Eyewitness Evidence Research Articles

Eyewitness Evidence: Improving Its Probative Value.

The criminal justice system relies heavily on eyewitnesses to determine the facts surrounding criminal events. Eyewitnesses may identify culprits, recall conversations, or remember other details. An eyewitness who has no motive to lie is a powerful form of evidence for jurors, especially if the eyewitness appears to be highly confident about his or her recollection. In the absence of definitive proof to the contrary, the eyewitness's account is generally accepted by police, prosecutors, judges, and juries. However, the faith the legal system places in eyewitnesses has been shaken recently by the advent of forensic DNA testing. Given the right set of circumstances, forensic DNA testing can prove that a person who was convicted of a crime is, in fact, innocent. Analyses of DNA exoneration cases since 1992 reveal that mistaken eyewitness identification was involved in the vast majority of these convictions, accounting for more convictions of innocent people than all other factors combined. We review the latest figures on these DNA exonerations and explain why these cases can only be a small fraction of the mistaken identifications that are occurring. Decades before the advent of forensic DNA testing, psychologists were questioning the validity of eyewitness reports. Hugo Münsterberg's writings in the early part of the 20th century made a strong case for the involvement of psychological science in helping the legal system understand the vagaries of eyewitness testimony. But it was not until the mid- to late 1970s that psychologists began to conduct programmatic experiments aimed at understanding the extent of error and the variables that govern error when eyewitnesses give accounts of crimes they have witnessed. Many of the experiments conducted in the late 1970s and throughout the 1980s resulted in articles by psychologists that contained strong warnings to the legal system that eyewitness evidence was being overvalued by the justice system in the sense that its impact on triers of fact (e.g., juries) exceeded its probative (legal-proof) value. Another message of the research was that the validity of eyewitness reports depends a great deal on the procedures that are used to obtain those reports and that the legal system was not using the best procedures. Although defense attorneys seized on this nascent research as a tool for the defense, it was largely ignored or ridiculed by prosecutors, judges, and police until the mid 1990s, when forensic DNA testing began to uncover cases of convictions of innocent persons on the basis of mistaken eyewitness accounts. Recently, a number of jurisdictions in the United States have implemented procedural reforms based on psychological research, but psychological science has yet to have its fullest possible influence on how the justice system collects and interprets eyewitness evidence. The psychological processes leading to eyewitness error represent a confluence of memory and social-influence variables that interact in complex ways. These processes lend themselves to study using experimental methods. Psychological science is in a strong position to help the criminal justice system understand eyewitness accounts of criminal events and improve their accuracy. A subset of the variables that affect eyewitness accuracy fall into what researchers call system variables, which are variables that the criminal justice system has control over, such as how eyewitnesses are instructed before they view a lineup and methods of interviewing eyewitnesses. We review a number of system variables and describe how psychological scientists have translated them into procedures that can improve the probative value of eyewitness accounts. We also review estimator variables, variables that affect eyewitness accuracy but over which the system has no control, such as cross-race versus within-race identifications. We describe some concerns regarding external validity and generalization that naturally arise when moving from the laboratory to the real world. These include issues of base rates, multicollinearity, selection effects, subject populations, and psychological realism. For each of these concerns, we briefly note ways in which both theory and field data help make the case for generalization.

