Now Performing in a Courtroom Near You: The ElderlyEyewitness! To Believe or Not to Believe That is the Question (original) (raw)
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Applied Issues in Investigative Interviewing, Eyewitness Memory, and Credibility Assessment
2013
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Journal of Applied Research in Memory and Cognition
This experiment was designed to examine the effect of misinformation imparted through cowitness discussions on memory reports and line-up decisions obtained after varied retention intervals. Two-hundred and eighty-nine participants viewed a simulated car-jacking and then heard co-witnesses describe their memory for the event. Confederate accounts included three plausible and three implausible pieces of misinformation. Memory for the event was assessed after fiveminutes, 50-minutes, two-days, or one-week. In addition to examining free-recall memory, we also looked at how misinformation about the perpetrator's appearance affected recognition memory by obtaining identifications from culprit-present and absent lineups. One of the confederates falsely described the perpetrator having a tattoo on his neck, and one lineup filler had this feature. Results revealed that mistaken identifications of the tattooed filler increased significantly at the longer retention intervals, while recall for the misinformation decreased at the longer intervals. Also, as expected, plausible misinformation was recalled more often than implausible. In the early morning hours of a summer night in Southern California, Brenda J. and her friend were coming back from a night of bar hopping and were confronted by two men who demanded her car keys. After a brief struggle, one of the assailants took her purse and fled. The police interviewed the witnesses separately. Brenda recalled that the assailant had some type of undefined tattoos on his face, but her friend remembered him having the letters tattooed on his head. In the days after the event, the two friends talked more about the shared experience, and searched social media together, looking for pictures of tattoos similar to what they remembered. After reviewing dozens of pictures together, the two women arrived at the shared conclusion that the culprit had letters tattooed on his face (a merging of the two witnesses' memory reports), and the women believed they may have even found a picture of the culprit. The witnesses then went back to the police with this new information, and the police immediately developed a suspect named Richard Torres who had letters tattooed on his face, similar to what the victims reported. The police then put Torres' picture in a sequential line-up with five other individuals, none of whom had tattoos on their face, and administered it to both witnesses using double-blind procedures. Not surprisingly, both witnesses picked Torres from the line-up, and each noted the importance of the letter tattoos in making their decision (People v. Richard Torres, San Diego Superior Court; February, 2015, CD256364). Surveys of real eyewitnesses to crimes reveal that co-witnesses like Brenda J. and her friend frequently talk together about their shared experiences (Paterson & Kemp, 2006; Skagerberg & Wright, 2008). Moreover, because witnesses' descriptions of perpetrators tend to vary after a crime (Gabbert & Brown, 2015), it is reasonable to assume that witnesses who participate in these post-event discussions are frequently exposed to inaccurate information about a perpetrator's appearance. A growing body of empirical research shows that, when people talk about their memories, they can influence each other such that their subsequent individual memory reports become similar to one another, as demonstrated in the Torres case (for reviews, see
The Influence of Race on Eyewitness Memory
2007
One Sunday morning in May of 2000, a 15-year-old Black youth named Brenton Butler was walking to a video store to apply for a job when he was picked up by police as a possible suspect in a brutal murder that had occurred earlier that morning. Taken back to the motel where the murder had taken place, Butler was positively identified by the murder victim’s husband, James Stevens, who had observed the murder from close range just two and a half hours earlier. Although he had described the murderer as 20 to 25 years old, Stevens identified Butler as the man who had demanded his wife’s purse and then shot her. When asked if he was certain about his identification, he remarked that he “wouldn’t send an innocent man to jail”—yet subsequent events showed that this is precisely what happened (Hattenstone, 2002; Schoettler & Treen, 2000; Schoettler & Pinkham, 2002). The misidentification and subsequent confession that was coerced from Butler were later portrayed in an Academy Award–winning do...
Eyewitness-Identification Evidence: Scientific Advances and the New Burden on Trial Judges
2012
Footnotes 1. THE INNOCENCE PROJECT, available at http://www.innocence project.org (last visited May 9, 2012). 2. Often, these are cases of sexual assault plus robbery, or sexual assault plus murder, but sexual assault is the common element because that is where the DNA evidence is found. 3. A special issue of LAW & HUMAN BEHAVIOR (volume 4, issue 4) in 1980 devoted to eyewitness behavior illustrates this early work. 4. The system-variable concept in eyewitness identification was first introduced in 1978 as a way of focusing the research experiments on methods to improve the accuracy of eyewitness identifications rather than simply showing that eyewitness identifications are often unreliable. Gary L. Wells, Applied Eyewitness Testimony Research: System Variables and Estimator Variables, 36 J.
2015
Despite the recent advances in assessing the reliability of eyewitness identifications, the focus to date has largely been identifications made pretrial. Little has been written about identifications made for the first time in the courtroom. While in-court identifications have an extraordinarily powerful effect on juries, all such identifications are potentially vulnerable to post-event memory distortion and decay. Absent an identification procedure that effectively tests the witness’s memory, it is impossible to know if the witness’s identification of the defendant is a product of his or her original memory or a product of the extraordinarily suggestive circumstances created by the in-court identification procedure. In this article, the authors discuss the science related to memory and perception and how the courts have historically addressed claims of suggestiveness in the context of eyewitness identifications and, specifically, how they have handled first time in-court identifica...