There is equivalence between size and blurriness-by making something smaller you lose the fine details.". This definitely raises the question: how accurate is an eyewitness testimony? The reliability if an eyewitness testimony is questionable. DNA tests should be used and held as a more reliable ource of evidence, as a persons eyewitness identification can not always be held accountable or accurate. SAMPLE. Help us improve your experience by providing feedback on this page. And this is why we are now using our research to help identify ways the police can prevent eyewitnesses from relaying false information. Another notable case was the Jill Dando murder enquiry in 2001. Please, specify your valid email address, Remember that this is just a sample essay and since it might not be original, we do not recommend to submit it. Although the witness may seem adamant and confident in their testimony, the above factors should be assessed and taken into consideration when reflecting on the accuracy and reliability of the witness’s testimony. Inevitably some residents raucously celebrate the annual windfall, and that night the celebrating turned deadly as four young hooligans embarked on "Clockwork Orange"-style attacks on random individuals. This means that the victim may focus a lot more on a specific thing about the culprit. For decades, researchers have been trying to nail down what influences eyewitness testimony and how much confidence to place in it. How accurate is eyewitness testimony? Despite Loftus's testimony, the jury convicted the defendants of assault and murder. He was sentenced to nine years based on police identification from CCTV images – which showed a man in sunglasses with a scarf over his mouth and chin. The defense called as an expert witness Geoffrey Loftus, PhD, a University of Washington perception and cognition psychology professor who testified that Olson was too far away to accurately perceive the defendants' facial features. No. Judges need to be able to asses an eyewitness testimony when it comes to: determining whether or not an eyewitness testimony should be admissible in court, allow and in court witness identification, admit eyewitness expert testimony and in ruling on eyewitness evidentiary issues (Wise, Fisherman & Safer, 2009). Dara Mojtahedi ne travaille pas, ne conseille pas, ne possède pas de parts, ne reçoit pas de fonds d'une organisation qui pourrait tirer profit de cet article, et n'a déclaré aucune autre affiliation que son organisme de recherche. Participants were then interviewed and asked to identify the person who had started the fight. As stated above, although the witness may seem so certain and adamant that what they are recalling is correct, due to the surrounding factors, they may not always be as correct as they believe. At 500 feet, you could see the person's head but just one big blur. However, As such, the same factors that can bias the results of an experiment can bias an eyewitness's performance in picking suspects out of a lineup, he says. Soon after testifying in the Fairbanks trial, Loftus began seeking a way to visually present to juries the proposition that people's ability to decipher details degrades rapidly as a person or object moves further away. things they didn’t actually see in their statements. "Eyewitnesses start to imagine possible changes and think, 'This must be him.'". The witness may be so certain that the person that thy are pointing out is one hundred per cent the suspect or they could be so certain when it comes to retelling the incident, although these people are so sure on what it is they are doing, their testimony cannot always accurate. Although DNA evidence did not exist when Ronald Cotton was first accused, it was what made him a free man in the end, proving his innocence. "At 200 feet, you would not even be able to see a person's eyes. There are, however, a number of court cases where Thankfully, DNA has exonerated those who have been wrongfully convicted of crimes they did not commit. On Oct. 10, 1997, Fairbanks, Alaska, residents who had lived in the state at least a year received about $1,500-an equal share of the income produced by the sale of state's oil and other natural resources. There are certain things that are contributing factors as to why eyewitness testimony is not accurate. All of the above factors and causes for wrongful causes of eyewitness testimonies as well as factors such as: the lighting of the area where the incident happened, how long the victim was with the victimiser, how stressful the situation was and the amount of time between the crime and alerting authorities can have a huge impact on ones eyewitness testimony. A study conducted in 2006 , proved that in seventy five precent or more of cases an error had occurred in 180 DNA exonerated cases. But these factors can only explain a small percentage of false eyewitness statements. "We know enough about the visual system that we now can create a visual depiction of what is lost at any given distance," Loftus says. He found that the instruction actually increased the participants' number of misidentifications. Along with judges, prosecutors must also have the skill to assess an eyewitness testimony in order to indict the suspect and take the case to trial. John Timmer - Jul 25, 2017 5:25 pm UTC Eyewitnesses statements often play a vital role in securing criminal convictions – police surveys show that eyewitness testimony is the main form of evidence in more than 20% of cases. In our research, groups of participants were shown actual footage of a bar fight taking place. And subsequently, her failure to correctly differentiate between what she witnessed and what she later found out will have led her to believe Avery was indeed the assailant. Many Jurors are still uneducated of the reliability of eyewitness testimony accuracy, even though it has known to be unreliable. And this is where the process of “co-witness conformity” occurs – in other words eyewitnesses are influenced into including This information cannot only effect the recontruction of the crime, it can also impair the eyewitness’s ability to identify the person. "The system [of interpreting eyewitness accounts] will never be perfect, but psychological research can help make it a lot better," he says. The victim and eyewitness, Jennifer Thompson had picked Mr. Cottons picture out of a group of pictures and also identified him in a line up. Droits d'auteur © 2010–2020, The Conversation France (assoc. Since the publication of both the American Psychologist and Department of Justice pieces, states such as New Jersey, North Carolina and Wisconsin have incorporated many of the recommendations, including one in the Department of Justice report that advises law enforcement officials to warn eyewitnesses that the culprit's appearance may have changed since the crime. "As an expert witness, my aim is not to use absolute judgment, but to provide as much information as possible," Loftus says. In lineups, the police have a hypothesis, they provide instructions, collect responses and interpret the results. At the trial two years later, the prosecutor's case rested on an eyewitness account by Fairbanks resident Arlo Olson, who testified that as he stood in the doorway of Eagles Hall, he watched in horror as a group of men, whom he identified as the defendants, accosted and savagely beat Dayton in a parking lot 450 feet away. They must understand that in a stressful situation, a persons memory may not remember certain vital things about the incident and also understand that stressful situations can sometimes cause people to forget how the situation was actually acted out. A team of investigative psychologists from the University of Huddersfield has been undertaking a series of experiments on more than 600 participants to simulate the event of witnessing a crime. This is where witnesses discuss what they saw with each other after the event and then change their mind about what they thought they saw based on the evidence of another witness. The science of why eyewitness testimony is often wrong Wrongful convictions are often the product of eyewitness testimony.