Winter tornadoes in Ireland: The case of the Athlone tornado of 12 January 2004

Records to date show that the maximum frequency of tornadoes in Ireland is during the summer months of July and August. However, significant tornadoes have also occurred during the winter months. This study identifies the main characteristics of such events in Ireland and examines one particular case that occurred on 12th January 2004 in the town of Athlone, County Westmeath. It occurred at approximately 2000 UTC, during the hours of darkness. This, together with the severe weather that occurred at the same time, minimised the eyewitness evidence. But site investigations established a recognisable, narrow damage track approximately 4.15 km long and local witness evidence suggests it lasted between 15 and 20 min. The synoptic environment for this event consisted of a cold front that was crossing Ireland from the west. This was in close proximity to a strong jet streak at 300 hPa and an upper level trough with an intense cold pool of air. Overall there was very modest instability. However, both horizontal and vertical wind shear was very marked, at middle levels and, in particular, low levels up to 800 hPa. This appears to have played the major role in the development of a favourable environment for the tornado. Mesoscale detail from radar images suggests that the tornado occurred in a storm cell behind the cold front along a surface boundary between the rear outflow from a storm cell ahead of it and surface winds from the SSW. It is also suggested that low level wind speed shear may have produced a downburst into the flank of the Athlone storm cell and created a bow echo of particularly small space–time dimensions, a mere 11 km long lasting for up to 30 min. The tornado occurred in the northern ‘bookend’ portion of the bow echo. If so, this is the first record of a bow echo tornado for Ireland.

Mock‐suspects' decisions to confess: the accuracy of eyewitness evidence is critical

AbstractForty participants were asked to commit a mock‐crime that involved them stealing a cell‐phone. Later the mock‐offenders were questioned and evidence was presented to them from a witness who was said to have seen the offence. Participants were randomly assigned to one of two conditions in which they were presented with a witness statement that either contained detailed information concerning their description and their actions, or not‐detailed information. For half the participants in each condition the information was correct, while for the other half some of the information was incorrect. The results show that participants were more likely to confess if the evidence against them was accurate, but the level of detail of the evidence made no difference. Participants who had accurate evidence presented against them felt more guilty than those who had less accurate evidence against them. The results are discussed in relation to police interviewing techniques. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Logical evaluation of evidence when a person is suspected of committing two separate offences

We consider the problem of drawing inferences within a legal framework when a person is a suspect for two separate offences. Although we are primarily concerned with scientific evidence the issue inevitably arises as to how that evidence interacts with other, non-scientific evidence. We show that, in this particular context, the evidence can be conveniently classified into three categories that concern, respectively: the first crime only; the second crime only; and evidence that relates to similarities between the two crimes. Two case examples are considered and we consider DNA, fibres and eyewitness evidence. These are viewed from the perspective of a prosecutor who has to decide whether or not to charge a suspect with one or both crimes. Graphical sensivity analyses are presented which have features that are not intuitively obvious.

Eyewitness memory is still not common sense: comparing jurors, judges and law enforcement to eyewitness experts

Knowledge of factors affecting eyewitness accuracy was examined in a sample of jurors, judges and law enforcement professionals. Participants completed a survey in which they were asked to agree or disagree with 30 statements about eyewitness issues, and their responses were compared to a sample of eyewitness experts who completed the same survey. Participant responses differed significantly from responses of eyewitness experts. Jurors disagreed with the experts on 87% of the issues, while judges and law enforcement disagreed with the experts on 60% of the issues. The findings show a large deficiency in knowledge of eyewitness memory amongst jurors, judges and law enforcement personnel, indicating that the legal system may benefit from expert assistance in the evaluation of eyewitness evidence. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

The Reactions of Mock Jurors to the Department of Justice Guidelines for the Collection and Preservation of Eyewitness Evidence

Failure to follow the recommended guidelines for conducting lineups set forth by the Department of Justice (DOJ) could result in fewer convictions. To test this supposition, mock jurors read 1 of 3 versions of a court transcript. In 1 version, no issues were raised about how the investigating officer conducted the photo array. In the second version, 2 procedural errors made by the investigator were highlighted. In the third version, the defense attorney highlighted 2 procedural errors and mentioned that these errors violated the DOJ guidelines. Mock jurors informed of the procedural errors their violation of the DOJ guidelines found the prosecution's case against the defendant to be weaker than mock jurors in the other 2 conditions. Also, mock jurors informed of the procedural errors were less likely to find the defendant guilty than mock jurors in the other 2 conditions. Thus, the failure of law enforcement to implement the DOJ guidelines could be used to discredit the prosecution's case in the jurors' eyes.

