Of the five criteria set by the courts for the reliability test, which one do you believe to be the weakest? Why?
The reliability criteria that have been developed as the science of eyewitness information advanced include the following: View, attention, certainty, descriptions, and time between crime and confrontation (Wells & Quinlivan, 2009). Of the five reliability criteria, three -- view, attention, and certainty -- are attributes of retrospective self-reports. Certainty is the criteria that I believe is the weakest since the literature is replete with studied that show how fallible the certainty of an eyewitness's testimony can be. Strong empirical evidence exists to show that retrospective self-reports frequently do not match the presentation of objective facts (Wells & Quinlivan, 2009). Retrospective self-reports have been shown to be quite malleable and people are not skilled at identifying which factors influence their self-reports (Nisbett and Wilson, 1977). Several of the reliability criteria are not independent of one another...
Eyewitness Testimony The Supreme Court, in Neil v. Biggers, 409 U.S. 188, 93 S. Ct. 375 (1972), set out some guidelines as to what a court must consider when it is trying to determine how much credibility to give to eyewitness testimony. This case involved a woman who identified a man who she claimed had raped her. The case revolved around the credibility of her identification. The Court laid out the
41+). Loftus notes that science has found "post-event information" is integrated into what most people have actually experienced because, "when people experience some actual event -- say a crime or an accident -- they often later acquire new information about the event. This new information can contaminate the memory" (Loftus, 2002, March, p. 41+). In addition, many false memories are created, deliberately or by accident, in response to leading questioning
Eyewitness Testimony Current Event in Criminal Justice The Reliability of Eyewitness Testimony The execution of Troy Anthony Davis on September 27, 2011, in Georgia has stirred new debate over the reliability of eyewitness testimony. Davis was convicted of the August 19, 1989 murder of police officer Mark MacPhail in Savannah, Georgia. Working a security guard at a Burger King, MacPhail was shot when he attempted to defend a man being assaulted in a
Thus while an interviewer may simply be trying to pin down additional details of an incident (for example), the eyewitness may believe that she or he is being challenged about the accuracy of his or her memory and statement and begin (again, most likely unconsciously and not in any attempt to commit perjury) to shift answers to coincide with what the witness believes the interviewer want to hear (Poole
Eyewitness Testimony and Memory Issues When investigating and prosecuting crimes and other incidents, their can be a heavy level of reliance on eyewitness testimony to substantiate the facts that are suggested by other evidence and to fill in missing gaps in the story of the crime, accident, or other incident. This can be a problem, however, as two different eyewitness accounts of the same incident are likely to differ significantly
Law enforcement has a direct ethical responsibility to preventing wrongful convictions, no matter how heavy the pressure for a conviction may be from a political standpoint. Wrongful convictions represent a miscarriage of justice and draw attention to procedural problems in law enforcement. One of the problems that has been shown to lead to wrongful convictions is the method by which eyewitness testimony is secured. Recent criminal justice policy and procedure
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