how reliable is eyewitness testimony?

what is eyewitness testimony?

an account given by people of an event they have witnessed

what can an eyewitness testimony include?

description at a trial, identification of perpetrators or details of crime scenes

what is the general expectation of an eyewitness testimony?

an eyewitness will be able to identify a suspect and give a good account of a situation

how has eyewitness testimony been shown to be unreliable?

there are cases where people have been wrongly imprisoned because of eyewitness testimony, as it was later discovered they were not guilty

how is Bobby Joe Leaster an example of wrong imprisonment due to eyewitness testimony?

he was accused of murdering a shop owner in 1970, he was drove to the shop where the murdered man's wife identified him as he sat in the police car and he was sentenced to life imprisonment

how was Bobby Joe Leaster proved innocent?

in 1986 a bullet from the murder victim was matched to a gun linked to 2 men arrested for robbery just after the murder, Bobby was released after 16 years

what have researchers of the innocence project reported since the 1990's when DNA testing was first introduced?

73% of 239 convictions overturned through DNA testing were based on eyewitness testimony, one-third of these rested on the testimony of 2 or more eyewitnesses

why is eyewitness testimony being wrong an issue for society?

trust can be lost in the justice system if society is put at risk through the perpetrator still being able to cause damage

how can the role of schemata proposed by Bartlett 1932 be used to explain why eyewitness testimony is unreliable?

reconstructive memory involves amending material so it makes sense to the witnesses and fits their schemata, confabulation will likely be used to fill in gaps, and rationalisation means some features will be forgotten

how do Loftus and Palmer 1975 provide evidence that leading questions can lead to unreliable eyewitness testimony?

they studied whether the manipulation of a verb in a question changed participant responses, who were shown a video of a car crash and asked about the speed of the car that smashed (41mph) or hit (34mph) into another car

why might studies into eyewitness testimony be seen as lacking validity?

most are lab experiments which can affect results due to situational factors or a lack of emotional responses, such as in Loftus and Palmer's 1975 study where participants were shown a video rather than a real life car crash

what study was conducted by Yuille and Cutshall?

they studied statements given by witnesses 4 months after a real crime of a gun shooting in Canada, they found recall was accurate and not affected by leading questions from the 13/21 who participated

what is the aim of using cognitive interviews?

to reinstate the cognitive environment at the time of the incident, using what the witness was feeling, their thoughts, etc. to obtain statements rather than police asking a sequence of questions

how are context cues used in cognitive interviews?

by asking witnesses to imagine as many details as possible of the setting of the incident

what does the Devlin report suggest?

we should be able to use eye-witness testimony but only with significant corroborating evidence, rather than dismissing them altogether which would render crimes such as rape

how is Ronald Cotton an example of a suspect being wrongly imprisoned due to eyewitness testimony?

he was misidentified by Jennifer Thomson-Cannino and spent over 10 years in prison for rape