Eyewitness Identification Archives - searchfortruth.info

Excluding Coerced Witness Testimony to Protect a Criminal Defendant’s Right to Due Process of Law and Adequately Deter Police

February 21, 2019October 4, 2017 by admin

Abstract

This Note argues that the Due Process Clause must protect criminal defendants from the admission of an involuntary statement made by a witness. Part I discusses the history of the use of involuntary statements, specifically the justifications for the exclusion of coerced confessions. Part II examines how various courts have addressed the issue and have come to different conclusions. Part III explains why involuntary witness statements should be excluded under the Due Process Clause in criminal trials.

INTRODUCTION

Colin Warner served twenty years in jail for a murder he did not commit his conviction based entirely on the testimony of a scared fourteen year old boy who was coerced by police to implicate Warner Mario Hamilton was shot and killed in April of 1980 in broad daylight near the Erasmus Hall High School in Flatbush, Brooklyn. Thomas Charlemagne stated that he had seen what happened, though in fact he had not. Charlemagne was...

Lineup Construction and Lineup Fairness

February 20, 2019September 15, 2017 by admin

1. Introduction.

Police lineups come from English criminal law and procedure. According to Devlin (1976), lineups were instituted through a Middlesex magistrate’s order in the mid 19th century. They were intended as a ‘fair’ replacement for the practices of courtroom identification, and showups, which were widely used in 19th century England, but widely recognized as potentially unfair to the defendant. Their origin indicates that the notion of ‘fairness’ is their raisond’etre. They are intended to secure an identification that can potentially incriminate someone, but also is fair to those who are subjected to it, particularly those who are innocent of the crime. Study of the case law in many countries, as well as recent DNA-based exonerations in the U.S., indicates that lineups are not invariably fair – many innocent people are convicted after identification from a lineup by an eyewitness. The problem is significant because eyewitness evidence is cited as the most significant source of wrongful...

Logic and Research Versus Intuition and Past Practice as Guides to Gathering and Evaluating Eyewitness Evidence

February 18, 2019August 6, 2017 by admin

Like many issues in the psychology–law area, when it comes to eyewitness evidence, researchers see an obvious opportunity to help solve a problem—in this case, to maximize the rate of accurate information and identification decisions while at the same time minimizing the rate of mistakes. Psychology is especially well suited to this task, given its interest in the psychological aspects of eyewitness evidence, such as attention (e.g., studying an assailant’s face while being assaulted vs. learning only later that a bank customer committed fraud by passing a bad check), perception (e.g., of color, distance, height, speed), memory (e.g., length of retention interval, interference, source monitoring), decision making (e.g., determining the odds of a witness choosing a suspect by chance), interpersonal communication (e.g., witness interviews), and attribution theory (e.g., a witness wonders why she has been asked a particular question or shown a particular lineup). So, to address the legal system’s “problem,”...

The Experts Aren’t Reliable Either: Why Expert Testimony on the Reliability of Eyewitness Testimony is Unwarranted in Alabama State Courts

February 12, 2019July 16, 2017 by admin

Introduction

Over the past twenty years, the legal community and the American public have witnessed the exposure of several cases of wrongful convictions in the past through the use of DNA evidence and other modern scientific techniques exonerating the accused. This has lead to the founding of several organizations designed to combat wrongful convictions and to lobby for the correction of the factors contributing to such convictions, as well as investigations and recommendations concerning criminal procedural safeguards and other measures by federal and state authorities. One factor consistently identified as problematic is erroneous eyewitness testimony or identification, which is found to be a factor in over two-thirds of the documented cases of wrongful conviction in the United States. Commentators, courts, and others have offered several approaches to the problem of faulty eyewitness identifications, ranging from the exclusion of questionable eyewitness testimony altogether to the prohibition of any conviction based solely on uncorroborated eyewitness testimony. Another suggested solution and recent trend of the criminal...

Eyewitness Memory for People and Events

February 12, 2019July 16, 2017 by admin

Abstract

The two primary aspects of eyewitness testimony, namely, memory for events and memory for people, are reviewed. The chapter utilizes a metaphor that likens eyewitness memory to trace evidence. Like other types of trace evidence (e.g., crime scene blood, fibers), a major concern exists regarding how the evidence is collected. Research on memory for events is reviewed with respect to misinformation effects, planting false childhood memories, the influence of imagination on memory reports, and other suggestive procedures. Research on memory for people is reviewed with respect to variables that affect identification accuracy (such as lineup structure) and the process governing lineup identifications (relative judgments). A classification scheme is introduced that partitions eyewitness identification variables into the categories of general impairment variables versus suspect‐bias variables and crosses this categorization scheme with other categorization schemes (e.g., system versus estimator variables, witness characteristics versus event characteriuh uh ustics). The general thesis of the chapter is that eyewitness memory evidence needs to be collect

