The Importance & Value on Eyewitness Testimony

The tape was shown to 90 undergraduates who were thence asked to rec every last(predicate) details in a test of their reminiscence of what they had seen. Scrivner and Safer none that eyewitness testimony is persuasive for jurors even though eyewitnesses may be in close. They also cite some enquiry that shows that retell questioning of eyewitnesses tush cause them to construct information, alone there is also evidence that such repeated know of the event so-and-so lead to hypermnesia, or net gains in the amount of information recalled without an increase in memory errors. In their own research, Scrivner and Safer thus conducted successive recall trials and found that their subjects recalled more(prenominal) details in each of the four recall trials, the break of which was 48 hours after the viewing of the tape. The researchers thus concluded that repeated attempts to recall information can make accounts more absolute rather than less. This would seem to indicate that eyewitness testimony in a courtroom might be more accurate than has been believed because of repeated efforts to recall during the time between the crime and the trial.

However, Scrivner and Safer did not try to account for certain social or class variables that have been found to color eyewitness testimony. Brigham (1990) considers one such element in terms of distinctiveness and pleasingness of bearing on the part of the "perpetrator." Brigham uses this dimension as a mediating gene in the relationship between the confidence the ey

ewitness has in his or her appellative and the accuracy of that identification (called the CA relationship). The confidence shown by the witness has been cited as a factor to be taken into account in find out the accuracy of an eyewitness identification, and common sense would indicate that a juror would see a confident identification as more accurate than an uncertain one. Research supports this view.

A succor issue raised by Brigham is whether the characteristics of the person being determine would affect the CA relationship. Brigham tried to eliminate some of the subjectiveness involved in determining whether his potential invests would be considered attractive or distinctive by using a type of 24 undergraduates to do the rating necessary. Brigham found that the distinctiveness of the fool was significantly related to the magnitude of the CA correlation, while target attractiveness was also related, but to a lesser degree.

What this research does show is that the issue of eyewitness accuracy and the various dimensions which can affect it has generated contradictory research and should be considered unsettled. This is a scientific matter, but the issue of what a juror should do is a legal and moral matter. There is sufficient evidence that eyewitness testimony is at least suspect and that there argon a variety of dimensions both social and otherwise that can affect it. This suggests a need for caution in pass judgment eyewitness testimony and a need to consider all the factors which might color such testimony, from faulty memory to expectations around an individual or group.
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