What The Brain Saw: The Case of Trayvon Martin and the Need for Eyewitness Identification Reform (original) (raw)
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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...
The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Memory Studies, 2023
Eyewitness testimony plays a crucial role in criminal and legal proceedings, but a well-established body of research demonstrates that it is unreliable. The extensively studied misinformation effect shows how post-event information can distort original memories, leading to false recollections of event details. The text explores theories such as source monitoring and fuzzy trace theory to explain this phenomenon. It also discusses the impact of retrieval enhanced susceptibility and the potential for misinformation to overwrite original details. Factors influencing perpetrator misidentifications are also examined, including estimator variables (i.e., factors related to the eyewitness) and system variables (i.e., factors related to the criminal justice system and its proceedings). Despite the limitations of experimental methods, opportunities for future research abound, including those that build upon novel approaches to understanding the confidence-accuracy relationship and the influence of fake news on memory. The constraints of eyewitness memory necessitate improved practices in the legal system, greater education about eyewitness memory issues, and recognition of both the value and risks associated with eyewitness testimony.
Scientific study of witness memory: Implications for public and legal policy
Psychology, Public Policy, and Law, 1995
The legal system relies heavily on human memory. Crime investigations, criminal trials, and many civil trials depend on memory to reconstruct critical events from the past. Getting at the "truth" is often synonymous with establishing the who, what, when, and how of some prior episode. Past events tend to leave traces, and the process of reconstructing events from the past is aided by various types of trace evidence. These traces can be physical, such as a footprint, a blood stain, or a fingerprint. An event can also leave traces of a somewhat different type, namely memory traces. Although these traces can also be said to have a physical property, in the sense that there exists a biological residue for the event somewhere in the brain, they cannot be observed directly by crime investigators or triers of fact. Instead, the memory trace that resides within the human brain is manifested for investigators and triers of fact through verbal testimony. It is probably safe to conclude that courts of law could not function without relying on human memory. Even physical evidence, such as a bloody glove, requires someone to take the witness stand and recall where it was found, by whom, at what time, in what condition, and so on. The scientific study of human memory was initiated over 100 years ago by Hermann Ebbinghouse (1885/1913), and the scientific study of human memory today remains almost exclusively the province of psychology and related cognitive and neurological sciences. The scientific study of memory is so fundamental to psychology that no general textbook in psychology could fail to devote a chapter or its equivalent to memory. Over the last 20 years or so, psychologists have developed a specific research literature on witness testimony. This research has been directed primarily at eyewitnesses, such as victims or bystanders to a criminal event. This issue of Psychology, Public Policy, and Law is devoted to the potential contributions of the scientific study of witness testimony to public policy and legal issues. Making policy or procedure recommendations to the criminal justice system on eyewitness reliability issues is not new for psychologists. Nearly 90 years ago, Hugo Munsterberg (1908) argued that "Nearly every chapter and sub-chapter of sense psychology may help to clear up the chaos and confusion which prevail in the observation of witnesses" (p. 33), and he bemoaned the fact that juries and judges are not obliged to know and understand these things. Following a long period of near dormancy on the issue, research programs in psychology arose again in the mid-1970s, and there has been a renewal of the argument that scientific psychology has something important to offer the legal system. Unlike Munsterberg, who tried to rely almost exclusively on basic findings and theories of sensation and perception, modern researchers on eyewitness issues have made heavy use of complex stimulus
This Amicus Curiae brief is submitted on behalf of 13 current and former professors of psychology who are experts on memory and eyewitness identification. Amici teach, research and write about memory as evidence as applied by the state and federal courts of the United States. As experts on memory and eyewitness identification, they have a strong professional interest in the issues presented by this case. Further, they have particular insight into the degree to which faulty eyewitness evidence may have unfairly prejudiced the outcome of Kevin Keith’s capital murder trial.
Effects of the type of incident and the number of perpetrators on eyewitness memory
Journal of Applied Psychology, 1981
The accuracy of eyewitness testimony and identification following the unprepared witnessing of either a violent (mugging) or a nonviolent (direction seeking) videotaped incident in which one, three, or five perpetrators participated was investigated, together with the relationship between the witnesses' objective accuracy and their subjective feeling of certainty concerning correctness. Sixty subjects, 30 male and 30 female unpaid undergraduates with an average age of 21.7 years, were tested individually. Testimony was less accurate following the witnessing of the violent incident, and the decrease in accuracy was a function of the increase in the number of perpetrators seen, especially under the violent condition. The accuracy of identification was very low, with only 27% of the subjects making a correct identification; chance performance was observed with five perpetrators. Whereas a positive accuracy-confidence relationship held for identification under the nonviolent condition, this was not the case under the violent condition. These findings were related to court cases in which violence was interpreted as rendering eyewitness memory more reliable than in nonviolent situations.
Memory for murder: A psychological perspective on dissociative amnesia in legal contexts
2001
Mental health professionals and legal decision-makers often hear reports of memory impairment from both perpetrators of extreme violence such as homicide (eg, Kopelman, 1995; Roesch & Golding, 1986; Schacter, 1986a), and from complainants and eyewitnesses (eg, Loftus, 1993). Adult complainants, for example, have testified about their recovery of repressed memories for a violent incident (s) following a lengthy period of amnesia (eg, Loftus, 1997; Porter, Yuille, & Lehman, 1999).