Eyewitnesses Experts and Jurors: Improving The Quality of Jury Decision Making in Eyewitness Cases

February 11, 2019July 16, 2017 by admin

In recent years it has been increasingly common for criminal defense attorneys to challenge the reliability of eyewitness identifications through the introduction of expert psychological testimony concerning problems of eyewitness identification. The acceptance of expert psychological testimony on issues associated with eyewitness memory is source of heated debate (McCloskey & Egeth, 1986). Much of the debate centers around three issues raised by lawyers and psychologists who oppose the introduction of expert eyewitness testimony: (1) is there a adequate scientific base of knowledge upon which to base expert testimony; (2) is psychological knowledge about eyewitness memory beyond the ken of the jury; and (3) what are the effects of expert psychological testimony on jury decision making? In this essay we report the results of several studies we and our colleagues have conducted in an effort to answer these questions. The Quality of the Research on which Expert Testimony is Based Some psychologists doubt that the existing body of research and theory on human memory...

Eyewitness Evidence Improving Its Probative Value

February 10, 2019July 16, 2017 by admin

SUMMARY

The criminal justice system relies heavily on eyewitnesses to determine the facts surrounding criminal events. Eyewitnesses may identify culprits, recall conversations, or remember other details. An eyewitness who has no motive to lie is a powerful form of evidence for jurors, especially if the eyewitness appears to be highly confident about his or her recollection. In the absence of definitive proof to the contrary, the eyewitness’s account is generally accepted by police, prosecutors, judges, and juries. However, the faith the legal system places in eyewitnesses has been shaken recently by the advent of forensic DNA testing. Given the right set of circumstances, forensic DNA testing can prove that a person who was convicted of a crime is, in fact, innocent. Analyses of DNA exoneration cases since 1992 reveal that mistaken eyewitness identification was involved in the vast majority of these convictions, accounting for more convictions of innocent people than all other factors combined. We review the latest figures on these DNA exonerations and explain why these...

The Role Of Eyewitness Identification Evidence In Felony Case Dispositions

February 10, 2019July 13, 2017 by admin

Abstract

We addressed the question of whether felony case dispositions are associated with eyewitness identification evidence. Toward this end, 725 felony cases (rape, robbery, and assault) were randomly sampled from the archives of a District Attorney’s Office in a large south-western city in the United States. A positive identification was present more often in accepted compared to rejected cases, although the association was significant in acquaintance cases (i.e., cases in which one or more of the eyewitnesses was familiar with the defendant), not stranger cases. Additionally, suspect and crime incident factors were associated with case issuing outcomes to a larger extent than eyewitness identification evidence. Analyses further indicated that eyewitness identification evidence was stronger in prosecuted compared to rejected cases in which eyewitness testimony was the sole evidence against the defendant. Neither the presence of multiple identifications nor nonidentifications of the suspect varied across issuing outcomes. The findings are discussed in relation to additional research that is needed at the police and prosecution stages to...

Eyewitness Evidence A Guide for Law Enforcement

February 10, 2019July 15, 2017 by admin

The legal system always has relied on the testimony of eyewitnesses, nowhere more than in criminal cases. Although the evidence eyewitnesses provide can be tremendously helpful in developing leads, identifying criminals, and exonerating the innocent, this evidence is not infallible. Even honest and well-meaning witnesses can make errors, such as identifying the wrong person or failing to identify the perpetrator of a crime. To their credit, the legal system and law enforcement agencies have not overlooked this problem. Numerous courts and rule making bodies have, at various times, designed and instituted special procedures to guard against eyewitness mistakes. Most State and local law enforcement agencies have established their own policies, practices, and training protocols with regard to the collection and handling of eyewitness evidence, many of which are quite good.

In the past, these procedures have not integrated the growing body of psychological knowledge regarding eyewitness evidence with the practical demands of day-to-day law enforcement. In an effort to bring together the perspectives...

False Assumptions Regarding Eyewitness Memory and Perception

February 10, 2019July 16, 2017 by admin

I. Background.

It has been estimated that each year approximately 77,000 individuals are arrested in the United States as suspects in cases where the principal evidence against the defendant is testimony from eyewitnesses (Goldstein, Chance, & Schneller, 1989). In a study of 500 cases where a felony conviction was set aside because of clear and convincing new evidence, 60 percent of the cases hinged around eyewitness identifications (Huff, Rattner, & Sagarin, 1986). A similar result was obtained from a sample of 205 additional such cases (Rattner, 1988). In a 1986 survey of judges, prosecutors, and lawenforcement professionals, 8 out of 10 respondents concluded that, in their experience, witness error was the most common sourceof wrongful conviction (Huff et al., 1986). Wells (1993) has documented 1,000 additional such cases since 1986. Even Thucydides (411 BC.), perhaps the first oral historian known, remarked that his history of the Peloponesian War was laborious because the accounts of eyewitnesses to the same event varied so greatly. Legal scholar and...

