Eyewitness Testimony

• Eyewitness error is the most common cause of wrongful convictions

• Eyewitnesses are imperfect

• Certain personal and situational factors can systematically influence their performance

Perceiving the Crime

• Emotional state can impair accuracy

  • Trigger high levels of stress

  • The more anxious we are, the less accurate we are at later describing and identifying a person in a lineup

• Alcohol intoxication

  • Impairs eyewitness perception and memory

  • Although people can recognize a perpetrator presented to them when they’re intoxicated, they often make false identifications when the perpetrator is absent

  • Alcohol can reduce other aspects of memory

• Weapon-Focus Effect: When a criminal pulls out a weapon, witnesses are less able to identify that culprit than if no weapon is present

  • People are agitated by the sight of a menacing stimulus

  • Even in a harmless situation, a witness’s eyes lock in on a weapon, drawing attention away from the face

• Cross-Race Identification Bias: People are more accurate at recognizing members

Storing the Memory

• Memory for faces and events tends to decline with the passage of time

• Not all recollections fade

• Time alone doesn’t cause memory slippage

• Theory of Reconstructive Memory: After people observe an event, information they receive later about that event becomes integrated into the fabric of their memory

• Misinformation Effect: The tendency for false postevent misinformation to become integrated into people’s memory of an event

  • Eyewitnesses can be compromised when exposed to postevent info

  • Witnesses who are under intense stress are especially vulnerable

• Repetition, misinformation, and leading questions can bias a child’s memory report

• Preschoolers are particular vulnerable

Identifying the Culprit

• Face-construction

  • Seldom produces a face that resembles the actual culprit

  • Process confuses witnesses

• Factors that can affect identification performance

  • Lineup construction

    • Foil should match the witness’s general description

    • Anything that makes a suspect distinctive compared to the others in the lineup increases their chance of being selected

    • Choices can be influenced by emotional expressions

  • Lineup instructions to witnesses

    • Witnesses with biased instructions felt compelled to identify someone and often picked an innocent person

  • Format of a lineup

    • Simultaneous spread of all photographs

      • Witnesses tend to make relative judgments

      • Pick the one who looks most like the criminal

      • Increases the tendency to make a false identification

    • Sequential Lineup: One picture at a time

      • Diminishes the risk of a forced / false identification

  • Familiarity-induced biases

    • People often remember a face but not the circumstances in which they saw that face

    • Witnesses will often identify from a lineup someone they happened to have seen in a another context

  • Double-blind procedure

    • Police officer administering a lineup may inadvertently steer a witness’s identification

Testifying in Court

• People don’t know about many aspects of human perception and memory though common sense

• People tend to base their judgements of an eyewitness largely on how confident a witness is

• Eyewitness confidence and accuracy aren’t highly related

  • Eyewitnesses can be influenced by the reports of co-witnesses

  • An eyewitness’s confidence in a mistaken identification is inflated by the presence of fillers in the lineup that bear no resemblance to the criminal

  • Post-identification Feedback Effect: Eyewitness who made incorrect identifications and received positive feedback from the experimenter were more confident and reconstructed their entire memory of the eyewitnessing experience

Improving Eyewitness Justice

• Educate judges and juries about the science so they can better evaluate eyewitnesses who testify in court

  • Psychologists sometimes testify as eyewitness experts at trial

• Make eyewitness identification itself more accurate

The Alibi: Eyewitness to Innocence

• Alibis: Witnesses of the defendant who help them vouch for their whereabouts at the time of the crime as proof of innocence

• Physical evidence: ATM receipts, cell phone records, surveillance video

• People see some alibis as more credible than others

  • Believe that biologically related alibis would lie for a defendant

  • Most believable alibis are those that include physical evidence, or statements from an unrelated stranger

Confessions

Suspect Interviews: The Psychology of Lie Detection

• Police ask non-accusatory questions and observe changes in the subject’s verbal and nonverbal behavior to determine if they’re telling the truth

• Most verbal and nonverbal demeanor cues that are suggested don’t discriminate at high levels of accuracy between truth-telling and deception

• Polygraph: Electronic instrument that simultaneously records multiple channels of physiological arousal

  • Used to detect deception on the assumption that when people lie, they become anxious and physiologically aroused in ways that can be measured

