Eye witness testimony is so unreliable that it should never be used in convicting criminals. Discuss.

Psychology Assignment 1

“Eye witness testimony is so unreliable that it should never be used in convicting criminals”

Eye witness testimony is a legal term. It refers to an account given by people of an event they have witnessed. Memory is very important for eye witness testimony. An accurate memory for an event can help lead to the conviction of a guilty person or the release of an innocent person wrongly convicted. Inaccurate memory can lead to the conviction of an innocent person or a failure to convict a guilty person, as the jury almost always believe the accounts of eye witness testimony; this was shown in the Devlin report where it is stated that eye witness testimony should never result in a conviction in an English court in the absence of other corroborating evidence.

Research points show that eye witness testimony is highly inaccurate. Loftus and Palmer conducted extensive research over 30 years and found that eye witness testimony is vulnerable to many different types of influence.

Research into eye witness testimony demonstrates that memories are quite fragile and subject to distortion by post-event information. Studies also indicate that misinformation can introduce serious errors into eyewitnesses’ recall of the event.

Bartlett challenged the idea of memory as a passive process, and suggested that memory is an active process rather than a "tape-recording" of an experience. According to Bartlett, we arrange our memories in a way that fits in with our earlier experience, or schemata. When retaining information from events, the gaps in our memory are reconstructed based on our schema.

Bartlett used a story "The War of Ghosts" to test his theory: this story is a North American folktale which has a theme which would be unknown to the majority of his participants. Bartlett read the story and then tested Participants memory of the story. He found that the story became shorter, Participants tended to focus on a particular aspect of the story and highlight its importance , Participants filtered out aspects of the story that didn't seem significant to them, the story became more coherent (from the point of view of the cultural framework of the Participant) ,the story became more conventional. This shows that participants decided to retell the without some of the facts which they were told. (Thomas H. Kramer, Page 6)

The Innocence Project in the USA has facilitated the exoneration of 214 men convicted of crimes they did not commit as a result of faulty eyewitness evidence. (Lawton, Page 26, 2011)

Research continuously shows that eye witness testimony is affected in a number of ways. A key factor is the use of misleading information, predominantly in the form of misleading questions. In the courtroom, barristers are frequently accused of ‘leading the witness’. There are two types of misleading questions. Leading questions are questions that make it probable that a participant’s schema will influence them to give a desired answer. Schemas are mental ‘units’ of knowledge that correspond to frequently encountered people, objects or situations. They allow us to make sense of what we come across in order to allow us ...

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Post-event information is comparable to leading questions, although this type of misleading information has a word added to a question after the incident has occurred. Research into the effect of leading questions on EWT was carried out by Loftus and Palmer (1974). They asked participants to estimate the speed of cars in a film with reference to traffic accidents and found the estimated speed was affected by participants being asked how fast the cars were going when they either ‘contacted’, ‘hit’, ‘bumped’, ‘collided’ or ‘smashed’ into each other, implying that leading questions affected participants’ schemas, influenced them to give the desired answer. The researchers also found that more participants incorrectly remembered a week later seeing non-existent broken glass if given the verb ‘smashed’ rather than ‘hit’. (J.M. Lawton, 2011. Page 19.) This suggests that at recall, misleading information is reconstructed with material from the original memory.

This shows that leading questions can create false memories and in the likes of a courtroom barristers can phrase questions in a certain way to receive the desired answers, which in certain cases may not be the actual truth, although the person being questioned may believe it to be so.

Witnesses who have picked out a suspect from a mug shot file or a photo spread may then be asked to choose a suspect from an identity parade or line-up, where the suspect is presented live alongside a number of foils. The difficulty here is that witnesses may want to appear consistent and therefore automatically select the same person that they have identified from the mug shots. Witnesses are often traumatised and may therefore be motivated to make a live choice which is closest to their memory, or just the most likely from the selection offered. Suspects are allowed to choose their own position in the line-up, but they may still present quite differently to the foils. They may appear nervous and stressed and if their anxiety is communicated via non-verbal indicators, witnesses may base their selection on this information. The resemblance of the foils to the suspect is crucial, but there is little proof of how this is regulated, and during particularly controversial investigations the pressure will be on to secure an identification as quickly as possible. If the suspect has an unusual appearance it will be even more difficult to find physically similar foils. Legal challenges are often made on the grounds that identification parades were not conducted fairly.

