Eyewitness memory and eyewitness identification, why so often do people get it wrong? According to The Innocence Project, which is an organization founded in 1992 by Barry Scheck and Peter Neufeld, is a national litigation and public policy organization dedicated to exonerating wrongfully convicted individuals through DNA testing and reforming the criminal justice system according to www.innocenceproject.org. Since the creation of The Innocence Project they have exonerated 342 cases through DNA and have found 147 real perpetrators that actually committed the crimes, (Innocence Project, 2016). One of the lead causes of the wrongful convictions are eyewitness memory and eyewitness misidentification which we talked about in Lesson 9. According to the project, at least 70% of wrongful convictions were due to faulty eyewitness identification (Innocence Project, 2016)
There have been several cases were witnesses picked suspects in the back of police cars almost 100 feet away. Eyewitnesses have picked people in a line-up that had an r marked next to the suspect, and nothing on the other photos. There have also been several cases were eyewitnesses pick who they thought it might be or someone that resembles the actual perpetrator. So the question is how does this happen? Also, how can we fix it from not happening as much as it does. According to our text, eyewitness testimony is testimony by an eyewitness to a crime about what he or she may have saw during the commission of the crime. In the United States of America, 200 people per day become criminal defendants based on eyewitness testimony (Goldstein et al., 1989). There have been several studies done in which eyewitnesses either picked the wrong person or could not even recognize the person that did it. Memory is faulty. Henderson et al., 2001 states that even under ideal conditions, identifying faces is a difficult task and errors occur. There are several errors in why people mistake the identity of a person. Errors are usually due to suggestion, familiarity, and attention. Errors in attention happen when eyewitnesses are focusing on one thing and forget other details. Errors due to suggestion happen when a police officer or another person infers or suggest things which then “bring back the memory” of the eyewitness or make them remember things they did not know or have any clue about. Errors due to familiarity happen when eyewitnesses pick innocent bystanders or someone they saw at the scene due to the fact that they remember their face, even though they were not the actually perpetrators.
Different groups are working with law enforcement agencies to make sure policies are being adopted that decrease the amount of wrongful convictions based off bad eye witness testimony. The Innocent Project has asked police departments to adopt policies, in which they do the following on all line-ups, a Blind/Blinded administration where the officer administering the lineup is unaware of who the suspect is, which helps reduce sugguestive practices. Lineup composition on all line-ups, that include “Fillers” (the non-suspects included in a lineup) should resemble the eyewitness’ description of the perpetrator. That all officers give instructions to the person viewing the lineup, letting them know that the perpetrator may or may not be in the lineup and that the case will continue regardless of the line-up. The IP also wants all law enforcement to get written statements from the eyewitness articulating his or her level of confidence in the identification made at the time that the identification is made and to record all procedures, this all according to o www.innoceneproject.org. I think that if all these things are done it could drastically reduce the number
www.innocenceproject.org
Cognitive Psychology Third Edition-Goldstein
Eyewitness memory, testimony, and identification reflect complexities associated with preserving an equitable justice system. I was exposed to an alleged criminal event, and recall appreciating the fragility of my memory as police questioned me shortly after the event.
An eyewitness’s fragile, faulty memory retrieval process is one of several estimator variables, which also include stress, fear, and vulnerability that can adversely impact judgment. (Rogue, Mario, Kayla Burd, Christie Diaz, and Alexandra Kitson 2010)
You presented information regarding reforms necessary to decrease the number of wrongful convictions. An extension of the reforms includes the education of judges and juries, who make assumptions about the reliability of eyewitness testimony due to a lack of information regarding how memory works. (Rogue, Mario, Kayla Burd, Christie Diaz, and Alexandra Kitson 2010)
Television shows such as “Making a Murderer” exposed the problems associated with eyewitness reliability in terms of errors due to suggestion, which you also referenced. One episode recounted a sexual assault victim’s experiences with a police sketch artist, who used descriptions to elicit testimony that a suspect was in fact her attacker. In effect, the victim’s memory was subject to implications made by the artist. The artist took advantage of the victim’s vulnerability and extremely high stress level. (Rogue, Mario, Kayla Burd, Christie Diaz, and Alexandra Kitson 2010)
The horrific reality is that the eyewitness misidentification error not only resulted in the incarceration of an innocent man, who was later exonerated, but the fact that the actual attacker was free to continue to commit acts of violence.