The 21st-century brain: biology's hardest problem

The 21st-century brain: biology's hardest problem

PC_Eyewitness: A computerized framework for the administration and practical application of research in eyewitness psychology

Eyewitness identification evidence is an important aspect of our legal system. Society relies on witnesses to identify suspects whom they have observed during the commission of a crime. Because a witness has only a mental representation of the individual he or she observed, law enforcement must rely on verbal descriptions and identification procedures to document eyewitness evidence. The present article introduces and details a computer program, referred to as PC_Eyewitness (PCE), which can be used in laboratories to conduct research on eyewitness memory. PCE is a modular program written in Visual Basic 6.0 that allows a researcher to present stimuli to a participant, to conduct distractor tasks, to elicit verbal descriptors regarding a target individual, and to present a lineup for the participant to provide an identification response. To illustrate the versatility of the program, several classic studies in the eyewitness literature are recreated in the context of PCE. The program is also shown to have applications in the conduct of field research and for use by law enforcement to administer lineups in everyday practice. PCE is distributed at no cost.

Real Property, Spontaneous Order, and Norms in the Gold Mines

This article contributes to the current debate about why people follow the law even when they are not subject to legal sanctions, as when there are no police and little danger of a lawsuit. Most recent scholarship in this area takes the form of norms theories, suggesting that social norms rather than laws shape behavior and that deviations from the norm are punished by either social or internal sanctions. Robert Sugden, however, proposes that order may develop “spontaneously” in the many areas of life where abiding by the rules minimizes the risk of costly confrontations with others and is thus in the interest of all parties. When this is true, the threat of little or no sanctions plays no role in regulating behavior. This article tests Sugden's theory against a simple property system, that of the California gold mines, in which individual miners held small claims subject to strict work requirements. The evidence of eyewitnesses shows that the stability of the regime did not depend on norms, but on the reasonable prediction that other claim holders would themselves stand up for their rights under the local mining code. Disputes about the rules and their application were submitted to arbitrators, whose decisions were accepted by the parties and did not need to be enforced. The California experience thus provides an example of a stable property regime for which game theory has a more satisfying explanation than do any of the norms theories.

Eyewitness Evidence: Will the United StatesGuide for Law EnforcementMake Any Difference?

The publication in the United States of Eyewitness Identification: A Guide for Law Enforcement Officers (TWGEYEE, 1999) is a significant development in seeking to deal with miscarriages of justice, based on erroneous identification, in all 50 states of the Union and at a Federal level. However, its development barely acknowledges the existence of more than 40 years of case law and legislation in England and Wales. In addition, the contents of the Guide are advisory only and failure to comply with them carries no sanction. This article compares the content of the Guide with the mostly mandatory requirements of English law. It argues that, in the face of some of the negative aspects of police culture and the problems associated with the external imposition of controls on policing, the Guide is not likely to be either accepted, or successful. In addition, it is argued that the parochialism of an approach that ignores both research and efforts and extant administrative controls in other comparable jurisdictions is both unwise and unscholarly.

"He Said, She Said": A Psychological Perspective on Historical Memory Evidence in the Courtroom.

