False Identification and Lineup Instructions Biased/Unbiased
There are many instances where people have been wrongly accused only because they were falsely identified or either because there was not enough evidence present that would prove them guilty. George Allen Jr. was convicted in 1983 on the charges of capital murder, rape, sodomy and first degree burglary. It has been noted that the reason for his false conviction was false confession, invalid or improper forensic evidence and government misconduct (Innocenceproject.org, 2013). Another case is of Barry Gibbs who was charged with second degree murder in the year 1988. He was wrongly charged due to eyewitness misidentification and government misconduct. It was noted that Barry Gibbs served 17.5 years of jail time before he was exonerated in the year 2005. (Innocenceproject.org, 2013)
These cases therefore give an idea that eyewitness misidentification is a very important cause of wrongful convictions all over the country and the world. It has now been speculated that eye witness identification is often unreliable because the human mind is not like a tape recorder. It cannot remember or recall events exactly how they happened. Even though eye witness information might seem like a reliable piece of evidence, there are factors that can cause it be inaccurate.
Seeing how crime is increasing all around the world, eyewitness identification play an important part in identification of the guilty. Even though eye witness identification may have gotten many people charged and convicted, this conviction might have been false all along. With the advent of better forensics techniques like finger printing and DNA testing, a lot of the people have now been exonerated. It has been noted that the confidence and retrospective report of the eye witness varies with the way the jurors and the investigators deal with the eye witnesses (Wells, Olsen and Charman, 2002) It was seen that many things went on to affect the response that the eye witnesses gave. These identifications responses seemed to vary according to the ease and bias of questioning that they attained.
Even though eye witness might have helped to solve crime in some cases, this phenomenon has also gone to spread a lot injustice around the world. It is considered to be an unreliable form of evidence and one that is easily biased (Brandon and Davies, 1973). Sobel, Vogelman, Ruoff, and Pridgen (2011) stated that identification is one of the major determining factors in a lot of jury verdicts. Their major argument was they considered this form of eyewitness identification and statements the most decent and most persuasive kind of evidence. It should be noted that there are two sorts of errors that can occur in this process. Maplass and Devine (1981) stated that either the person can wrongly accuse another person or he can miss out the right person. This means that when the witness is presented with a lineup possible offender, they can choose the wrong person or state that they don't recognize anyone. In both cases, the end result is that either the guilty is not charged or an innocent person is accused of a crime he didn't commit.
Fallible eyewitness testimony goes on to risk the entire concept of criminal justice. Two types of variables have gone to be estimated that go on to reduce the accuracy of eyewitnesses.
Estimator Variables
Estimator variables are variables because they are linked to the actual crime that took place. They are linked to the crime, the perpetrator the witness and they are unchangeable (Wells, 1972). The amount of time that the witness was exposed to the relevant stimuli is very important. Loftus (1972) stated that picture recognition is a monotonically increasing function of exposure time. Lack of familiarity with the size or the distance of the surrounding objections can greatly go on to distort the estimate of the size, distance and the acceleration of the perpetrator (Grether and Baker, 1972). It should also be noted that when the witness is in the process of seeing a crime from his own eyes, he might be in a very traumatized and panicked state. It has been noted that the accuracy of the witness decreases as the severity of the crime increases (Leippe, Wells and Ostrom, 1978). It is also noted that if the crime that took place is more complex, the recognizability and eventually accuracy may also increase (Loftus, 1972) Johnson (1984) stated that there are more chances of false identification when the person offender involved in the crime is of a different race than the witness. In other words, the accuracy would be more in within-race identifications as opposed otherwise. Furthermore, the degree of stress may also alter...
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