FPSY: Eyewitness Testimony (Definitions)

Lecture 5

Jennifer Thompson Case (July 1984)

• sexually assaulted

• Thompson identified Ronald Cotton in photo and live lineup

  • Sentenced to life in prison +54 years

• DNA → Bobby Poole

Encoding

gathering

Storage

holding

Retrieval

accessing

Memory Trace

biochemical representation of the memory in our brain

• Decays and deteriorates over time

Recall

Reporting details of witnessed crime or perpetrator

• “He had a black sweatshirt and blue pants on”

Recognition

Determining whether you have previously seen an item or a person

• “That is a photograph of the person I saw committing the crime”

Car accident experiment (Loftus & Palmer, 1974)

• Same video of car accident

• “How fast were the cars going when they hit each other?”

• smashed, collided, bumped, contacted

Misinformation effect

exposed to inaccurate info, later recalls that info

Misinformation Acceptance Hypothesis

guessing

Source Misattribution Hypothesis

includes two sources

Memory impairment Hypothesis

pure inaccessible

Retrieval Inhibition

selective retribal of some aspects '“inhibits” recall for other aspects of same scene

Recalling the Culprit

• Witnesses often asked to describe the perpetrator of the crime

• Suspect descriptions typically limited

  • Detail & accuracy

“I saw the man who killed Anna Lindh!” - Granhag et al., 2013

• Anna Lindh

  • Swedish Foreign Minister

• Murdered in 2003 at shopping mall

• Witness reports

• CCTV footage eventually discovered

When comparing witness reports to actual CCTV footage poor accuracy for both blank and blank features

basic; detailed

Additional research says more accurate at identifying blank vs blank

physical descriptors; clothing

Thomas Sophonow Case (December 23, 1981)

• Manitoba

• Lorraine & Norman Janower

• John Doerksen

  • Man leaving coffee shop

    • Flipped closed sign

• Find Barbara Stoppel

  • 16 years old

  • Strangled

Thomas Sophonow (Aftermath)

• Visiting from BC

  • Hanging around donut shop

• Identified in lineup

• Janowers & Doerksen

• 4 years in jail, conviction eventually overturned

  • Sophonow Inquiry

Estimator

Variables that are not under control of the legal system

• Lighting, distance, exposure time, weapon focus, etc.

System

Variables that are under the control of the legal system

• Lineup method/construction, types of questions, etc.

Simultaneous Lineups

• 6-12 photos at once

• relative judgement

Relative Judgement

“who looks most like the suspect that I saw?”

Sequential Lineups

• Photos shown one after another

• Absolute judgement

Target-absent

Sequential → significantly more correct rejections (65% vs 42%)

Target-present

No significant difference → both about 50%

Biased Lineups

• Difficult to construct a fair lineup

• In someway, the suspect ”stands out”

• Following increase false positives

Ivan Henry Case

• Convicted in 1983

  • 10 counts of sexual assault

  • Rested solely on eyewitness identification

• Consistently maintained his innocence

  • Filed 56 appeals

• Conviction appealed in 2010

  • Appeal court found issues with initial identification procedure

  • Nearly 27 years in prison

Unconscious Transference

The reassignment of a face that is familiar from another context to the scene of a crime

Scripts

• Widely held beliefs about sequences of actions that occur in particular situations

  • Brushing teeth, ordering food, dentist visit, etc.

• Enable us to process info quickly and efficiently

  • Rely on when retrieving memories

  • ”fill in” any gaps

Holst & Pezdek, 1992

• Presented participants with mock trial accused of robbery

  • Evidence presentation did not include key elements of robbery script

    • Pulling out gun, taking money

• Ask participants to recall what took place according to prosecution

• Excluded elements often recalled

Weapon Focus Effect

• Worse at describing event/culprit and worse at ID’ing from lineup

• also known as Arousal/threat Hypothesis

• Focus attention on weapon

  • Less attention paid to other details (e.g., culprit’s face)

Unusual Item Hypothesis

when a distinctive or unusual item is present during a crime, such as a unique piece of clothing or an uncommon object, witnesses may focus their attention on that item rather than on other details of the event or the perpetrator

Cross-race Effect

also known as the own-race bias or other-race effect, refers to the phenomenon where individuals are better at recognizing faces of their own racial or ethnic group compared to faces of other racial or ethnic groups

Race & False Identifications

• Consistent across lifespan

• Observed across various ethnic groups

• Competing explanations

  • Interracial contact

Otis Boone Case

• February 2011

  • Two armed robberies in Brooklyn neighbourhood

  • Both victims were White – ID’d Boone

  • Foil bias

    • Only 2 people in lineup matched description

• July 2012

  • Convicted on two counts of armed robbery

  • Sole evidence à victims’ lineup identifications

• December 2017

  • Appeals court reverses decision

    • Eventual alibi discovered

  • New law on cross-race effect instructions in New York

    • Any case involving cross-race ID à jurors explicitly instructed