Abstract Canadian courts are hearing an increasing number of allegations based on incidents. In most cases, complainants or witnesses report remembering the alleged offense continuously since its occurrence. In other cases (e.g., R. v. Francois, 1994), a witness reports that his/her memory was recovered after being blocked from conscious awareness for a lengthy period. Both continuous and delayed memory cases pose difficulties for legal decision-makers given the typical absence of corroborating evidence. Without clear guidelines for the assessment of allegations based on incidents, judges and juries may rely upon questionable assumptions about memory to assess the credibility of the allegation. A large body of psychological research on applied memory is relevant to the understanding and evaluation of such memory evidence. A review of this research indicates that the central details of most distant emotional/criminal experiences are recalled vividly and often accurately over time. However, some level of peripheral distortion can be expected for such events. In addition, amnesia for traumatic events may occur in rare cases. Conversely, completely mistaken memories for experiences also can occur. Guidelines are presented to assist in the evaluation of allegations based on events. Imagine being a juror in a trial that is based on a middle-aged woman's allegation that her neighbour sexually assaulted her after giving her a ride home 40 years earlier. She recounts a vivid and emotional memory of the accused person attacking her and comes across as a confident witness. As in many sexual assault cases, the defendant denies the allegation and there is no other evidence to corroborate either testimonial. Additionally, the defense team points to inconsistencies in the complainant's testimony relating to dates and locations. How would you evaluate the evidence in this case? Noting the factual errors, some jurors might be skeptical. However, others might view the testimony as highly credible and consider the errors to be minor and the result of the passage of time. A factor that might further complicate decision-making is the complainant's report that her memory of the incident was only recently recovered. There are parallels between the above hypothetical scenario and many civil and criminal cases heard in Canadian courts, such as the case involving the former premier of Nova Scotia, Gerald Regan (R. v. Regan, 1999, 2002). In 1995, Regan was charged with 18 counts of sex-related offenses against 13 women, dating back to the 1950s, '60s and '70s. The complainants were 14-24 years of age at the time of the alleged incidents, which ranged from sexual touching to rape. Mr. Regan was acquitted on some of the original charges and the Crown recently decided not to pursue prosecution on any remaining counts. The Regan case and similar historical cases have sparked a furor over the ability of judges and jurors to accurately assess the credibility of such allegations. Historical cases are those in which the incidents in question occurred years or even decades ago. Because of the complexity of the evidence therein, cases create significant challenges for the court system (e.g., Van Koppen & Crombag, 1999). In light of the difficulties in prosecuting or defending cases based on allegations of abuse, some legal experts, such as Regan's defense counsel (E. Greenspan), have called for a statute of limitations in Canada regarding sexual assault allegations. Others have argued that crime victims are being treated unfairly by a legal system that does not give sufficient credence to claims. It is beyond contention that some allegations of abuse are based in fact. For example, Jack Ramsay, the former justice critic in the Reform Party of Canada, was recently convicted for a sexual offense that occurred three decades earlier, in the absence of any physical or eyewitness evidence (R. …

Memory in Canadian Courts of Law.

Abstract Thousands of people have found themselves facing criminal or civil litigation as a result of questionable memories. Sometimes these involve faulty memory of eyewitnesses to crimes. Psychological science has informed the legal system about memory and enabled productive changes in the handling of eyewitness evidence. The chances of wrongful convictions hopefully go down in the process . But sometimes the questionable memories involve allegations of massive repression of horrible brutalization. In these cases, there is enormous controversy, and downright skepticism, over whether such massive repression even occurs. Unless or until better proof becomes available for these types of claims, a reasonable argument exists for keeping these dubious claims out of the courtroom altogether. Canada has seen its share of problematic, if not downright dangerous, memories being introduced into legal cases. I had a chance to play a role in two such cases. One of them involved the mistaken identification of Thomas Sophonow, described in detail by (Yarmey, this issue). The other involved dubious allegations of repressed memories that forced teacher Michael Kliman to endure three trials before his ultimate acquittal, a case that should probably be considered when evaluating the conclusions drawn by Porter, Campbell, Birt, and Woodworth (this issue). In both of these cases, witnesses came to court to testify based on their memories, and in both cases false or highly dubious memories were accepted by Canadian jurors. For centuries now, we have had experience with people who come to court to testify, and they take the familiar solemn oath. In light of what psychological science has taught us about human memory, I recently proposed that witnesses probably ought to be taking a more realistic oath: Do you swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, or whatever it is you think you remember? (Loftus, 2002). Thomas Sophonow was accused of murdering a young waitress who worked in a donut shop in Winnipeg, Manitoba. Several eyewitnesses testified against Sophonow but there were problems with each one. For example, the photo array shown to a number of witnesses contained a picture of Sophonow, which was significantly different than the other men in the array. For one thing, Sophonow's picture was taken outdoors while the rest of the men were photographed inside. Sophonow is shown wearing a cowboy hat, unlike most of the other possible suspects. Sophonow was also the only man who was depicted in both the photo and the physical lineup, making it possible witnesses chose him because they had seen his picture before. Moreover, Sophonow was the tallest man shown to witnesses, and the killer had been described as a tall man. Despite these and other problems with the eyewitness testimony, Sophonow was convicted of murder and spent nearly four years in prison. Eventually, he was declared factually innocent. An official inquiry was established to investigate what went wrong, to determine just compensation for Mr. Sophonow, and to make recommendations about future cases. Commissioner Peter Cory was eloquent in his description of the suffering of this one man, falsely accused: What has he suffered? ...He is psychologically scarred for life. He will always suffer from the core symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder. As well, he will always suffer from paranoia, depression and the obsessive desire to clear his name. His reputation as a murderer has affected him in every aspect of his life, from work to family relations. The community in which he lived believed him to be the murderer of a young woman, and that the crime had intimations of sexual assault. The damage to his reputation could not be greater. .... His reputation as a murder will follow him wherever he goes. There will always be someone to whisper a false innuendo. . In the mind of Thomas Sophonow, he will always believe that people are talking about him and his implication in the murder. …

