Eyewitness Testimony Case

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Shockingly, in the United States alone there have been 235 wrongful conviction cases based on misidentification that have been overturned by DNA evidence since The Innocence Project was created in the 1990’s (Innocence Project, 2012). The Innocence Project has been disproving death row cases founded on eyewitness testimony. In their findings, 73% of their 235 overturned convictions were based on faulty eyewitness testimony (Innocence Project, 2012). Most of these inaccurate identifications are caused unknowingly or unconsciously. In eyewitness testimony, mistakes are frequently made. This creates a larger dilemma, since it is one of the most persuasive elements in a trial. Focusing on eyewitness testimony in criminal trials, jurors place importance …show more content…
False information is not only found in experimental groups, but it is used in everyday life by agents of the law when interviewing suspects. To study how misinformation can obstruct a witness's memory of a person or scene, Mudd and Govern (2004) tested 27 participants on details from a video clip. Before the video is shown, a confederate joins the participant. Concluding the video, both people are given a set of open ended questions to answer. After the questions were answered, the confederate either started talking to the participant about general topics like the weather or about the video providing false information. As a result of the false information being introduced, the percentage of false witness reports rose from 0% directly after the video to 43% after talking to the confederate. This experiment shows how easily it can be to corrupt an eyewitness report. Continuing with false information skewing participant’s memory of an event, Wade, Green, & Nash (2010) demonstrated this using a gambling task and deception. After completing the gambling task portion, the participants returned to the laboratory and were then …show more content…
Cross-race effect, the tendency to recognize a face of one’s own race more easily, has been continually studied. Marcon, Meissner, Frueh, Susa, & MacLin (2010) studied this effect using different exposure periods of faces followed by picture lineups on Hispanic students from the University of Texas at El Paso. Subjects were shown a target face for either 100 ms, 500 ms, 1000 ms, or 1500 ms followed by a blank screen and a photo lineup including two, four, six, or eight pictures. Overall, the mean accuracy was 85.80%. Along with a high accuracy rate, it was found that there was a significant main effect of the race of face on accuracy. This shows that the subjects were more accurate on identifying faces of the same race over faces of another race. In addition to higher accuracy, responses were quicker to a face of the same race as themselves. Similar to the above mentioned cross-race bias, Shaw and Skolnick (1994) investigated the own-sex bias hypothesis. In this experiment, subjects were shown a slide sequence that featured a target person, either a man or a woman, in a behavioral progression, then they took a recognition and recall test. From those two tests, it was found that the researchers predicted hypothesis, that people more accurately identified a face of their own sex, was supported. The test indicated that men and women
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