Criminological Key Question Flashcards
What is your key question for criminological psychology?
BASED ON THEORIES OF MEMORY, IS EYEWITNESS TESTIMONY TOO UNRELIABLE TO TRUST?
What is eyewitness testimony?
Eyewitness testimony refers to information given by a witness after seeing an event or crime occur.
Why is this a problem in today’s society?
The evidence appears to suggest that eyewitness testimony cannot be trusted and results in frequent miscarriages of justice. For example, the Innocence Project have reported:
•375 exonerations have occurred since 1989.
• 69% of these cases involved eyewitness misidentification.
The large number of miscarriages of justice due to faulty EWT provides credible evidence that EWT is unreliable. Psychological research on the complex cognitive processes supports this conclusion. It is important to improve the reliability of eyewitness testimony as otherwise society will lose trust in the criminal justice system and crimes may then go unreported through fear of miscarriage of justice.
How can the MSM explain unreliability of EWT?
How this explains the unreliability of EWT:
According to MSM, information enters your sensory memory through the five senses. If information is paid attention to, it is transferred to the short-term memory. Therefore, it someone witnesses a crime and they do not pay attention to all the details, they won’t be able to remember everything - they will only remember what they paid attention to, which might mean they miss important details. The MSM states that for information to be transferred to the long-term memory, it needs to be rehearsed. After witnessing a crime, some people will rehearse what they saw often as it will have been a significant event.
However, other people may avoid or be unable to rehearse the event as it was traumatic which will mean the memory will decay. This will then affect the reliability of their EWT as they may forget important details.
How the MSM can be used to improve the reliability of EWT:
According to the principles of MSM, it is important that witnesses give a statement to the police in good time after the incident to reduce the chance of details decaying with time. They may then also need to rehearse the information regularly to ensure they remember it accurately if they may need to give a statement again in the future.
How can reconstructive memory explain unreliability of EWT?
When eyewitnesses encode and store their memory of a crime, they are actually storing what happened in a way that it makes sense to them and can be influenced by their schemas. According to reconstructive memory, our memory is active and reconstructive, so is fallible to inaccuracies. We also try to fit what we remember with what we already know and understand about the world. Therefore, an individual may not remember everything about an event and may have to rely on their schemas. Therefore, when a person recalls the event they witnessed, they may fill in the gaps in their memory using schemas and their memory will become what they think should have happened rather than what actually did happen. For example, a perpetrator’s appearance or accent may trigger the eyewitness’ schema about the type of person who is committing the crime, influencing them to encode and later recall the perpetrator differently from reality.
This can reduce to reliability of their EWT.
Post-event information, such as leading questions and discussions with other witnesses, can result in inaccurate memory as a result of reconstructive memory. New events or information can alter the memory of the event. It can then be difficult to isolate their true memory of the event without the additional influences when giving testimony at trial.
How can reconstructive memory be used to improve the reliability of EWT:
We now know that in trials, witnesses should not be asked leading questions as this can reconstruct their memory of the event.
Questions should always be open to illicit the most accurate account of the incident. Barristers should not lead a witness into giving a desired response in order to deliberately support one side
Obiection: leading
of the argument.
Cognitive Interviewing can be used to enhance eyewitness testimony using the principles of reconstructive memory. The Cognitive Interview includes four main techniques: report everything, reinstate the context, reverse the order, and change perspective. The purpose of ‘reverse the order’ is to allow witnesses to describe the event in a different chronological order, for examples, from end to beginning, or from a midway point in the account. Evidence suggests that by interrupting schema activation, witnesses are likely to give a truer account under these circumstances, rather than relying on their schemas and their expectations of what they thought had occurred. The purpose of ‘change perspective’ is to allow witnesses to tell the story of the event from someone else’s perspective, for example another witness or someone who was directly involved. This should also interrupt schema activation and result in a truer account rather than the witness relying on their expectations.
How can tulving’s theory of long term memory explain unreliability of EWT?
Tulving believed that episodic memory was susceptible to transformation, linking to reconstructive memory. Recall of episodic memory is dependent on the context in which it was experienced, therefore context can aid the recall of episodic memories. We encode the context and emotional state we experienced at the time of the event, as well as the memory of the experience itself.
How can tulving’s theory of long term memory be used to improve the reliability of EWT:
State and context cues are used during cognitive interviews with witnesses of crime to improve the accuracy of their testimony. For example, one of the techniques of cognitive interviews in to reinstate the context. This involves asking the witness to imagine all aspects of the crime scene such as how they felt, the weather, anything they could see or smell, the time of day etc. It is hoped that these context cues can aid recall by triggering further information.