Although I could be called upon to act as an eyewitness, I believe it is more likely that I would be called to serve on a jury. I might be in a relatively unique position to apply what I have learned as a result of studying information associated with your topic.
Web Publications
Rogue, Mario, Kayla Burd, Christie Diaz, and Alexandra Kitson 2010. “Eyewitness Testimony and Making a Murderer.” Applied Principles of Vision and Memory. Eyewitness Testimony on the Avery Case. Conclusion. Cornell University Law School Social Science and Law. ©2010 Cornell University. Web 2 August 2016.
Your post brings up some very interesting points. According to Goldstein (2011), ‘people (especially jurors) perceive eyewitness testimony to be the most convincing type of evidence’. And approximately 75% of people that have been exonerated for wrongful convictions were originally convicted due to faulty eyewitness identification. For those reasons, it is obvious that this is an extremely pertinent issue today. In fact, over the course of the past several years I have heard of multiple cases in which this has taken place. Most recently, I heard the heartbreaking story of a woman by the name of Jennifer Thompson-Cannino who mistakenly recognized Ronald Cotton in a police line up as the man that raped her in 1984. However, 11 years later, DNA evidence showed that he was not at all involved in the crime. The problem in this case was the fact that the real perpetrator of this crime was not actually in the original police line up. Goldstein (2011) mentioned that it is common for eyewitnesses to pick out the person that looks the most like the subject in a police line up. Additionally, eyewitnesses commonly pick out suspects from the police line up, whether the subject is there or not. Luckily, police have begun to change the ways in which they handle eyewitness testimonies and police line ups in order to reduce the likelihood of wrongfully convicting people.
Goldstein, E. Bruce. “Perception.” Cognitive Psychology: Connecting Mind, Research, and Everyday Experience. Third ed. Australia: Wadsworth Cengage Learning, 2011. 51-57. Print.
http://www.today.com/id/29613178/ns/today-today_news/t/she-sent-him-jail-rape-now-theyre-friends/#.V6ER9ZPnbGc
I agree with your statement “memory is faulty” and I also agree that something should be done to reduce the amount of incorrect identifications. I can appreciate what the Innocence Project is doing for the citizens in our country but I can’t help but wonder why we’re still relying on eyewitness testimonies in the first place. I know, it’s a very far-fetched claim that we should get rid of them. They’re what “helps” the most when it comes to putting criminals (and innocents) behind bars. However, everyone knows that the human mind is not the most reliable resource. We can’t even rely on our own memories, for our own personal use, but we trust the memories of strangers when it comes to the law. False memories and unconscious biases also can affect the statements of an eyewitness testimony (Engelhardt, 1999). Even though we all know about the faults of the human memory, we still have no other way to replace eyewitnesses. Hopefully, the justice system is implementing more accurate methods to reduce inaccurate testimonies.
Engelhardt, L. (1999). The Problem With Eyewitness Testimony. Stanford Journal Of Legal Studies, 25-30.
I definitely agree with you on the point that “memory is faulty”.Humans are prone to make faulty reconstruction of our mental experiences. This failure to accurately remember is due to one or more of three processes that are involved in remembering and recalling an event, encoding, storing, and retrieving. However,I believe it’s hard to reduce the errors drastically because at the end of the day you are dealing with the human brain which is hard to control or deal with when people have their own will.
Our faulty memory. Retrieved August 2, 2016, from http://joesr.com/The%20Book/Our%20Faulty%20Memory.html
Goldstein, B. E. (2013). Cognitive psychology: Connecting mind, research and everyday experience with Coglab manual (3rd ed.). United States: Wadsworth Cengage Learning.