. Next is confidence ratings. They witness needs to be asked how confident they are when the make and identification immediately and before any feedback is given. Fifthly they want a video recording. Which means recording all identification procedures so jurors could see for themselves what was told to the witness. Next is sequential lineups. This give the witness the ability to see one person at a time and to not make comparisons to the other people in the lineup. Lastly is expert testimony. Simply, having and expert witness testify in court.
Some witnesses cant remember specifics of what they saw but there are ways to recall that info. One way is hypnosis. Once they enter the state of hypnosis eyewitness are asked to rewitness the crime with the ability to do things like pause and zoom. When the witness recalls more info is part of a phenomenon called hypnotic hypernesia. Another technique is the cognitive interview, which relaxes the witness and allows them to mentally reinstate the context surrounding the crime. The down side to this is that it requires police to adopt an interviewing style different from their normal style. Since this technique has been accurate police in England and Wales now receive training in the technique.
What is the most interesting thing you learned?
The thing that surprised me the most is that children can be as accurate as adults at identifying a criminal in a line-up. I just assumed that childrent would do worse because their brains are not fully developed.
What surprised you the most?
The thing that surprised me the most is how aware people who deal with cases are about wrongful identification yet the dont do much to try and prevent it.
What is something you want to learn more about?
The cognitive interview.
Search on that topic and report on some additional information about that topic. Provide any links to resources
The cognitive interview is based on four rules.
1) Mental Reinstatement of Environmental and Personal Contexts
2) in-depth reporting
3) Describing the TBR Event in Several Orders
4) Reporting the TBR Event from Different Perspectives
The biggest limitation it has is that is more difficult to perform than regular police interviews.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_interview
The average number of correctly recalled facts for the cognitive interview was 41.2, for hypnosis it was 38 and for the standard interview it was 29.4. There was no significant difference in the number of errors in each condition.
http://www.simplypsychology.org/cognitive-interview.html
Vocab:
encoding, storage, retrieval, memory trace, cross race effect, voir dire, cross-race effect, weapon focus effect, unconscious transference, scripts, postidentification feedback effect, cognitive dissonance, estimator variables, system variables, bias reducing instruction, fillers, sequential lineups, hypnosis, cognitive interview, hyonotic hypernesia
This chapter deals with eyewitness testimonies. It starts out with a special case where a woman was raped and is very confident in her own picture of the man. She testifies and picks out one man in particular, Robert Cotton. As investigation around Cotton continues they find lots of evidence that seemingly fits the crime scene. Nothing is solid though, merely assumptions and guesses, other than the woman's memory; she is sure of herself. Cotton serves 11 years in prison for a crime he never committed. I am utterly shocked and bewildered on how the investigation and trial was performed. The woman was not lying, but it was obvious she could not have been 100 percent accurate in her descriptions; studies later discussed in the chapter prove why. Even regardless of her memory flaws there was no solid eveidence. I thought each criminal is "innocent until PROVEN guilty"? I guess not. The investigators assumed the pieces together. There was rubber at the crime scene and a shoe Cotton owns could have fit that...are you kidding me? Yea, Cotton and a thousand others own that shoe in his city. I cannot believe they went off just assumptions and an eye witness. Assumptions put an innocent man away for more than a decade of his life. That is despicable in my eyes.
The chapter goes on to talk about countless studies done to prove memory is flawed, children witnesses are not reliable, and how memory can be improved. And yet, with all this proof, the professionals still go about interrogations wrong. They know full well that their current procedures are in fact inhibiting witnesses' memories; no matter. They and the jury see children as pure and honest creatures...who wouldn't? They are. But children are also easily manipulated and their minds are underdeveloped. They also see lineups as games and do not understand the interrogation process fully.
The chapter briefly discusses hypnosis and such other tactics.
One topic I am further interested in is how they use children to testify.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/04/070430162627.htm
This link states that younger children have less false memories than older, in a study between 9th graders and 5th graders, which is opposite than our book. However, i think in high stress situations the younger children's memory accuracy would drop considerably; older children have experienced more high stressful situations versus the younger so they would be better at recalling crimes and such.
http://cogprints.org/648/1/amina.m&v.html
this scholarly journal article shows that in children the repetition of questions can greatly influence a child's memory, proving that children are very easily manipulated, as I previously stated.
Chapter seven is all about forensic memory and eyewitness testimony. Because eyewitness evidence is trace, it is something that cannot be put in a bag, or tagged. Eyewitness evidence is also easily contaminated. So why then are some states judges hesitant to allow scientific experts on memory to testify? They say it’s because this will confuse the jury, or because everyone has a memory and understand how it works; however, around 4,500 people are wrongfully convicted every year due to faulty eyewitness testimony where a witness recalled incorrect information from their memory, or there was never a memory stored in the first place. Recall memory is the most difficult because it is remembering something in the absences of the item one is trying to remember. An example of this would be an essay only exam. Recognition memory is when one recognizes the material when they see it: such as a multiple choice exam or a line-up at the police station. Part of the chapter that I found the most interesting was about déjà vu, or a sense of familiarity about a location or situation. This occurs because a prior experience is now influencing behavior, but the exact memory of this event is outside conscious awareness. I found http://science.howstuffworks.com/science-vs-myth/extrasensory-perceptions/question657.htm very interesting because it states that déjà vu occurs more often in people between the ages of 15 and 15 and is related to having some form of epilepsy in the temporal-lobe. There are many other interesting theories suggested within the article. Another aspect of memory that I find interesting is memory loss. Anyone of my friends and family can tell you I have a terrible memory. Memory loss happens because of a variety of reasons: decay, retroactive interference (new memories hinder recovery of old), proactive interference (old memories hinder establishment of new), repression, amnesia (caused by problems in the brain usually due to an injury), retrograde amnesia (memory loss before injury), and anterograde amnesia (memory loss after injury). There are also many reasons one may forget things such as failing to encode, interference, and motivated forgetting, just to name a few.