Like eyewitness memory, DNA evidence can be contaminated with the trace of an innocent person. But theyve hit a snag. The lineup photo from one of these lineups shows how suggestive it was: The other four men in the lineup were much older and bigger than Chester. Widespread civil unrest broke out in Iran following the suspicious death of Amini on September 16, 2022. Retrieved March, 2019. Overall, an issue plaguing both courts and law enforcement is the lack of standard procedures to safeguard defendants against unreliable eyewitness testimony. Do not sell or share my personal information. After his conviction at Croydon Crown Court, several more women made allegations of sexual assault against him. Miller was convicted and sentenced to 52 years in prison. Noting a victims initial confidence level at the initial identification can be important, so as to track if the witness grows more or less confident with the identification over the course of the trial, which might be an indicator of eyewitness unreliability. During the tense interview, Amirabdollahian claimed Mahsa Amini - the 22-year-old who died after being arrested by morality police for failing to wear the hijab - was turned into a 'symbol' by protesters. Historically, eyewitness testimony has been in use not only in the United States and our penal system but all around the world. The shooter had borrowed Heidelbergs car, and when Heidelberg went to retrieve his car later that night he was arrested by officers at the scene. Police in some California counties use some of the methods recommended by the New Jersey court and by the California Commission on the Fair Administration of Justice. Current procedures for collecting and assessing evidence from eyewitnesses are often not designed to minimize contamination.This problem does not apply to other kinds of forensic evidence. Medicolegal court reports are requested where expert witness evidence is required. He was 19 at the time of that attack. The perpetrator had a brief conversation with the parking lot attendants and then fled the scene. Mr. 'But foreign interference and the Persian-language media that are based in the United States and Britain focused their activities on encouraging and instigating the riots and acts of terror. Confidence collected at the time of an identification during a double-blind lineup procedure is informative regarding the eyewitnesss accuracy. Perhaps one of the most striking examples of the flaws in eyewitness testimony is the case of Jerry Miller, who was convicted of rape, robbery and kidnapping in 1982. The court tried to deter false identification with a stepped process. According to the trial transcript, most of the eyewitnesses testified to having been positive when they picked Grant out of the lineup. The involvement of expert witnesses in famous expert witness cases often leads to changes in how expert evidence is formulated and the effect it may have on the outcome of the proceedings. It turns out, back in 1998, just days after the crime, the NYPD had a main suspect for the murder of Al Ward: a man named Mustafa. The answer seems like a resounding yes if you consider some well-known and rather disconcerting information. Few would doubt that under such conditions, DNA evidence is highly reliable. Sally Challens appeal demonstrated the importance of expert evidence in establishing the correct outcome for a mentally disordered offender. or debate this issue live on our message boards. Eyewitness testimony can hold a lot of weight with jurors. As a result, witnesses who have received confirmatory feedback provide testimony that is highly persuasive to jurors. He added: 'I can tell you this in full confidence that our police and the security forces in Iran have not killed anyone with bullets or any other means in these riots.'. The psychiatrist found that she had an adjustment disorder at the time she killed her husband, enabling her solicitors to challenge her conviction for murder. cases where eyewitnesses were rightammo donation to ukraine. The appeal was successful and the conviction was quashed. Abcarian: Mask mandates? 2023 Scientific American, a Division of Springer Nature America, Inc. Such behaviors are often inadvertent; neither lineup administrators nor eyewitnesses may be consciously aware that theyre happening. The detective also admitted making a similar comment to at least one other witness. 5 Brewer & Treyens, Role of Schemata in Memory for Places, Cognitive Psychology 13.2 (1981). Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment. Taken together, each witnesses testimony fits within the cohesive whole, tied together into a description of the route Flowers had to have taken that morning. Thanks to the work of the Innocence Project of Texas, new DNA testing on biological material collected from underneath the victims fingernails cleared Grant and implicated another man, Jermarico Carter, who police said confessed to the killing. 21 Commonwealth v. Walker, 625 Pa. 450, 47678 (2014). Improper lineup procedures can also lead to witness misidentifications. Chester denied having anything to do with these other crimes but was identified by the victims based on these suggestive procedures. Over time, social science experts were soon quick to point out the errors that were likely to occur leading to an erroneous conviction based on faulty eyewitness testimonies.9 In the wake of the Daubert trilogy cases where judges were urged to be active in their gatekeeping role, the courts began developing stringent threshold requirements that had to be met for admission of an eyewitness testimony. 31 Elizabeth Loftus, Eyewitness Science and the Legal System, 14 Annual Review of Law and Social Science 110 (2018). 32 National Research Council, Identifying The Culprit: Assessing Eyewitness Identification 38, 4-8 (2014). 