Ronald Cotton Eyewitness Testimony

Innocence Project Report on the Case of Curtis Jasper Moore Tommy Warrick Drake University According to the Innocence Project one of the greatest causes of wrongful conviction is due to eyewitness misidentification. They state that 72% of cases where defendants have been exonerated eyewitness misidentification played a role. Even though eyewitness testimony has been proven inaccurate numerous times, it can still be the decisive evidence in a court of law. This is because the law views the human memory as a camcorder which can record and repeat whatever it sees.

After investigators begun to suspect arson was in play, the testimonies turned into accusations and assumption of Willingham’s guilt. David Grann wrote, “Dozens of studies have shown that witnesses’ memories of events often change when they are supplied with new contextual information”, suggesting that after a certain period of time into an investigation, all testimonies should be taken with little confidence (Grann, “Trial by Fire”). If the witnesses and testimonies were taken from individuals who know nothing about the

The article “When Our Eyes Deceive US” speaks about the wrong decisions that can lead to a wrongful conviction. This particular article decided to focus on cases of wrongful convictions of sexual assault. The first case mentioned was that of the wrongful conviction of Timothy Cole. His victim positively identified him three times (twice in police lineups and one in person at the trial), he was exonerated by DNA testing. To the utmost misfortune, the real rapist had been confessing to the crime for nine years.

She “studied every detail on the rapist’s face. [She] looked at his hairline; [she] looked for scars, for tattoos, for anything that would help [her] identify him” (New York Times). She put so much effort to stay conscious and study this much detail of her attacker, yet when Bobby Poole stood in front of her in the courthouse, she did not recognize him claiming “that she’s never seen that man before in her life”. This shows that there are other contributing factors that could lead a witness to misidentify an attacker and that even the “best” eyewitnesses are not perfect. Thompson shared the statistic that eyewitness error is the leading cause of wrongful convictions in America.

The innocence project has proposed to legislation to improve the accuracy of eyewitness ID’s. These proposals include recording the proof of identity technique so that the juries can regulate if it was accompanied properly, putting characters in the lineup

In the article,”Does Talking About Emotions Influence Eyewitness Memory?,” it discusses the way emotions can affect the memory of a witness of a crime. Having two witnesses of the same crime can result in different memories due to the person’s way of thinking. The different ways that you ask questions can affect the results of how the witness can recall a crime. The authors uses hypotheses experiments to come to an conclusion if emotions influence eyewitnesses memory. They show participants emotional video clips and interview them alone and as a group to see if their stories change.

Witnesses to crimes are sometimes asked to view a police lineup to see if they can identify the culprit. Using experimentally created events, psychological researchers have long warned that eyewitness identification evidence is less reliable than people seem to believe. Corroborating the concerns of psychologists, since the advent of forensic DNA testing in the 1990s, 258 people convicted by juries in the United States have been freed based on exculpatory DNA tests, and 200 of these were cases of mistaken eyewitness identification (Innocence Project, 2010). Examination of the reasons for these mistaken identifications has provided rich avenues of investigation guided by cognitive and social perspectives. Here we focus on (a) variables that

This week’s topic was very interesting to learn about how important eyewitnesses can be when a crime and accidents do occur. In the case that was presented in the 60-minute segment of Ronald Cotton and Jennifer Thompson is exactly how legal system can fail us when it comes to the eyewitnesses’ identification testimony and how a person’s perception and memory can be altered. The aspect of psychology and law research from this week’s course material is most relevant to the topic of perception and memory. The memory has different stages the first is encoding the process of entering perception into memory.

Context consists of such factors as emotion and environment, and it is necessary to recreate those factors in order to access the memory that has been naturally primed to be recalled in reference to them (Cutler, Penrod, Martens, 629). Thus, when addressing these identification errors made by eyewitnesses and when trying to fix them it is essential that the officials involved in the criminal justice system who are questioning the witnesses “reinstate the context surrounding an event” (Cutler, Penrod, & Martens, 629). In other words, eyewitness identification errors need to be fixed, as well as discrepancies of reliability and accuracy within a jury and among the jury members. Furthermore, authors Kovera and Borgida discuss how social psychologists are not allowed in the courtrooms even though that would be very beneficial as they can share the knowledge of these phenomena that can often lead to injustices (1376). Perhaps the first step to more forcefully addressing and working on these influential estimator and system variables as well as jury biases will be to change that rule.

Eyewitnesses in the judicial system have lots of roles. They are called upon to make identifications at two points in the legal process. First during the investigation of suspects, they may be called upon to help compose a facial composite using a “photo-kit,” examine mug shots, pick a suspect out of a photo-spread, or make an identification from a live lineup. Second thing is the eyewitness may be called upon during the prosecution of defendants to make an identification in a courtroom trial (Penrod, 149). Characteristics of the eyewitness may profoundly affect the performance (Penrod, 157).

Furthermore, there can be several factors at play when a wrongful conviction occurs and each case is unique. Three of the more common and detrimental factors that will be explored in this essay are eyewitness error, the use of jailhouse informants and professional and institutional misconduct. Firstly, eyewitness testimony can be a major contributor to a conviction and is an important factor in wrongful conviction (Campbell & Denov, 2016, p. 227). Witness recall and, frankly, the human emory are not as reliable as previously thought. In fact there has been much research showing the problems with eyewitness testimony such as suggestive police interviewing, unconscious transference, and malleability of confidence (Campbell & Denov, 2016, p.227).

Introduction Context: Senior of Woodlawn High School, Adnan Syed, was convicted and charged with the first-degree murder of his ex-girlfriend Hae Min Lee. Not only is Adnan’s alibi inconclusive, but he also fails to recall any specific details or occurrences of January 13, 1999. His acquaintance, Jay Wilds, has served as the State’s key witness against Adnan. Thesis Statement:

For one, when conducting a lineup of possible suspects, it should be a double blind suspect lineup meaning that neither the person in the room conducting the investigation nor the person identifying the suspect should know who the possible suspect is. This prevents the person conducting it from unintentionally giving hints which would affects the person's decisions. Also, when conducting a lineup it should be recorded and close attention should be paid to how long it took for the person to decide as a longer time indicates uncertainty, but also gives time for the brain to trick the person into becoming confident in their choice, especially if they receive confirmation from people around them. Also, many false eye witnesses, will give signs of nervousness, and after

Some of the most important research related to memories and cognitive psychology is about Eye Witness Testimony (EWT). EWT is a legal term used in courtrooms, by police and other authorities. EWT refers to when someone witnesses an illegal act for example a robbery, a rape, or a situation that could be lead to further investigation. EWT is still crucial in discovering someone’s guilt or innocence in court, despite the fact that much research has proved that one cannot entirely rely on one’s memory.

The oxford dictionary defines memory as “the act or fact of retaining and recalling impressions, facts, etc.; remembrance; recollection”, in short it is described as the act of using existing knowledge, but psychology questions the reliability of our memory, does the memory work as the tape recorder or does our mind make changes over time. The reliability of memory has been a topic of interest for long and psychology has contributed to the understanding remembrance in many fields of interest. One of them is the legal system, were eyewitnesses testimony is a very commonly used method, but as it is based on the memory, its reliability may easily be questioned. People like to view their memory as a very accurate record of facts, however researches