Eyewitnesses are called to give evidence of occurrences that took place in a crime scene as well as identify the suspects that are culpable of committing the offense in a court of law. Thus jurors base their judgment of the case based on the evidence that eyewitnesses give. The empirical researches on the topic have over time made the legal system to be suspicious of eyewitness evidence. Thus, it is paramount that the legal system identifies the different factors that make eyewitness evidence to be incredible. The study discussed the following factors; weapon focus, stress, reconstructive memory, misleading information, alcohol, time, age, and gender; and assessed the possible ways through which the validity can be improved. According to the study findings, most of the witnesses, except the shy and autistic people, will be distracted by the weapon. Further, the study revealed that both genders tend to have an inclination towards remembering the suspects of the same gender. Also, the male eyewitnesses should be probed for the sequence of events during the crime because they are better at identifying such occurrences. The third finding was that children and the aged are vulnerable to forgetting key details. The last finding was that intoxication influences the memory of the eyewitness.
Albright, T. D. (2017). Why eyewitnesses fail. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 114(30), 7758–7764. doi:10.1073/pnas.1706891114
Beaudry, J. L., Lindsay, R. C., Leach, A.?M., Mansour, J. K., Bertrand, M. I., & Kalmet, N. (2015). The effect of evidence type, identification accuracy, line?up presentation, and line?up administration on observers' perceptions of eyewitnesses. Legal and Criminology Psychology, 20(2), 343-364. doi:10.1111/lcrp.12030
Begakis, C. (2017). Eyewitness Misidentification: A Comparative Analysis Between the United States and England. Santa Clara Journal of International Law, 15(2), 175-195. Retrieved from https://digitalcommons.law.scu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1222&context=scujil
Berman, M. K. (2015). Eyewitness Identification Jury Instructions: Do They Enhance Evidence Evaluation? New York: CUNY Academic Works. Retrieved from https://academicworks.cuny.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=https://www.google.com/&httpsredir=1&article=1874&context=gc_etds
Carlson, C., Dias, J., Weatherford, D., & Carlson, M. (2013). An investigation of the weapon focus effect and the confidence-accuracy relationship for eyewitness identification. Journal of Applied Research in Memory and Cognition, 6 (1), 82-92.
Charman, S. D., Carol, R. N., & Shwartz, S. L. (2018). The effect of biased lineup instructions on eyewitness identification confidence. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 32 (3), 287-297.
Cowan, S., Read, J. D., & Lindsay, D. S. (2014). Predicting and postdicting eyewitness accuracy and confidence. Jour al of Applied Research in Memory and Cognition, 3 (1), 21-30.
Dahl, M., Graner, S., Fransson, P., Bertillson, J., & Fredricksson, P. (2018). Analysis of eyewitness testimony in a police shooting with fatal outcome–manifestations of spatial and temporal distortions. Cogent Psychology, 1487271.
Garrett, Brandon L., (2017). Actual Innocence and Wrongful Convictions. Academy for Justice, A Report on Scholarship and Criminal Justice Reform (Erik Luna ed., 2017 Forthcoming). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2959570
Hagsand, A. V., Roos af Hjelmsater, E., Granhag, P. A., & Fahlke, C. (2017). Witnesses stumbling down memory lane: The effects of alcohol intoxication, retention interval, and repeated interviewing. Memory, 25 (4), 531-534.
Henry, L., Messer, D., Wilcock, R., Nash, G., M, K.-S., Hobson, Z., & Crane, L. (2017). Do measures of memory, language, and attention predict eyewitness memory in children with and without autism? Autism & Developmental Language Impairments, , 2 (1), 44-68. doi: 10.1177/2396941517722139
Jack, F., Leov, J., & Zajac, R. (2014). Age?related differences in the free?recall accounts of child, adolescent, and adult witnesses. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 28 (1), 30-38.
Jones, A. M., Bergold, A. N., Dillon, M. K., & Penrod, S. D. (2017). Comparing the effectiveness of Henderson instructions and expert testimony: Which safeguard improves jurors'evaluations of eyewitness evidence? Journal of Experimental Criminology, 13(1), 29-52. doi:10.1007/s11292-016-9279-6
McNally, R. J. (2016). False memories in the laboratory and in life: Commentary on Brewin and Andrews. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 31 (1), 40-41.
McPhee, I., Paterson, H. M., & Kemp, R. I. (2014). The Power of the Spoken Word: Can Spoken- Recall Enhance Eyewitness Evidence? Psychiatry, Psychology and Law, 21 (4), 551-566.
McRae, K. (2014). Eyewitness memory for typical and atypical weapons in cognitive context. Journal of Investigative Psychology and Offender Profiling, 11 (2), 179-189.
Nahari, G., & Pazuelo, M. (2015). Telling a convincing story: Richness in detail as a function of gender and information. Journal of applied research in memory and cognition, 4 (4), 363- 367.
Neuschatz, J., Wetmore, S., & Gronlund, S. (2015). Memory Gaps and Memory Errors. Emerging Trends in the Social and Behavioral Sciences: An Interdisciplinary, Searchable, and Li
In-Text Citation: (Fakiha, 2018)
To Cite this Article: Fakiha, B. (2018). Determining the Validity of Eyewitness Evidence. International Journal of Academic Research in Business and Social Sciences, 8(10), 1–11.
Copyright: © 2018 The Author(s)
Published by Human Resource Management Academic Research Society (www.hrmars.com)
This article is published under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY 4.0) license. Anyone may reproduce, distribute, translate and create derivative works of this article (for both commercial and non-commercial purposes), subject to full attribution to the original publication and authors. The full terms of this license may be seen at: http://creativecommons.org/licences/by/4.0/legalcode