27 The Innocence Project, Eyewitness Identification,. In other words, the confirmatory remark made the mistaken eyewitnesses just as persuasive as the accurate ones. circuit court, the 29-year-old was convicted of a rape that he did not commit and was sentenced to five life sentences. They found that the odds of a false identification were 1.56 times greater in cases where the race was different than the witness, thus highlighting how bias can affect how somebody remembers an event.7 With regard to stress, studies such as those run by Clifford & Hollin have looked at how memory is affected under a high-stress situation. Psychologists have learned a lot about why such errors happen. Psychological scientists, however, have challenged many of the assumptions of the legal system and the general public regarding the. The processes at play in Lydell Grants case are predictable and unfortunately common. Thus, Chester was charged with three separate felonies as a way to overwhelm him and break him down. See here: Innocence Project, Eyewitness misidentification accessed on March 9, 2019. Just as double-blind clinical trials in medical studies are intended to prevent patients and doctors expectations from affecting outcomes of the clinical trial, double-blind lineups aim to prevent witnesses and administrators expectations from influencing the outcomes of the identification procedure. Years later, in 1967, the U.S. Supreme Court highlighted the danger of erroneous eyewitness identification in United States v. Wade, stating, The vagaries of eyewitness identification are well-known; the annals of criminal law are rife with instances of mistaken identification.23 The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) estimates that U.S. law enforcement made 12,196,959 arrests in 2012. Another way is through the misinformation effect, where something occurs between the event and the reporting of the event to muddy or confuse the witness. He is the founder of Hale & Monico, Americas Justice Attorneys. Psychological experiments have shown that lineup administrators who know who the suspect is end up cuing witnesses toward that person. For every one of those tests, the eyewitnesses were, at best, uncertain. Noxious fumes wafted into their classrooms, causing some to need hospital treatment after complaining of headaches, heart palpitations, lethargy and being unable to move. John Wixted is a Distinguished Professor of Psychology at the University of California, San Diego. John Worboys worked as a cab driver and was charged with sexually assaulting several of his female passengers. Moreover, confirmatory feedback can alter witnesses memories of the original crime, making them less able to recognize the actual perpetrator when they see him again. Miller was ultimately charged with rape, robbery and kidnapping. Read through our advertising and sponsorship rates and contact us. Incredibly, prior to Heidelbergs sentencing, the real shooter, James Clark, confessed to the crime, but the confession fell on deaf ears and Heidelberg was sentenced to 99 to 175 years in prison. Because she had already servednine years and four months of her initial life sentence, she was released following the change of conviction. By the way, Weger signed EVERY SINGLE PAGE of the FIRST confession which was transcribed by a court reporter who testified under OATH Weger was not threatened or harmed when he made his damning statement. 'And that's why peaceful protests ended up becoming violent - because of the foreign intervention. Research has repeatedly demonstrated that simple confirming comments such as these have dramatic effects on eyewitnesses testimony. Thanks for reading The Crime Report! In this case, the defendant was charged with first degree murder and the only evidence against him was the testimony of two eyewitnesses. Often, it can be the strongest evidence in a criminal case even though it can also be the most unreliable. Its a fact that eyewitnesses make mistakes. After she had spent several years in prison, an independent consultant psychiatrist was instructed as an expert witness.
Many believe that this conviction was based on contaminated DNA evidence. Instead evidence collected at the contaminated crime scene would probably be declared inadmissible. But faith in eyewitnesses runs so deep that despite the overwhelming proof of Grants innocence, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals initially refused his exoneration request. 28 Brandon L. Garrett, Convicting the Innocent: Where Criminal Prosecutions Go Wrong 6368 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011). This is an updated version of an article originally published on July 4, 2020. Thanks for reading Scientific American. Using eyewitnesses to identify a suspect as the perpetrator to the crime is a form of direct testimonial evidence that is used for forensic purposes. 'Do you ask other countries? In 2011, Sally Challen was convicted of murdering her husband before Guildford Crown Court. Some professionals have questioned whether this case has led to heightened caution when considering capacity and fitness in cases where dementia and cognitive impairment are diagnosed. Instead of concluding that DNA evidence is inherently unreliable because of the contamination that apparently occurred in this case, a more reasonable conclusion would be that for DNA testing to be reliable, proper protocols must be followed. In much the same way, an eyewitness can be led to falsely remember someone committing a crime that was actually committed by someone else. A new version of that legislation, AB 308, is pending in the state Senate, though passage in this session is unlikely. The subjects who had been asked the leading question were much more likely to choose the slideshow with the yield sign, since their memories had been tampered by the question asked earlier.4 Many studies have since corroborated the findings of Loftus, such as another experiment, where the same effect was reproduced using television screens, and then seeing the effects between the different participants.5 Studies like these have demonstrated the fickle nature of memory, and how details can be changed without the witness really even recognizing it. These courts generally accept detailed descriptions of relevant scientific research findings to either attack or support eyewitness testimony.19 Other courts, meanwhile, leave the jury to determine the credibility of eyewitness testimony and insist that findings from scientific research in this area cannot help the jury to do so.20
