Courtroom Testimony from Psychologists on Eyewitness Identification Issues Criminology Essay
The current study attempts to fill a gap in the literature by evaluating the influence of eyewitness testimony on case outcomes, while taking into account other types of evidence, such as DNA. While the results underscore the value of forensic DNA evidence, they also highlight the importance of eyewitness testimony in jurors' decision-making. Resume. Research into eyewitness accounts is flourishing. Over the past thirty years, psychologists have made important discoveries and applied those discoveries to the legal system in countless ways. There were disagreements along the way, which were generally healthy in nature. I discuss a few, for example around Eyewitness Identification: Issues in Common Knowledge and Generalization. DOI: 10.1002 9780470696422.ch8. In book: Beyond Common Sense: Psychological Science in the Courtroom pp.157. Eyewitness testimony plays an important role in the criminal justice system and has become an important area of research for psychologists and other social scientists over the past fifty years. This chapter provides a comprehensive overview of key findings from an extensive literature on eyewitness identification performance. Summary Case studies, and more recently DNA testing in the United States, have shown that eyewitness misidentification is responsible for more wrongful convictions than all other causes combined. It is argued that scientific laboratory and field research can contribute to a better understanding by the court of those factors that: Obtaining eyewitness evidence is a critical psychological issue. The manner in which eyewitness identifications are obtained can determine whether they are accurate or inaccurate. A thorough one. Eyewitness testimony is a powerful form of evidence, and this is especially true in the United States criminal justice system. At the same time, misidentification by eyewitnesses is the largest contributing factor to wrongful convictions, proven by DNA testing. In this article, I provide a close examination of this tension between the enormous: The false confession expert's testimony was excluded as not applicable to the case, while the eyewitness identification expert was excluded from testifying due to the presence of other evidence linking the suspect to the crime. The court concluded that the testimony would not have greatly assisted the jury. According to the Innocence Project, eyewitness misidentification is “the single largest cause of wrongful convictions nationwide. In percent of cases where a suspect was found innocent due to DNA evidence, it was eyewitness testimony that put him behind bars in the first place. All kinds of problems can arise.