An example is the Jennifer Thompson case. Jennifer was a college student back in 1984. One night an intruder burst into her flat and held a knife against her throat. As he raped her Jennifer watchfully memorised his appearance, studying every detail of his face, determined that if she lived her aggressor would be caught and imprisoned. Later that day she worked with police officers in drawing up a sketch, looking through hundreds of images of facial features to ensure she got it right. It was just a few days later when she identified Ronald Cotton as the rapist. She was absolutely certain and Jennifer Thompson picked him out again in a police identity parade. On the strengths of Jennifer’s eyewitness testimony Ronald was imprisoned – she declared it to be the happiest day of her life. Indeed she was so sure of his guilt that she wanted him electrocuted, desiring to flip the switch herself. However, in 1995, after Ronald Cotton had been in prison for 11 years, DNA evidence proved it was a different man who had raped Jennifer and Ronald was released. Ronald and Jennifer have become friends and Jennifer is now an outspoken opponent of the death penalty and a regular lecturer on the unreliability of eyewitness testimony. (Julie Harrower, Page. 88, 2003.)

With the use of a mug shot or a photo spread I feel that to prevent people being wrongly convicted like Ronald Cotton the victim must be told that there is a strong chance that the suspect will not appear in these photos. When using this I feel that DNA evidence should also be used as Jennifer Thompson was so sure it was Ronald; however when the DNA evidence came through it showed that she had been more motivated to see her attacker locked up, even though it was not the correct person.

There are indications that cognitive abilities diminish with age, suggesting that the accuracy of EWT decreases as people grow older. However, factors have been identified that moderate the effect of age upon the accuracy of recall. Children appear more willing to accept inaccurate information provided by adults for fear of contradicting adult authority figures, but have more accurate and detailed memories when they identify an event as serious. In addition, the accuracy of children’s answers can vary depending on how they are questioned. Younger children, in particular, are vulnerable to being misled by post-event information and leading questions. Older people have less accurate and less detailed recall than young or middle-aged people and appear more prone to misleading information. However, research findings from all age groups are not always consistent, possibly due to methodological flaws.

Loftus et al. (1991) found that elderly people were more likely to make false identifications and were poorer at recalling specific details. In addition, elderly men in particular were prone to distortions through misleading post-event information, again suggesting accuracy of recall declines with age and that the elderly are susceptible to misleading information. (Lawton, Page 27, 2011)

One problem in the study of age factors and EWT is the type of research methods used. Older adults are often compared with college students, but on stimuli suited more to the college students. Anastasi and Rhodes (2006) tested participants’ recall of photographs previously seen. They found that all age groups performed best with photographs of people from their own age group, suggesting that the stimuli used in research have an influence on findings.

Weapon focus refers to the decreased capability to give a precise description of the perpetrator of a Crime by an eyewitness because of attention to a weapon present during that crime.

Weapon focus refers to a witness's attention being directed towards a weapon during the crime. The weapon becomes an overriding thought whereby other stimuli in the environment are given less attention than would be normally expected. The stimuli that are often of most interest are the face, physical features, and clothing of the perpetrator. Therefore weapon focus refers both to the heightened attention paid to the weapon and to reduction of attention toward and recall of these other stimuli.

Loftus, and Messo (1987) using a corneal reflection device, tracked eye movements while subjects viewed a scene in which a cashier was confronted with either a check or a weapon. Subjects showed longer eye fixations on the weapon than the check. (Thomas H. Kramer, Page 2-4)

This suggests that witnesses may not actually get a look at the suspects face. This could result in the witness feeling under pressure to give details and giving false details which they feel is true.

Racial prejudice can very easily affect the way the world is viewed, as was demonstrated by Duncan (1976). Chance and Goldstein (1996) have shown that identifying faces from a different ethnic group is more difficult than identifying faces from one’s individual group, because of inappropriate and unfamiliar encoding strategies. The area of cross-race identification thus produces a particularly challenging issue in evaluating eyewitness testimony. Duncan (1976) was concerned in the effect of stereotypes on perception. White participants were asked to view a video of a disagreement between two people which resulted in one pushing the other. In fact four versions of the video were shown to different groups: Tape 1 (White assailant/white victim) Tape 2 (White assailant/black victim) Tape 3 (Black assailant/white victim) Tape 4 (Black assailant/black victim) Participants were asked whether the behaviour of the person who pushed the other could best be described as ‘playing around’ or as ‘violent behaviour’. When the perpetrator was black, 70% of participants described his actions as violent, while only 13% of participants chose this descriptor when the perpetrator was white. (Lawton, 2011. p 28.).

Research seems to reveal that eyewitness testimony, while occasionally believable, is not always as reliable as the police and jurors believe. Witnesses are vulnerable to influences at a number of stages throughout their observation and recall of an event, and are also vulnerable to inaccurate post event information. In view of this it seems clear that eyewitness testimony should never be allowed as the sole evidence supporting a conviction, Psychologists can greatly assist the police in developing interview techniques which can improve the extent and the accuracy of witnesses’ recall.