A CommonKADS Representation for a Knowledge-based System to Evaluate Eyewitness Identification

The Joseph Bell Centre for Forensic Statistics and Legal Reasoning has been set up to examine the correct presentation, interpretation and evaluation of scientific and forensic evidence through the use of technology. The aim of the Centre is to build computer systems for those operating in the legal system so that they can follow best practice whether investigating a crime or presenting evidence in court. The initial approach to developing computational systems is to build small-scale knowledge-based systems in specific domains. This paper presents a CommonKADS approach to designing a small-scale system to evaluate eyewitness evidence. CommonKADS is a Knowledge Acquisition Design System using computer-generated models to represent how tasks are performed, which agents are involved, their expertise and the communication involved in the process of evaluating eyewitness evidence. The knowledge to be modelled for the application has been drawn from sources such as: the police, the prosecution service, lawyers and psychologists. This system will be piloted and evaluated by the Centre with collaborating institutions for ultimate use by law enforcement agencies and prosecution and defence agents.

Theaters of Proof: Visual Evidence and the Law in Call Northside 777

This Article, a collaboration between a law professor specializing in evidence and an English professor who writes about film, analyzes a film of the late 1940s - Call Northside 777 (henceforth Northside), directed by Henry Hathaway and starring Jimmy Stewart - as a study in evidence. We argue that the film, an explicit retelling of an actual Chicago wrongful conviction case, speaks powerfully to the question of what counts as proof and what persuades, both in the courtroom and in our cultural imagination. The film strongly suggests that legal conceptions of what constitutes good evidence may deviate from more broadly-held ideas of legitimate proof. Legal standards of evidence are portrayed as rigid and conservative, too willing to rely on the reliable and too resistant to novel forms of knowledge. The Article explores in detail how Northside sets up a hierarchy of evidence, with eyewitness evidence at the bottom, expert evidence in the middle, and photographic and visual evidence portrayed as the best evidence of all. We show, however, that in the end, Northside's hierarchy depends on a host of simplifications, both of the historical record on which Northside is based, and also of the ways that visual evidence is made and deployed. We also use Northside as a jumping-off point for a broader examination of the relation between films and legal evidence. We analyze the actual use of reenactments and other films as legal evidence in the period contemporaneous with Northside, and we show that for the most part, judges shared the vision set forth in Northside of film as a nearly transparent medium of truth. In addition, we look at Northside as a reenactment, a hybrid form that lies between drama and documentary, and show that dramatic reenactments and trials have a special relation: they are both, at heart, attempts to capture the past in an authentic and credible fashion. Neither claims to capture the past directly, but both verdicts and reenactments want to be seen as being true to the past in all of the ways that matters. The Article, therefore, suggests an important affinity between the trial and the filmed reenactment: Both are attempts to create believable stories of the past, stories not literally true that nonetheless become substitute depictions for what actually occurred.

