Eyewitness Evidence example essay topic

Are Eyewitnesses Reliable? Michael D. Wells Research Report Psychology 123 Scientific Thinking and Design Instructor: Dr. Han tula 11-19-03 Abstract The present study investigated the effect that eyewitnesses (or no eyewitness) had on jurors. Participants read a crime and chose their guilt belief based on 1-7 scale. The! SSunrefuted eyewitness!" received the most guilt belief, ! SSdiscredited eyewitness!" received moderate guilt belief, and!

SSno eyewitness!" received little guilt belief. The experiment coincided with past experiments. Would you be willing to sentence a human being to the death penalty based solely on an eyewitness testimony? That question proceeds through the minds of many jurors each and every day. Criminal investigators know that it often takes many pieces of converging evidence to solve a complex case.

Freshly-schooled recruits and veteran investigators alike are trained to search for, detect, collect, and preserve! SS obvious!" physical evidence such as weapons, and stolen property, as well as trace physical evidence such as fibers, hairs, fingerprints, blood, and semen. Few police officers, lawyers, scientists, or people in general, would question the importance of using the best procedures available to obtain and preserve such evidence, not to mention adherence to relevant statutory and case law. Eyewitness testimony is a powerful tool within any field particularly that of justice, as it is a readily accepted form of evidence that allows for convictions.

Test conducted in 1970 have shown an enormous (59%) swing form a non-guilty verdict, to that of a guilty verdict (Lof us, 1979). This alone displays the potency of eyewitness testimony, and asserts the theory that jurors tend to over believe, or at least weigh heavily on such evidence (Lindsay, Wells, & O! |Conner. 1989). Therefore, since eyewitness testimony has such a colossal impact on the justice system, should not we as a society be certain that eyewitness testimony is a reliable source of evidence? There have been numerous studies conducted referring to eyewitness testimony.

However, it was not until 1999 that the United States Department of Justice released the first national guide for collecting and preserving eyewitness evidence (Wells & others, 1999). In 1989 a study was conducted with mock-jurors. 16 eyewitnesses viewed a staged videotaped crime and were questioned by lawyers in a real courtroom. In the particular study, 178 University of Alberta undergraduates served as mock-jurors and attempted to detect the accuracy of the witnesses based on their testimony. The overall rate of belief by the jurors was substantially high (69%); the jurors believed the testimony of the accurate and inaccurate eyewitnesses about at the same percentage (68% to 70%) (Lindsay, Wells, & O! |Conner, 1989).

Eyewitness testimony can be a crucial part of the prosecuting attorney's case against an accused criminal, or can be used to exonerate innocent people. Having a competent person in court that can testify to precise details at the time of a crime can easily sway a case one way or the other. Even though opposing counsel can challenge eyewitness testimony vigorously, ultimately it is the jury who will weigh the evidence against other pieces of the puzzle to determine what indeed happened at the time and place in question. For example, in three particular court cases on the east coast the jury convicted three men based on eyewitnesses. Ronnie Bullock was sentenced to 60 years in jail for kidnapping and rapping a young Illinois girl, Ed Honker spent a decade in a Virginia's prison for sexual assaulting a woman at gunpoint, and Kirk Bloods worth was shipped off to Maryland's death row for raping and strangling a 9-year-old girl. All three of these men were convicted in part because eyewitnesses or victims firmly placed them at the scene of the crime.

However, not one was guilty and were later excused from their charges do to DNA test (Miller, 2000). Therefore, the juries in all three cases based their guilt belief solely on the eyewitnesses even though they were unknowingly inaccurate. Therefore, these court cases and the other mentioned experiment lead me to hypothesize that in our experiment that the! SSunrefuted eyewitness!" will lead to the most guilt belief, the! SSdiscredited eyewitness!" will lead to moderate guilt belief, and the! SSno eyewitness!" will lead to the least guilt belief.

Method Participants In this study there were 76 participants that completed the study. 66 were female and 10 were male. In addition, the average age of each participant was 22.3 years of age. Apparatus All participants conducted this experiment using a computer via Internet. Procedure To begin the experiment the participants went to the Psych Experiments web page.

At this point, each participant signed a consent form. All participants were presented with the same crime and evidence (see appendix); each of the participants were randomly assigned to one of three groups; ! SSno eyewitness!" , ! SSdiscredited eyewitness!" , and! SSunrefuted eyewitness!" (independent variable). Of the 76 participants, 29 where randomly placed in the!

SSno eyewitness!" , 20 in the! SSdiscredited eyewitness!" , and 26 in the! SSunrefuted eyewitness!" . After reading the description of the crime and the presented evidence participants rated their guilt belief on a scale of 1-7 (dependent variable). 1 had a definition of absolute!

Ssno guilty!" , 4 had meaning of not sure of guilty / non -guilty, and 7 was defined that the participant was absolutely sure of! SS guilty!" . Results In order to test the differences between the three groups a contrast analyses was performed (see table 1). The contrast was developed using the hypothesis that the!

SSno eyewitness!" category would have the least guilt, the! SSdiscredited eyewitness!" would have moderate guilt, and the! SSunrefuted eyewitness!" would have the highest guilt belief. Computing the statistical analyses of the data yielded t = 9.030, df = 72, p 0.001, and r (effect size) = 0.53. Therefore, the statistical analyses showed a statistically significant, indicating the hypothesized pattern of guilt belief.

Discussion This research was an attempt to determine if an! SSunrefuted eyewitness!" would have the highest guilt belief when compared to! SSno eyewitnesses!" and! SSdiscredited eyewitness!" . As a result of the experiment it was found that an!

SSunrefuted eyewitness!" persuaded the jurors to vote guilty more than! SSno eyewitness!" and! The results concluded in the hypothesized direction and were statistically significant. In addition, the results of our experiment coincide with past studies and actual court cases. In a particular court case a man was on trial. A woman, who was the eyewitness, said that she did not know if she could identify the person because it was dark and she was not wearing her glasses.

However, at the trial she identified the man as the person at the scene of the crime (Miller, 2003). The man was eventually found guilty because of the eyewitness. One shortcoming of this experiment was that it was through the Internet. In the future it should be conducted as mock crime witnessed in front of the class; also, it should be done when the class is not ready or not anticipating the crime; this will be more realistic because in real crime are any of the eyewitnesses excepting or waiting for a crime to happen?

Also, in future experiments lawyers should inform jurors about human memory. Lawyers are now aware of the ability of third parties to introduce false memories; for this reason, lawyers should question witnesses regarding the accuracy of their memories and about any possible! SS assistance!" from other in the formation of their present memories (Engelhardt, 1997); also, that memories are of external based events and when eyewitnesses view crimes that they cannot possibly remember every detail, and at this point their brains begin to! SS fill in the blanks!" (Dobson & Markham, 1993). In conclusion, eyewitnesses are an extremely excellent piece of evidence; however, the human brain is not a video recorder. Also, the US judicial system takes time; therefore, a person could witness a crime in June 2003 and not go to trial until January 2004.

Appendix! SS On Friday, May 12, 2000, the owner of a small grocery store was confronted by a man who demanded money from the cash register. The owner immediately handed $110 to the robber who took the money and started walking away. Suddenly, and for no apparent reason, the robber turned and fired two shots at the owner and his five-year-old granddaughter, who was standing behind the counter. Both victims died instantly. Two hours later, the police arrested a suspect and charged him with robbery and murder!" Followed by the Arguments Presented by the Prosecution "