Best Practice Recommendations for Eyewitness Evidence Procedures

February 10, 2019July 8, 2017 by admin

Abstract

This article provides “best practice ” recommendations for collecting and preserving evidence using eyewitness identification procedures. Suggested procedures are based on decades of social science research as well as the recommended practices found in the recent report on the Robert Sophonow case in Manitoba and in a 1999 U.S. National Institute of Justice document distributed to all police services in the U.S. These recommendations currently guide training programs for several police services in Canada, the U.S., and around the world, and experienced criminal investigators will recognize many of the procedures as practices they have employed in their own cases. The overarching goal of this article is to accumulate these recommendations in one place in order to allow investigators to take advantage of them and achieve a maximal level of accurate eyewitness identifications while minimizing the rate of inaccurate choices.

New Ideas for the Oldest Way to Solve a Case

Criminal investigators know that it often takes many pieces of converging evidence to solve a complex case....

Eyewitness Lineups: Is the Appearance-Change Instruction a Good Idea?

February 10, 2019July 16, 2017 by admin

The Department of Justice’s Guide for lineups recommends warning eyewitnesses that the culprit’s appearance might have changed since the time of the crime. This appearance-change instruction (ACI) has never been empirically tested. A video crime with four culprits was viewed by 289 participants who then attempted to identify the culprits from four 6-person arrays that either included or did not include the cul-prit. Participants either received the ACI or not and all were warned that the culprit might or might not be in the arrays. The culprits varied in how much their appearance changed from the video to their lineup arrays, but the ACI did not improve identi- fication decisions for any of the lineups. Collapsed over the four culprits, the ACI increased false alarms and filler identifications but did not increase culprit identifi- cations. The ACI reduced confidence and increased response latency. Two processes that could account for these results are discussed, namely a decision criterion shift and a general increase in ecphoric similarity...

The Effects of Witness Viewpoint Distance Angle and Choice on Eyewitness Accuracy in Police Lineups Conducted in Immersive Virtual Environments

February 10, 2019July 16, 2017 by admin

Abstract

The current study investigated the value of using immersive virtual environment technology as a tool for assessing eyewitness identification. Participants witnessed a staged crime and then examined sequential lineups within immersive virtual environments that contained 3D virtual busts of the suspect and six distractors. Participants either had unlimited viewpoints of the busts in terms of angle and distance, or a unitary view at only a single angle and distance. Furthermore, participants either were allowed to choose the angle and distance of the viewpoints they received, or were given viewpoints without choice. Results demonstrated that unlimited viewpoints improved accuracy in suspect-present lineups but not in suspect-absent lineups. Furthermore, across conditions, post-hoc measurements demonstrated that when the chosen view of the suspect during the lineup was similar to the view during the staged crime in terms of distance, accuracy improved. Finally, participants were more accurate in suspect-absent lineups than in suspect-present lineups. Implications of the findings in terms of theories of...

Are Defendants Guilty If They Were Chosen in a Lineup?

December 1, 2018September 16, 2017 by admin

Abstract

Courts over believe witnesses who choose suspects in lineups. The extent of the problem depends on the probability of defendants who were chosen actually being guilty. According to Bayes' theorem, the probability of their guilt depends as much on the relative number of guilty who are chosen [p(C/G)] as on the number of innocent suspects [p(C/not G)]. Evidence is presented, based on both experimental data and archival reports of real eyewitness cases, that p(C/G) = 0.29 and p(C/not G) = 0.098 are conservative estimates. This leads to 0.247 being the probability of innocence if chosen (assuming no a prior presumption of guilt or innocence). The problem, then, is serious. Potential remedies are discussed....

When Believing Is Seeing: The Effect of Scripts on Eyewitness Memory

December 1, 2018September 17, 2017 by admin

Abstract

Two studies examined the conditions under which event schema or scripts produce gap-filling errors in eyewitness accounts of a robbery. In Study 1, scripts for the robbery of a convenience store were identified. Results revealed high agreement among the 120 participants concerning the sequence of actions for such a robbery. Based on the information obtained in Study 1, participants in Study 2 (N = 144) viewed one of two sequences of slides depicting a robbery of a convenience store by a lone robber. In one sequence, three central script actions were omitted and in the other, three peripheral script actions were omitted. In addition, rate of exposure was varied (2 vs. 8 sec) as was the length of the retention interval (5 min vs. 1 week). As predicted, there was a higher rate of false recognition for central as opposed to peripheral actions, and this tendency was exaggerated for the longer retention interval...