Wrongful Conviction On the morning of August 10, 1984, Deborah Sykes was brutally stabbed, sexually assaulted, and eventually killed in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. The man convicted for her murder was Darryl Hunt, a 19 year old boy that would go on to spend 20 years in prison for a crime he did not commit. Hunt was convicted based on eye-witness testimony and informants, but was later exonerated based on DNA evidence that matched a man that was caught just a few months after the murder took…
INTRODUCTION Eyewitness testimony, which depends on the precision of human memory, enormously affects the result of a trail. For instance, In 1984, American College Student Jennifer Thompson was assaulted at knifepoint by a man who burst into her dorm. Amid her difficulty, Jennifer focused on everything about her aggressor so she could later precisely identify him. Soon thereafter, she worked with law enforcement to make a precise representation out of an attacker. A couple days after the fact…
suspects are identified by eyewitnesses in American trials (Denholtz, T. L., & McDonough, E. A., 2015). After a century of researching on eyewitness identification testimony, psychologists have reached a consensus that eyewitness testimony error is the leading cause for false conviction. Researches have showed that among witnesses who made an identification under the experimental situation, 36% identified a known-innocent filler rather than a suspect, indicating that eyewitness performance…
Eyewitness testimony can become very controversial, sometimes even contradictory. In some cases, people are willing to lie to help others, and in some, they may genuinely believe false statements. However, testimony from witnesses can be necessary in determining the facts of specific cases. Though it may be necessary, it usually does not help in determining the genuine truth. In most cases, eyewitness testimony is invalid. The case in the video is one of the many examples of how eyewitness…
Throughout the history of the United States’ judicial system, eyewitness testimonies — accounts of a crime or accident that involves a witness narrating their firsthand experience of the incident to a court — have been used as primary evidence for courts to indict a defendant since biological evidence may not always be available or easily analyzed (Myers 350). One of the major problems with these testimonies is that it requires perfect recollection of the events so that the courts can piece…
When one thinks of memory, they usually think of past events that happened or something that they had learned. Although one can recall certain memories, can they recall every single detail? This semester, we were asked to recall the events of a day that happened six weeks prior to the beginning of class. While some students could explain some details of what they had done that day, not all could be certain. Details may not seem to be that important when telling a story from a childhood…
If you have been charged with a criminal offense in Pennsylvania, or elsewhere, then you know that your arrest may have been based on eyewitness testimony. Identifications and testimony given by eyewitnesses have long been considered one of the most reliable types of evidence. More and more, however, it has been shown that eyewitness recall might not be as accurate as it was once thought to be. In fact, Science magazine reports that eyewitness testimony was the basis for approximately 75 percent…
Eyewitness testimony is the examination of how precisely an individual might analysis critical occasions that they have visually perceived happening. In the situation of an individual optically discerning a crime, it’s extremely vital that the promulgation they give of data is accurate, as in a court their proof will impact jurors’ decisions (Green et al, 2009). By considering witness testimony, therapists have possessed the capacity to see the reasons for erroneous reports made by witnesses;…
The field of forensic science seems like a captivating world. It is known that forensic scientists assist law enforcement agencies by collecting and analyzing the evidence of a crime scene. Most of the time, this is all a person knows by watching television shows, such as “NCIS.” There are many misconceptions of a forensic scientist created by television shows. Sometimes these misconceptions make forensic science look glamorous. The issue is that this is how it happens on television and in…
Suggestibility, as it pertains to memory, is a person’s unknown tendency to incorporate incorrect or misleading information into his or her own personal recollection of an event. Some contest that suggestion is a subset of misattribution, but this is not this case. Misattribution can occur without the presence of overt suggestion; this is not the case for suggestion. This finding places suggestion and its effects in a distinct class of its own. While the power of suggestion can be hard to…