Recently in Witnesses Category

Here is a fun, yet informative little website that I ran across that has some good information about of variety of topics.  Some of these topics may help you with your project (depending on your role) and others are just full of useful information!

When I was in a social psychology class, we learned about the bystander effect. This is simply the fact that when with others, individuals act differently than they would alone. A huge case involving the bystander effect is the murder of Kitty Genovese in 1964. Kitty was 21 years old living in New York City. She managed a bar close to her apartment. One night, she was walking home late from work. Right outside her apartment, she was attacked and stabbed twice. She screamed but no one came to help her. The perpetrator left but returned 10 or so minutes later to find Kitty lying, barely conscious, by the back door. He continued to stab her, rape her, steal her money, and then leave. One man saw the first attack on Kitty and didn't call the police. Quite a few of the other tenants in the apartment building heard Kitty's screams but did not call the police either. This is the reason why this case is so well known. Many of the apartment tenants said they didn't want to get involved.

Four years after the murder, two psychologists did a study to try and figure out what the effect of bystanders had on people. They placed people in one room and were to speak through a microphone to the person in another room. The person on the other side, the confederate of the experiment, started to pretend he was having a seizure and even mumbled the words about dying. The psychologists found that the more people that were present, the longer it took for someone to act for respond to the person having the seizure. The people who didn't report the seizure said that the reason they didn't report it was because they wanted to abide by the rules of the experiment by staying in the other room apart from the confederate.

I think the bystander effect relates a lot to psychology and law. If someone is witnessing a crime, it's way less likely they'll report it if other people are present. It makes me wonder though if the bystanders being strangers has an affect on if people act or not. If I was surrounded by my friends, I think I would almost always react to someone getting murdered or having a seizure. People care a lot about what others think and sadly, this can have some negative effects.

This website is where I read about the bystander effect.

http://faculty.washington.edu/eloftus/Articles/2003Nature.pdf

I found this article by Elizabeth Loftus, a professor of psychology and professor of law at the University of Washington. Loftus has written many articles about memory, and its vulnerability to manipulation. This article discussed a few studies Loftus and some colleagues conducted to prove the malleability of our memories. She emphasized the importance of memory when it comes to crime and legal issues. Loftus thinks there should be new approaches implemented to reduce and eventually eliminate witness misidentification. America has a much higher rate of wrongful convictions than Canada and Great Britain because they have less faith in witness identification and are more strict on their reviews of cases involving eye witness testimonies.

The article summarizes a few of the studies Loftus and her colleagues have performed concerning the power of false memories, and the ease of misleading a person to believe they saw or did something  that never happened. Memory is vulnerable and it should be treated with care to avoid tampering with real memories.

In class we have been talking a lot about the different procedures that law officials go through from the first 911 call to the end of the trial. Recently, we have talked about the importance of memory and eyewitness identification and all the implications these two forms of evidence can have. Below is a link to an article written by Gary Wells, Mark Small, Steven Penrod, Roy Malpass, Soloman Fulero and C. A. E. Brimacombe, (1998). This article is often times referred to as the "white paper". This article is meant to be an eye opener to people, and for them to realize the many implications in conducting lineups. Also, it goes into great detail explaining the many ways our legal system can avoid contaminating memory evidence and limit the amount of false witness identifications. (This is kind of long, but is worth your read if you are interested in this sort of topic).

http://www.law.northwestern.edu/academics/colloquium/Gary%20Wells/Gary%20Wells%202.pdf

Wells, G., Small, M., Penrod, S. Malpass, R., Fulero, S., & Brimacombe, C. (1998).       Eyewitness identification procedures: Recommendations for lineups and photospreads. Law and Human Behavior, 22

After our discussion in class on Tuesday about how the brain can fabricate false memories, I decided to look up more about this topic.  I came across an interesting website from pbs.org that showcases the show "Don't Forget!"  This series covers such topics as short term memory loss, the role of the hippocampus in remembering and identifying faces, new potential treatments for Alzheimer's and how to evade memory loss, why emotional memories are more easily recalled, and how our memories are sometimes subject to suggestions.

I watched a short clip about how memory lies.  In this clip, researcher Elizabeth Loftus from the University of California, Irvine is trying to get Alan to believe that a certain event happened in his childhood that he does not recall.  It turns out she was just making up the event; however, Alan's mind was partially influenced by her suggestive memory.  Loftus is trying show that there is an increased confidence in a memory that is suggested to a person but was completely made up.  Sometimes you can get people to change how they behave based on those false memories.  I thought that this clip related to the story that Dr. Maclin told in class about the two girls who accused their grandfather of taking pornographic videos of them when they were younger because of leading questions by interviewers. 

Just as this clip and Dr. Maclin's story suggest, misleading and misguided suggestions can often lead witnesses to wrongfully accuse and prosecute innocent people because of their false memories.  I think the clip of Loftus trying to trick Alan gives us a good perspective on how are brains can create AND believe false memories.  Something as little as a suggestive or persuasive comment from even a stranger can cause us to second guess ourselves.  We saw this example between adults, imagine the effects of implementing a false memory could have on a young child whose brain is still developing and maturing.  If our own brain lacks confidence in little scenarios such as turning off the stove before leaving or using a blinker at that last turn, it is only plausible that other people who are persistent and persuasive in their suggestions could have a profound impact on our "memory." 

