Eye witness testimony debate Flashcards
Why is there a debate?
Memory is fallible
It is easy to manipulate and change it.
Laszlo Virag (1969)
He was convicted in Bristol of stealing from parking meters and using a firearm.
Despite having an alibi and other contradictory evidence he was found guilty and convicted after the single eyewitness identified him as the perpetrator.
Whilst he was serving time, it was found that another person committed the crime, and he was eventually pardoned.
Lord Devlin
He investigated Virag’s case as well as other cases and recommended that the:
“Trial judge should be required to instruct the jury that it is not safe to conduct on a single eye - witness testimony alone, except where there is substantial corroborative evidence.“
Devlin’s recommendations were never made the law.
Davies et al (1989)
Reviewed literature discussing children used at witnesses.
Children ages of 6 and 7 and 10 and 11 are fairly accurate in their memories of an event.
They don’t usually “make things up”.
They don’t deliberately lie when giving testimony.
Their memory for important details is also not significantly altered by adult suggestion after the event.
These conclusions challenge many of the claims made by other researchers.
Anastasi and Rhodes (2006)
Found that all age groups are most accurate when recognising an offender from their own age group.
This may mean that if the child witnesses had observed children committing staged crimes, perhaps they would be more reliable in their identifications.
Child witnesses – NOT RELIABLE
Children as eye-witnesses are often regarded as unreliable because they’re prone to fantasy.
Their memories may also be especially affected by the suggestions made by others.
Therefore, researchers have been interested in finding out if children are accurate eye-witnesses. For example:
Identifying a perpetrator from a line-up.
Target-present and target-absent
Line-ups don’t always include the target individual because otherwise a suspect could be selected because he / she fits an enormous description.
Therefore, eye-witnesses are now often told that the line-up may or may not include the target.
This is referred to as target-present or target-absent.
Pozzulo and Lindsay (1998)
Drew data from a number of studies.
(2000 participants between them)
Found that children under the age of 5 were less likely than older children or adults to make correct identifications when the target was present.
Children aged 5-13 didn’t differ significantly from adults in the target-present condition.
However, they were more likely to make a choice (which was inevitably wrong) in the target-absent condition.
It was thought that this was due to children being more sensitive about doing what they’re asked to do – they feel they can’t say “no” and have to give an answer.
Crimes are emotive experiences - RELIABLE
Some psychologists believe that when we experience events which are emotionally shocking and / or which hold personal significance we create a particularly accurate and long - lasting memory.
This is referred to as a flashbulb memory.
Cahill and McGaugh (1995)
There is evidence that the hormones associated with emotion may enhance the storage of memories.
This suggests that the emotion surrounding a crime may actually lead to more rather than less reliable memories.
Crimes are emotive experiences – NOT RELIABLE
Eye-witnesses may not be reliable because the crimes they witness are unexpected and emotionally traumatising.
Freud
Argued that extremely painful or threatening memories are forced into the unconscious mind.
This process of repression, is an ego-defence mechanism.
Today, psychologists might call this “motivated forgetting”.
Exonerated
A term used to describe people who have been found guilty and convicted of a crime but are later found to be innocent.
Huff et al (1986)
Reported that nearly 60% of 500, mainly American, cases of wrongful convictions involved eye-witness identification errors.
This suggests that too much reliance on eye-witness testimony has ethical implications.
Greene (1990)
There may be dangers inherent in becoming too sceptical of eye-witness testimonies.
Greene reports that when mock juries were asked to make decisions about the guilt or innocence of a perpetrator based on eye-witness testimony, some jurors mentioned their knowledge of mis-identification mistakes.
They know about such mistakes from items on the news.
This knowledge made them more sceptical about the testimony of eye-witnesses.
As eye-witnesses are a major source of information in ant crime scene it’s important to pay some attention to the evidence.