  • Truthful ppl often fail the test

  • People who understand the test can fake the results using countermeasures

  • Judges may refuse to admit polygraph test results into evidence

• Implicit Association Test: People are quicker to respond to true statements than to false statements

Police Interrogations: Social Influence Under Pressure

• In the past, police would use brute force to get confessions

• Now, police use psychological tactics

Pressure the Suspect into Submission

• Expressing certainty in their guilt

• Falsely claiming to have damaging evidence

• Accused is led to believe that it’s futile to continue in their denials

Befriend the Suspect

• Offer sympathy and friendly advice

• Minimize the offense

  • Offering face-saving excuses

  • Blaming the victim

• Suspects agree to give a confession

  • Under stress

  • Feeling trapped

  • Lulled into a false sense of security

  • Led to expect leniency

• Increases the anxiety associated with denial

• Reduces the anxiety associated with confession

False Confessions: Why Innocent People Confess

• False confessions were present in more than 25% of all cases involving prisoners who were convicted and later proven innocent by DNA evidence

• Proven false confessions have been documented in countries all over the world

• Sometimes innocent people agree to confess to escape the stressful situation

  • Act of compliance

  • Influenced more by rewards and punishments that are immediate than by those that are delayed

  • Stopping the process through confession may feel so urgent that they don’t fully consider the future consequence of doing so

  • Short-term benefit of confession outweighs the long-term benefit of denial

• Internalization: Innocent people confess because they come to believe that they’re guilty of the crime

  • Factors that can increase this risk

    • A suspect who lacks a clear memory of the event in question

    • Presentation of false evidence

• People are powerfully influenced by evidence of a confession, even when they agree that it was coerced

  • Common sense leads us to trust people who make statements against self-interest

  • Impact of confessions - they typically contain a great deal of detail

  • Confessions are so persuasive they can corrupt other evidence

• Innocence Problem: Innocent people who fear ultimate conviction and a harsh sentence sometimes take a plea deal

Jury Decision Making

Jury Selection

• Court compiles a master list of eligible citizens who live in the community

  • Voter registration lists

  • Telephone directories

• Random sample - a certain number of people from the list are randomly drawn and summoned for duty

• Voir Dire: A pretrial interview in which the judge and lawyers question the prospective jurors for signs of bias

  • Judge can excuse a person for cause

  • If it can be proven that an entire community is based, the trial might be postponed or moved to another location

  • Peremptory Challenges: Lawyers can reject a limited number of prospective jurors even if they seem fair and open minded

Trial Lawyers as Intuitive Psychologists

• Lawyers rely on implicit personality theories and stereotypes

  • Implicit Personality Theory: A set of assumptions that people make about how certain attributes are related to each other and to behavior

  • Stereotypes: When we believe that all members of a group share the same attributes

• Self-fulfilling prophecy - lawyers might ask questions that confirm their beliefs on their expectations

• Limited the use of peremptory challenges to prevent lawyers from systematically excluding prospective jurors on the basis of race

• Two problems

  • Conscious and unconscious racial stereotypes influences social perceptions

  • Racial biases are difficult to identify in specific instances

• Peremptory challenges are still being used in some parts of the country to exclude disproportionate numbers of African Americans

• Most lawyers cannot effectively predict how jurors will vote

Scientific Jury Selection

• A method of selecting juries through surveys that yield correlations between demographics and trial-relevant attitudes

• Try to determine jurors’ attitudes and verdict tendencies from info that’s known about their backgrounds

  • Focus groups

  • Mock juries

  • Community-wide surveys

• Use peremptory challenges to exclude those whose profiles are associated with unfavorable attitudes

• Trial lawyers who’ve used scientific jury selection boast an impressive winning percentage

• Attitudes can influence verdicts in some cases and pretrial research can help lawyers identify these attitudes

Does Race Matter?