The ever so popular TV show, The First 48 on AE.TV is one that you can count on for truth and facts. The first 48 is a show about homicide detectives that respond to a crime and try and solve it within the first 48 hours. These are real cases with the real people...no actors or replaying of a scene. What you see is what you get!
This show focuses mostly on people that go from suspicion to suspect, eye witnesses, and the interrogation, or interviewing. This really helps you see what a detective does from the moment they get that call.
You can also get a sense of how they figure out what happened and who was involved. They start with the facts that they have off hand and work their way down from there. The one thing that I have started to notice sense we have talked about it in class is the interrogations done by the detectives. In class we learned that a detective will tell you anything you want to hear. They will exhaust you mentally and physically, they will lie to you. Basically they will do anything to get you to confess or turn on anyone. If you notices, in most shows, the detective will either try and play friend, or yell and scream and lie to get them to crack. I find it interesting to watch, now that you really know what is going on.
I have posted the link to the First 48 TV shows. The one on the link I am posting is about a homeless man who is murdered, and a 911 call that has gun shots firing in the background. I urge you to watch the whole show and really pay close attention to the detail that goes into being a detective, especially the ones that do the interviews.
If you are interested after watching this show, you can watch many other episodes with different stories. They get very interesting!

http://www.aetv.com/the_first_48/video/index.jsp?paidlink=1&vid=AETV_SEM_Search&keywords=first%2B48&utm_source=google&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=first%2540&utm_term=first%2048

http://www.aetv.com/the_first_48/video/index.jsp?paidlink=1&vid=AETV_SEM_Search&keywords=first%2B48&utm_source=google&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=first%2540&utm_term=first%2048 

Witness Protection Program, what is it? There's a lot of information that I didn't know about it, so I decided to write my blog on it. Turns out about 9,500 people are in the program, that's so many! I think that it would be so weird to be in the program and up and leave everyone and everything you know, however it's all to save your life. The witness protection program has an 88% success rate, meaning that only 12% of the people who go into this program get caught by the people they're hiding from....crazy. I think it's nuts that we've developed such a program that can completely erase your real life and replace it with a 'fake' one. I think that if I was in the program I'd get confused myself and not remember what my 'fake' name was.
Here is a website I found that has some questions and the answers about the Witness Protection Program
http://www.usanetwork.com/series/inplainsight/theshow/witsecfaq.html

After going through some of the older blogs, I remembered an event that happened in my hometown of Dubuque, Iowa. At Hempstead High School, the assistant principle, Shane Oswald, is accused of having sex with a 17 year old student and also giving her prescription drugs (hydrocodone) and alcohol. When word of this got out, Oswald fled and ran away to Florida, where he was arrested. Oswald plead not guilty to these accusations but the 17 year old girl was able to draw diagrams of the inside of his home. His $50,000 bail was posted last week by his father. His trial is set to start April 15. Since I live in Dubuque, I've heard many stories about this case such as Oswald would sneak the girl into his basement while his family was upstairs to have sex with her. I've also heard that Oswald would give the girl hydrocodone before she went to school. I find this whole situation rather disturbing and it really makes me wonder why and how some people do the things they do.

The website below has several articles on the case.

http://interceder.net/news/shane-oswald

The article below has a very detailed description of what has been accused of Oswald.

http://www.kwwl.com/global/story.asp?s=11888266  

In many high profile cases, expert witnesses are called to the stand. They are usually questioned by both sides of the case (prosecution & defense). Many times their judgments are seen as a cut above the rest, and they are highly respected. However, the court room is not the only place where people can hear from expert witnesses. Michael Levine is a retired enforcement officer who has written several books, appeared on many TV shows, and now even has his own radio show. This radio show invites several guests that range from  retired law enforcement professionals, former and current military personnel, agents, political leaders, authors and many more. This website has several links to different archives of previous broadcast! It is a really interesting sight... to check it out, use the link below!

http://www.expertwitnessradio.org/

In a program series called Discovering Psychology, Philip Zimbardo narrates a particular program called Applying Psychology in Life.
 In the program, Research Psychologist Stephen Ceci is interviewed about child witness testimony. He discusses how investigators can inadvertently alter a child's memory by asking leading questions. His research has also laid down groundwork for interviewing children in many jurisdictions.
 This segment was extremely interesting to me and I encourage you all to watch it. It's roughly 7 minutes long but it is filled with a lot of  useful and interesting information.

http://www.learner.org/vod/vod_window.html?pid=1521
*Please note, this video link is for the entire show. You may need to download Media Player 11 to watch it. To get to Ceci's segment, pull the video's progress bar to 12 minutes and 40 seconds into the video. Also, directly following the segment is a different segment about conflict management that begins with images from the Columbine incident (this begins around 19 minutes and 20 seconds). Please note that this segment is entirely different and strictly pertaining to conflict management among youth and not the judicial system.