Eye Witness testimony is key for the criminal justice system, but sometimes it has it’s down sides. I had to watch an eye witness video for my psychology class and it was about a woman named Jennifer who was raped, but then sent the wrong man, Ronald Cotton, to jail for 11 years. She went to the police and was given photos of suspects, and Cotton was one of those photos. After 5 minutes of studying them she picked Cotton as the man, and then during the photo lineup, she picked Cotton again. After she identified Cotton twice, they told her that he was the same man that she picked in the photos, and Jennifer thought, “I got him.” That reinforcement was key. During the trial Jennifer looked Cotton in the eye, pointed at him and said, that’s him, he’s the one who raped me. Cotton was them sent to jail for 50 years to life. Years later another inmate who looked similar to Cotton came to the jail, his name was Bobby Poole. People started to mistake Cotton for Poole in the prison. Finally Cotton heard that Poole was overheard saying that he was the one who raped Jennifer and another one a few years ago. Cotton got a retrial with Poole in the room, but Jennifer still identified Cotton as her rapist. Finally 11 years later Cotton gets another retrial and this time, he has DNA on his side. The sperm showed that Poole was indeed Jennifer’s rapist and Cotton was innocent all along. How could Jennifer sit in the same courtroom with both men, the one who raped and the one she accused of rape and still get them confused? How could she pick someone who wasn’t even her rapist and accuse him of raping her? Part of this was that Poole was not in the picture pool of suspects, so Jennifer naturally picked the guy who looked almost identical to her rapist. Then during the lineup when she picked the same man again she was reinforced that this was her guy so during both trials without DNA she always picked Cotton because he was the guy she was picking all along.
It’s scary to think that sometimes our own memory can play tricks on us, and that it isn’t always reliable. Eye witness testimony is used in courts because it has an impact on the jury. It is someone saying they were there and this is what happened. Just picture yourself in that courtroom with Jennifer so confidently pointing at Cotton saying this is the man who raped me. “Memory is malleable, full of holes, easily contaminated and susceptible to suggestion” (CBSNEWS, 2009). When looking at lineup photos of suspects if you are 100% sure the suspect is in those pictures memory recognition will kick in, in 5 to 6 seconds. When Jennifer looked at those photos it took her 5 minutes to pick out Cotton. That there is a key part as to why Cotton was not the rapist, because Jennifer did not instantly recognize him in the photos. Now what they are starting to do at some police stations is have a computer system do the lineup and show only one photo at a time. Also during the lineup they want the person conducting it to have no idea who the suspect is so they don’t have an influence on the victim. Jennifer was reinforced at the lineup that Ronald Cotton was indeed her man, by one of the officer’s on the case.
Our memory can play mind games on us. Sometimes when we recall certain event we may change a few details and not even realize it. Our memory is never perfect and can be tricked based on other factors. There was a study conducted at Stanford where participants had to look at a car crash and whenever the word “smash” was brought up they said that the participants said they saw broken glass on the ground when they did not. (Stanford). Multiple factors can influence and that is something that needs to be taken to heart in courtrooms across America.
Work Cited:
http://agora.stanford.edu/sjls/Issue%20One/fisher&tversky.htm
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/eyewitness-how-accurate-is-visual-memory/5/
This blog was so fascinating primarily because of the reality of an innocent man going to jail for eleven years. Not to mention he had two trials in which he was proven guilty before forensics compared DNA. The eye witness pointed out Cotton from the beginning to the end of the end of the investigation as well. Its interesting that Cotton was the one to suspect the real rapist, Poole, in prison. After is was fact that Poole was guilty, what happened to Cotton and what measures were taken? What happened to the eye witness?
A study done by research news shows 10,000 innocent people may be wrongfully committed a year, however it shows that to be less than one percent of convicted criminals. This arises the question, Is it worth it? Is this innocent mans suffering the outcome of our flawed yet great legal system?
Megan, I have also heard about similar cases in some of my classes and on the news. I have a question: what ethnicity was Jennifer in this case? One thing that I had heard about before was the difficulty of “cross-racial” identification, meaning that it’s harder for people to distinguish faces and identify correct ones when the faces belong to a different ethnicity than their own. We’ve heard the “______ people all look the same” kind of comments directed at many ethnic groups before. I looked into it and found this meta-analysis on Cross-Racial Identification. It examined multiple studies on the issue and found statistically significant results saying that in 79% of studies, Black and White people were both better at correctly identifying people of their own race. The report stated that “the effect occurs with equal magnitude among both Black and White subjects, accounting for 11% of the variance in recognition ability of Black subjects and 10% of the variance in recognition ability of White subjects,” meaning that Blacks and Whites had about the same accuracy rate when it came to identifying people of another race. All this is to say that if Jennifer was white, she might have had an “own-race bias” that influenced her mistake. This goes back to what Andrew has talked about in class: humans have lousy intuition. Jennifer sent the wrong man to jail, and even when she was presented with the real culprit, she made the same mistake again. Kind of like how the doctors studying anti-arrhythmic medications found results saying they were hurting people and blamed the study, maybe Jennifer was already convinced for cultural/emotional reasons that the first man had to be her rapist, and since she was already convinced, the initial evidence that he wasn’t couldn’t convince her or the jury.