• Jurors favor defendants who’re similar to themselves

• When the evidence was weak, participants were more lenient in their verdicts toward the defendant of the same race

• When the evidence was strong, they were harsher against the defendant of the same race

• When race was made a prominent issue at trial, white jurors went overboard to not appear prejudiced and didn’t discriminate

Death Qualification

• A majority of American states permit capital punishment

• Sentencing decisions are also influenced by jurors’ general attitudes toward the death penalty

• People who favor the death penalty are more likely to hold fundamentalist religious views and a belief in the literal interpretation of the Bible

• People who favor the death penalty tend to harbor authoritarian beliefs and the belief that the world is a just place

• Death Qualification: Judges may exclude all prospective jurors who say they would refuse to vote for the death penalty

• Jurors who said they were willing to impose the death penalty were more likely to vote guilty both before and after deliberating than were those who would have been excluded for their refusal to impose a death sentence

The Courtroom Trial

• Juries are more lenient than judges

• Juries are sound decision makers, even in cases containing complex evidence

• Jury verdicts are based largely on the strength of the evidence presented at trial

Non-evidentiary Influences

• The more people know about a case, the more likely they are to presume the defendant guilty, even when they claim to be impartial

• Juries’ exposure to pretrial publicity can have consequences at trial

  • Divulges info that isn’t later allowed into the trial record

  • Jurors learn certain facts even before they enter the courtroom

• Highly publicized cases may be postponed or their trials may be moved to less-informed communities

• CSI effect: Television programs lead jurors to have unrealistically high expectations that cause them to vote cautiously for acquittal because they find the actual evidence insufficient to support a guilty verdict

  • No hard evidence to support this

• People can’t strike info from their minds the same way court reporters can strike it from the record

• People don’t follow a judge’s order to disregard inadmissible evidence

  • Added instruction draws attention to the information

  • Judge’s instruction to disregard restricts a jurors’ decision-making freedom

    • Can backfire by arousing reactance

    • Become even more likely to use it

  • Jurors want to reach the right decision

    • Want to use relevant info

    • Don’t care about legal technicalities

Judge’s Instructions

• Jurors seem to have many preconceptions about crimes and the requirements of the law

• Lack of comprehension

• Jury Nullification: Because juries deliberate in private, they can choose to disregard the judge’s instructions

  • Particularly likely to occur when jurors who disagree with the law are told of their right to nullify it

Jury Deliberations

Dynamics of Deliberation

• Relaxed orientation period

  • Set an agenda, raise questions, explore facts

• Open conflict period

  • Scrutinize the evidence

  • If they agree, return a verdict

  • If not, try to convert the holdouts

• Period of reconciliation

  • Unanimity is achieved

  • If holdouts continue to disagree, the jury is hung

• Leniency Bias: The tendency for jury deliberation to produce a tilt toward acquittal

Jury Size

• Usually twelve people juries

• American courts are now permitted to cut trial costs by using six-person juries in cases that don’t involve the death penalty

• Smaller juries

  • Less likely to represent minority segments of the population

  • More likely to reach a unanimous verdict

  • Deliberate for shorter periods of time

Post-trial Sentencing and Prison

The Sentencing Process

• Jury’s verdict is followed by a second decision to determine the nature and extent of their punishment

• Usually made by judges

• Many people see judges as being too lenient

• People disagree on the goals served by imprisonment

  • Incapacitate offenders and deter them from committing future crimes

  • Exact retribution against the offender for their crimes

• Sentencing Disparity: Punishments for crime are inconsistent from one judge to the next

• Sentencing decisions are consistently biased by race

• Many prisons are overcrowded

• Prison life is highly oppressive

Perceptions of Justice

Justice as a Matter of Procedure

• Decision Control: Whether a procedure affords the involved parties the power to accept, reject, or otherwise influence the final decision

• Power Control: Whether a procedure offers the parties an opportunity to present their case to a third-party decision maker

• Adversarial Model of Justice: The prosecution and defense oppose each other, each presenting one side of the story in order to win a favorable verdict

• Inquisitorial Model: A neutral investigator gathers the evidence from both sides and presents the findings in court

• Participants who took part in an adversarial trial were more satisfied than those involved in an inquisitorial trial

  • Any method that offers participants a voice in the proceedings is seen as most fair and just

  • People all over the world are motivated by a need to be recognized

• For people to accept the rule of law and comply with outcomes they don’t like, they must see the decision-making procedures as fair

Culture, Law, and Justice

• Judges and juries are sometimes asked to consider cultural defenses in their decision making

• Nations differ in:

  • The crime laws that are set

  • The processes used to enforce these laws

  • Their use of juries

  • The consequences

• 97 countries prohibit the death penalty for all crimes