Effects of DNA and Eyewitness Evidence on Juror Decisions

Effects of DNA and Eyewitness Evidence on Juror Decisions

Lineup and photo spread procedures: Issues concerning policy recommendations.

This article examines the recommended changes to lineup reforms outlined by eyewitness researchers and the impact of these reforms on public policy as reflected in national guidelines for police identification procedures (Technical Working Group for Eyewitness Evidence, 1999). The limitations of these reforms are discussed. Alternative “best practices” for social science researchers, as well as for police, are proposed to minimize false-positive lineup selections and, consequently, convictions of innocent persons. The purpose of this article is to examine recent recommendations for improving outcomes of lineups and photo spreads in applied settings and to comment on some issues related to policy recommendations. The primary issue appears to be whether a best-practices 1 strategy should be used. An analysis of recommendations for changes in eyewitness identification procedures (Wells, 1988; Wells et al., 1998) and subsequently developed public policy (Technical Working Group for Eyewitness Evidence, 1999) are used to illustrate this issue. The relationship between eyewitness research by psychologists and the legal

Subjective Assessment of Blunt Impacts

An important role of an eyewitness to an assault is to effectively quantify the degree of force used; yet evidence of this form is often subjective and relies on personal opinion. Twelve subjects were asked to strike a load cell with a wooden bat, using varying degrees of force. The strikes were recorded by video camera and 50 people observed the video and were asked to grade the strikes. On average 44% accurately assessed the severity of the strikes, whilst 26% over-estimated. Results suggest that the evidence of eyewitnesses should be treated with caution.

Some Experimental Influences of Lawyers' Complicated Questions on Eyewitness Confidence and Accuracy

Eyewitness evidence and the confidence the eyewitness expresses in such evidence are crucial in many criminal trials. The present study is an examination of the influence of confusing questions often used by attorneys to examine witnesses in court. Participants viewed a videotaped incident and were questioned about the incident 1 week later. Half the participants were asked questions framed in a confusing form; the remaining half were asked the same questions in straightforward language. Confusing questions reduced the participant witnesses' accuracy and suppressed the confidence–accuracy relationships compared with the condition in which simple questions were asked. However, the number of absolutely sure responses was the same in both conditions, although these responses were almost always accurate in the simplified condition, whereas in the confusing question condition, accuracy was comparatively poor. This experiment demonstrates the importance of ensuring that lawyers ask witnesses simple, clear questions.

From the lab to the police station: A successful application of eyewitness research.

The U.S. Department of Justice released the first national guide for collecting and preserving eyewitness evidence in October 1999. Scientific psychology played a large role in making a case for these procedural guidelines as well as in setting a scientific foundation for the guidelines, and eyewitness researchers directly participated in writing them. The authors describe how eyewitness researchers shaped understanding of eyewitness evidence issues over a long period of time through research and theory on system variables. Additional pressure for guidelines was applied by psychologists through expert testimony that focused on deficiencies in the procedures used to collect the eyewitness evidence. DNA exoneration cases were particularly important in leading U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno to notice the eyewitness literature in psychology and to order the National Institute of Justice to coordinate the development of national guidelines. The authors describe their experience as members of the working group, which included prosecutors, defense lawyers, and law enforcement officers from across the country.

Objectivity bias in eyewitness performance

Two experiments were conducted to explore whether facial identification performance could be predicted from observers' attitudes toward eyewitness evidence, perceived personal objectivity, expressed confidence, or completeness and accuracy of verbal descriptions of the suspect. None of these predictors was found to be significantly related to identification performance with either target-present or target-absent photoarrays. However, observers who perceived themselves to be more objective were likely to give higher confidence ratings regardless of the accuracy of their identification performance, and they were likely to include more incorrect elements in their verbal descriptions. Copyright © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Language: en