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The term ‘eyewitness’ is a legal term that refers to an account by people of an event that has been witnessed. The testimony is slowly being treated less and less credible because DNA evidence is becoming more accessible and accurate memory testing reveals the errors of your memory. The eyewitness testimony involving criminal justice is being questioned and becoming a controversial topic because the human brain can only hold so much memory.
Recalling information can be very difficult as well, something that can prevent an innocent person from being convicted. A woman named Aileen Clare, a South Carolina district attorney, published an article referring to the reliability of eyewitness testimonies in the United States courts. In the article, it says that Clare started to list examples of men charged wrongfully because of testimonies. Aileen Clare also went into detail about the factors that could lead to misidentification and that includes suggestive identification procedures which is when it’s time to lineup the eyewitnesses and put them in different situations or scenarios to identify the suspect in ways that aren’t natural and doesn’t make each suspect seem equal (Clare, A.P.). It’s as if they are suggesting to the witness that a particular suspect could be a predator or killer even worse a rapist. Despite the fact that eyewitness testimony has not been seen reliable in recent year’s researchers decided to test different abilities of females as opposed to males when it comes to testimonies and what was found was stereotypical and true.
A professor for the University of Maribor taught criminal justice and security, his name was Igor Areh. Igor wrote an article about the experiment and the findings in the study of memory. In the article Areh didn’t focus on just one aspect of memory he tested everything from facial recognition to recollection of everyday tasks and names (Areh, I.). In all of the test runs the females outperformed the males expect when it came to spatial memorization which was tested with the use of maps (Areh, I.). In Igor explanation of why these things occurred, he stated the differences between the genders and that seemed to be the result of the female’s superiority when it comes to verbal recall (Herlitz,A., & Rehnam, J.). Women seemed to have a more intense need to be correct and efficient with that being said they tend to act this way because of the fact they make more mistakes than men in the same experiment (Herlitz,A., & Rehnam, J.).
In his article, author Daniel Yarmey wrote about the expert eyewitness testimony and it provided the chance for lawyers to get help in making sure the convictions of innocent suspects get minimized and the convictions of guilty suspects get put in jail. A while ago Hugo Munsterberg believed in experimental psychology concerns itself with the scientific study of human behavior and experience and the result of the laboratory studies on human perception and memory should be relevant to American courts ‘evaluations of witness testimony’ (Munsterburg, 2001). The field research could contribute to the court and have a better understanding of those factors that contribute to both accurate and mistaken eyewitness information. The result of this experiment suggested that females outperformed men when it came to accuracy of descriptions of people both victims and perpetrators but the men were more confident in their answers and more accurate in describing the different situations and the actual crimes committed.
In the article, I read about the only reasonable conclusion that came to thought is the eyewitness testimonies are not reliable because of the three main points. The first point is violence and weaponry do actually hurt their ability to recall information. The second point is men and women don’t have equal recollection abilities and that it can vary within the different genders. The last and final point is that eyewitness can be persuaded by outside sources about what happened in the crime scene and they interpret what they saw but it’s not reality and they replace it with the information they received from the outside source.
References
- Clare, A.P. (2012). Is Eyewitness Testimony Inherently Unreliable? Trial Evidence, 20(2), 2-5.
- Areh, I (2011). Gender-Related Differences in Eyewitness Testimony. Personality and Individual Differences, 50559-563. doi:10.1016/j.paid.2010.11.027.
- Herlitz, A., & Rehnman, J. (2008). Sex Differences in Episodic Memory. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 17(1), 52-56. doi:10.1111/j.1467-8721.2008.00547.x.
- Munsterberg, H. (1908). On the Witness Stand. New York: Doubleday.
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