As an experimental psychologist who conducts research on eyewitness identification, Ive seen hundreds of examples of highly confident yet mistaken eyewitnesses both in the laboratory and in actual court cases. Additional Reading: Truth, Lies and Police Lineups, The Crime Report, May 5, 2021. A full and fair examination of all the circumstances of the subject crime, and all the evidence involved, is necessary. After the rape, with the victim now locked in the trunk, the rapist attempted to drive the womans vehicle out of the parking garage but was prevented from doing so by the two parking lot attendants who recognized the victims car and noticed that she was not driving it. Marilyn Stowe instructed a pathologist to review the medical notes of both infants. A cornerstone of the state's case is the video at or near the kennels filmed on Paul's phone starting at 8:44 p.m. in which Murdaugh's voice can be heard in the background. Therefore, it is important that the individuals allowed to testify are accurate in their recollections. The prosecutor, Doug Evans, tried Curtis Flowers, a former employee at Tardy, six times for the crime.29 The Flowers case relied on three key points of evidence: (1) the eyewitness testimony of people who placed Curtis Flowers on the route from his home, to steal a gun, back to his home and then to Tardy to commit the murders and then home again (2) ballistics and (3) jailhouse confessions.30
Two police officers thought the sketch resembled Miller, a man they had questioned a few days earlier. 109, 10910 (2006). Gareth, a Pulitzer prize-winning journalist, is the series editor of Best American Infographics and can be reached at garethideas AT gmail.com or Twitter@garethideas. Please send suggestions to Mind Matters editor Gareth Cook. Wegers attorneys, Celeste Stack and I, continue to seek to prove Chesters innocence and are seeking to review and analyze the physical evidence and are working to be able to conduct forensic testing on some of that evidence. Gov. Many more sit in prisons who have not had the opportunity to have their cases re-investigated or samples re-tested. If a judge finds the eyewitness testimony unreliable, he can suppress its use at trial. Even though no connection between Leiterman and Ruelas was ever established, the prosecution theorized that all three must have been together after midnight at the murder scene in 1969, with the preschooler bleeding on the victim for some unknown reason while Leiterman killed her. 'The issue in Iran at the moment is not that of hijab.'. Alex Murdaugh's defense attorneys will deliver their closing arguments in his murder trial on Thursday as they seek to raise reasonable doubt about whether he killed his wife and son in 2021. Sally Challen claimed she experienced years of emotional abuse before killing him with a hammer. Eyewitness Testimony: Recommended Practices, Eyewitness testimony continues to be commonplace in law enforcement and trials. Medicolegal court reports are requested where expert witness evidence is required. One might assume that Grant was the murderers unlucky doppelganger. Do Not Sell or Share My Personal Information, Editorial: He spent 38 years in prison for a crime he didnt commit. The ability of a person who witnesses a crime to later pick the perpetrator out of a lineup is atrociousright? Your comment will be posted to MailOnline as usual. Yet, based on, among other things, this powerful purported eyewitness evidence, Heidelberg was convicted. COVID origins? 'You're supposed to interview me but you're actually having a confrontation with me,' he told Amanpour. He did it and was fortunate not to be sentenced to death in that era. Any evidence can potentially be contaminated, including what is considered to be the gold standard of forensic evidence: DNA. 15 Perry v. New Hampshire, 565 U.S. 228, 248 (2012). (Joshua Boucher/The State/AP) The reliability of these alleged identifications was suspect, since the officers would have had only a fraction of a second to observe the driver whizz by them at a high rate of speed at night. By posting your comment you agree to our house rules. The case shed renewed light on the country's treatment of women, with a growing number of female Iranians choosing to flout the Sharia-based law to wear the hijab. She unsuccessfully appealed against her conviction in 2000. In the Miller case, a. Officers of the law should be instructed by their superiors about the potential inaccuracies and dangers of witness testimony. Recently, post-conviction DNA exonerations of innocent persons have dramatically highlighted the problems with eyewitness identifications. It does make sure that photos in a lineup resemble one another.) Therefore, when John Warboys applied for parole, an independent psychologist was instructed by his legal representative to assess his risk. A Man Was Jailed For 20 Years Due To A Single Eyewitness Who Now Wants To Recant Antonio Mallet's conviction rested on testimony from one eyewitness who, in a new court filing, now says NYPD detectives assaulted him and threatened to lock him up if he didn't blame Mallet for the murder. But in 57 percent of those cases, it was possible to determine what happened on the initial (uncontaminated) memory test. However, there has yet to be research showing what ideal instructions would look like, as each case involving eyewitness testimony varies from each other. To the trial transcript, most of the foreign intervention Elizabeth Loftus, eyewitness misidentification accessed on March,... Driver and was sentenced to 52 years in prison probably be declared inadmissible of. This issue live on our message boards the legal system, 14 Annual Review law. Comment will be posted to MailOnline as usual the time of an during. 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