Eyewitness Testimony Research Paper

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Eyewitness testimony and false imprisonment based on eyewitness
First off I would like to say eyewitness testimony is very questionable the human mind is very complexed and there are many issues with eyewitness testimony. One factor of eyewitness testimony is poor encoding at the time of initial perception. When most are endanger them only see the danger, not the person. The mind tries to focus on getting a solution to get out of the danger without death. The mind process and vision in many ways and fills in what it cannot see. In a bad situation the mind goes into fight or flight most people are not trained to overcome this process. When it comes to poor visibility in bad lighting, brief duration, long distance, etc. or to the mind playing …show more content…
or from other memories and systematic perceptual distortions in memory small sizes grow and large sizes shrink, colors are remembered as brighter, etc. A third reason for error lies in the procedures used during photo-identifications and lineups. Error Sources in Lineups and Photo-identifications from a scientific viewpoint, valid finding of fact requires that the outcome is not contaminated by confounding variables those other than the ones whose effects are explicitly being measured or biased toward desired results. Each observation should be independent and unrelated to any other. Photo-spreads and lineups generally fail to meet these criteria because they offer many opportunities for a biased result. There have been many studies on these facts. A study done That DNA first exonerated wrongfully convicted people. In 90% of the cases, mistaken eyewitness identification played a major …show more content…
The only thing officers had to go on was that a rapist had a white girlfriend, according to the victim. The investigating officer only knew Marvin as the only black man with a white girlfriend in the neighborhood where the rap occurred, Marvin had automatically become a suspect. Marvin Anderson was at work when Marvin was asked to speak to officers. The officers questioned Marvin about a rape that had occurred over the previous weekend. Marvin told the police what he knew about the crime – details Marvin had because Marvin lived in the neighborhood where it had occurred. When police ask Marvin to come to the station to give a statement Marvin agreed. However, there were facts Marvin didn’t know was that the man who had committed the rape had told the victim that he “had a white girl,” before questioning Marvin, the officer had gone and obtained a color employment identification photo of him (KRISHNAMURTHY,
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