A Case of Mistaken Eyewitness Testimony, Ronald Cotton Ronald Cotton was a victim of being wrongly identified in an eyewitness testimony. In July 1984, a man broke into Jennifer Thompson-Cannino's, 22 years old house. Whoever this man was sexually assaulted her, but Jennifer Thompson-Cannino was smart and did what she could to stay alive and remember all the features of this man to make sure he will be charged for his actions. Later on in the same night, he repeated this actions to another female in the same apartment complex. So Jennifer Thompson-Cannino went to the police and told them everything.…
Dennis Dinardo is going to be prosecuted for reckless disregard to human life because of the amount of danger he put everyone in. This is the right way to go because he was correct that Washington had a gun and was running with a purpose after the shots were fired. Charging Dinardo with attempted murder would be too much because he was right to take the shots he did and not charging him would not be right either because he fired multiple shots into crowd of chaos. The race of both men is not important to the story because that is not the reason Dinardo shot Washington, he shot Washington because he felt as though he was in danger of being shot. The second transit officer who stopped after he heard Dinardo yelling from the train should have pulled off his badge and shown it to him to prove that they were on the same side of the law.…
“Under the Manson test, if an identification was unnecessarily suggestive, a court must weigh certain reliability factors against the corrupting influence of the suggestive procedures to determine whether the identification is reliable and therefore admissible (Couch, AFRICAN AMERICANS WRONGLY CONVICTED 7 2013, p. 1536). Eyewitness testimonies are still used to this day even though the reliability of this source of evidence is not as good as the Supreme Court believed. It’s a wonder why this is still being used as much seeing as how it is the number one cause of false…
Mr. Replogle, I strongly agree with your point of view. The Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments prohibited eyewitnesses from testifying to false identification due to faulty memory. In today’s society, a variety of different techniques can be utilized to identify criminals. It is sad to say that several problems have been encounter from eyewitness identification due to an unreliable perception of the events along with other factors. However, eyewitness testimony is a powerful component to obtaining a conviction in some cases.…
As Holloway pointed out, eyewitness testimony plays a significant role in sending innocent people to prison (Holloway, 2015). Yet, I feel that she only vaguely covered the topic. Because eyewitness testimony is a major component of the American criminal justice system, Holloway should have better emphasized the faultiness of eyewitness…
An example would look like this, “Is it true that you saw John waiting across the street before his wife came home?” (How Courts Work). Because this information did not come from the witness himself, it makes the information less believable in the jury’s…
Many who read and study about the Holocaust, realize that the actions that took place can be considered as a genocide upon a nation of people that were seen as inferior to others…but that ultimately were not harming anyone throughout society. Despite studying all of the information about the Holocaust, the only “accurate” information comes from those whom were hard to undergo the course of this mass genocide. It is these eye-witness testimonies that allows, for those who did not experience it, brain to retain the material presented while also allowing the hearts to be moved to realize how it felt to be a Jew, Gypsy, Handicapped, or Prisoner of War (POW) during the concentration and medical camps of WWII. It is also because of the eye-witness testimonies that allow for one to realize why it is important to remember the Holocausts’ impact upon the lives of those affected…so that history never has the audacity to repeat. While reading the stories portrayed throughout the eye-witness accounts, I was able to place myself within the shoes of those whom were able to give their testimonies.…
Instead, the witness must reconstruct the event from memory, which allows the possibility of inaccuracy, even without law enforcement involvement. Despite evidence of flawed traditional eyewitness identifications, eyewitnesses are still used regularly for law enforcement as thousands of suspects are targeted each year based on eyewitness reports. As the U.S. Supreme Court has noted, "There is almost nothing more convincing than a live human being who takes the stand, points a finger at the defendant and says, 'That's the…
The accuracy of their testimony is sometimes called into question, especially if a witness says they saw the…
When a conviction depends completely on whether or not an eyewitness can select the correct suspect and not one of the foils, known non-suspects, out of a lineup is where many cases of wrongful convictions can begin. For example, in many cases it appears juries believe a witness who can correctly identify a defendant from lineups, even when other sources of evidence are contradictory to their statements (“Eyewitness Identification” 1); therefore, proposing a possibility of bias towards one piece of evidence while ignoring all opposing information from others. However, some may say that eyewitness testimony is the only way to correctly identify the accused suspect. Although in some cases that statement may be true when no other form of evidence is present, for so many others, the eyewitness identification can lead to a lapse in judgement by the jury who may very easily dismiss other pieces of evidence that are available to them; therefore, an individual who unfortunately matches the description of the guilty party may be imprisoned for a crime they did not commit.…
In conclusion, both an eyewitness and the reasonable person provide standards in the court of law that are used in determining whether to convict a suspect, as demonstrated by the eyewitness in the State v. Hendersen (2011) case. Unfortunately, both standards are based upon subjective perception. For example, human error in memory processing may decrease the accuracy in an eyewitness testimony. Research should be done on individual interpretation as it relates to an eyewitness or the reasonable person in order to prevent any wrongful…
An issue in developmental psychology that is a common topic of research is the question of whether or not the testimony of young children can be trusted. Can they recognize perpetrators or even remember events accurately? The answers to these questions should inform how children are questioned as eyewitnesses in the courtroom, and since many people aren’t as educated in this topic, it important for a policy to be implemented to ensure that findings from recent research are being used to effectively utilize children as eyewitnesses. There are three main topics of applicable research that I will discuss in this paper, and they are: use of initial exhaustive recall to avoid retrieval-induced forgetting, eye closure in recalling events, and repeating…
Eyewitnesses are humans, who are bound to make mistakes, and are prone to the misinformation effect. The old man had heard the young man threatened his father to kill him and the woman had witnessed the young…
Whether by perjury or eyewitness/victim error (Project, 2016). The criminal justice put more than necessary faith in eyewitness testimony. An eyewitness testimony is not a reliable source for the simple fact that only after innocence is proven is it made clear that eyewitness testimony was flawed. Many factors that can lead to eyewitness misidentification include but not limited to the witness lying and PTSD. It is not possible to know the number of wrongful convictions by mistaken identity, because many who are mistakenly identified will never have a chance to prove their innocence (Project, 2016)…
In a study done by Steven D. Penrod and Brian L. Cutler, eyewitness identification was tested to find the most reliable effects on eyewitness performance. The studies that they performed indicated that jurors ' evaluations of identification evidence are heavily influenced by the confidence of the eyewitness. Unfortunately, in this case and in many other cases, the confidence of the eyewitness did not matter because he still identified the wrong man. The correlation between confidence and accurate eyewitness identification is weak (Penrod & Cutler, 1989). Because the victim’s husband was so confident in his identification, the cops did not feel obligated to find all of the evidence that they needed to prosecute Brenton.…