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the eyewitness memory to recall a crime infallible?
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Table of contents:
1. Introduction
2. Eyewitness testimony and its weaknesses
3. The accuracy of eyewitness memory
4. Eyewitness stereotype
5. Conclusion
"The case in which you really need to worry about eyewitnesses’
memory is the case in which it’s the only evidence you‘ve
got,"
Steven M. Smith
1. Introduction
Eyewitness memory has always been a subject of constant arguments
throughout the whole history of its existence. People’s
words have always been valued and having a witness of a crime
was he worst thing hat could happen to the criminal. The phrase
“Eyewitnesses do not live long” so commonly spread
among people, reveals the importance of the fact of eye-witnessing
for the majority of people in general and especially for the
jury. The eyewitness memory as any other source of evidence
has to be carefully checked and evaluated. And what is even
more important – the objectivity of the recollections
have to be very at a very high rate. Criminal justice requires
special attention to the phenomenon of the eyewitness memory
as it is known that sometimes memory plays tricks on its carriers.
This is primarily due to the peculiarities of the perception
of human mind and the character of the reproduction of the
information.
I is common knowledge that memory is a process of perception,
storage and reproduction of any information. So it is very
important to be sure that all of these processes are undamaged.
This emphasises the importance of the information about the
eyewitness health and mental abilities. The eyewitness memory
can be of any value only in case of its correspondence to
the major court demands and its 100% objectivity which is
especially hard due to the subjectivity of the human perception.
2. Eyewitness testimony and its weaknesses
Eyewitness testimony is an oral informing about the circumstances
that are important to the criminal case. During the process
of checking and evaluation of the eyewitness testimony the
main difficulty is to determine if the eyewitness has certain
reasons for concealing information or giving false testimony.
The main weakness of the eyewitness testimony is the analysis
of the process of its formation, taking into account all the
subjective and objective factors, which could have influenced
the accuracy, veracity and objective reliability.
There are four factors that question the trustworthiness of
the eyewitness testimony. They are: the characteristics of
human perception, the conditions under which the perception
takes place, the specific character of the memorization and
the memory peculiarities, and the character and he conditions
under which the reproduction of the perceived information
takes place. All these four conditions can without any doubt
be called the weaknesses of the process of the eyewitness
testimony.
The characteristics of human perception implies the physiological
limitations of he persons, any defects of the perception organs
and the orientation of the perception, susceptibility to different
irritants, the psychological setting on perception of the
person and he understanding of his own attitude towards the
perceived facts. The conditions under which the perception
takes place emphasize the importance of the psychological
state of a person at the moment of perception, the duration
and the atmosphere of the process of perception, the operation
factors of the perceived object, physical conditions of the
perception such as the specificity of illumination, distance,
audibility and any others. The specific character of the memorization
and the peculiarities of memory of the eyewitness create a
separate group which is vital in the evaluation of the reliability
of the eyewitness testimony. This is especially actual in
terms of the novelty of the events for the eyewitness, their
recurrence, the continuance of the storage of information,
the particular qualities of the witness’s memory and
its defects and a last the possibilities of distortion or
substitution of the information. The character and the conditions
under which the reproduction of the perceived information
takes place intends to reveal the value of the interpretation
of the setting, unwillingness to give reliable testimony according
to personal motives or because of the dread of revenge from
the side of defendant and the conformity of the given testimony
and its record.
All these conditions under which the eyewitness testimony
is “insolvent” make it very hard to trust the
eyewitness testimony or rely only on it during the case investigation.
For that reason no eyewitness testimony should be taken in
into consideration if the witness depositions contradict other
irrefutable evidence. Another questionable situation is the
contradiction of the testimonies of two eyewitnesses which
rather often happens in court. Basically saying eyewitness
testimony remains too objective for the court and for that
reason it can not be a subject of complete confidence until
it is not supported by any objective details. The major problem
is the contradiction and sometimes the discrepancy of the
subjective and objective evidence. This puts the necessity
of eyewitness testimony under a big question!
3. The accuracy of eyewitness memory
The biggest task of the evaluation of the eyewitness testimony
is the selection of the correct information and the release
from all the subjective “blast”.
According to Marc Green:”Memory can change the shape
of a room. It can change the colour of a car. And memories
can be distorted. They are just an interpretation. They are
not a record” [1]. This is what makes the eyewitness
memory primarily unreliable for the court. It goes without
saying that there are both accurate and inaccurate eyewitnesses.
Nevertheless, the probability of getting inaccurate eyewitness
testimony may is still rather high and this is extremely dangerous
due to the fact that the wrong person can be put in jail only
because someone gave “inaccurate” information
concerning the case. The jurisdiction system is not the place
for might guesses and human beings can very seldom be objective
towards what they have observed in the past. Individuals tend
to add and to modify what they saw and they do it unconsciously.
It happens due to the peculiar probabilities of the memory.
The brain subconsciously “fills in the gaps” of
memory and through this creates new case-details. These details
ordinarily are not correct at all.
Actual perception and memory do not have much in common, as
many facts a blurred, forgotten or replaced by other facts.
Any reconstruction of a given even is often accompanied by
slight changes in the testimony which can become indicators
of the unreliability of the eyewitness’s event and fact
memory. The accuracy of the eyewitness’s statements
is not stable and subjectivism reduces the precision of the
facts to zero. The brightest practical example is any childhood
event that people usually like to reproduce. It is common
knowledge that all of them are distorted sometimes completely.
But what happens to the perception when a person finds himself
in a situation of high stress when for instance becomes an
eyewitness of a murder?
According to the studies of the Yale University:”…the
ability to recognize persons encountered during highly threatening
and a stressful event is poor in the majority of individuals…”
[2]. So the only situation when the eyewitness testimony should
be considered is when that even took place in a very familiar
environment for he individual and did not cause any extreme
stress condition.
The problem of accuracy of the eyewitness testimony is closely
related to the inability to provide correct “peripheral
details” and the tendency to provide changed details
of the event. The majority of people have stereotyped thinking
when certain events are connected to certain objects and other
events. For instance, a person that has a settled opinion
that all robbers have knives will claim that he saw a knife
in the hands or in the pocket of the robber. Individuals confuse
memory information sources and sometimes also combine two
different events. Or they might have heard a story related
o their case and impose this “borrowed memories”
over the actual situation. So the accuracy is no any means
a characteristic of the eyewitness testimony.
5. Eyewitness stereotype
Very often eyewitness testimony contradicts the real forensic
evidence of the case. This contradiction creates a serious
problem for the jury. Juries are people and are also subjective,
and it is obvious that their personal.
The research in the field of eyewitness memory is of a great
significance to the jurisdiction system. And that is very
important not to underestimate the meaning of the temperament,
physical properties and other moments when analyzing the eyewitness
testimony.
Psychological questions concerning the eyewitness testimonies
were the main priority of a French scientist Laplas. Laplas
analyzes the probability of the eyewitness statements along
with the probability of he outcome of court verdict.
He constructed a list of elements that may imply that the
testimony complies with the reality. This list consists of
the next elements:
? The probability of the event that the eyewitness is telling
about.
? The likelihood of the next four hypotheses in terms of the
eyewitness’s statements.
o The eyewitness is not mistaken and is not lying.
o The eyewitness is lying, but not mistaken.
o The eyewitness is not mistaken, but is lying.
o The eyewitness is both lying and mistaken.
In this hypotheses “mistaken” means that the eyewitness
is confusing facts that of the described event.
Laplas perfectly understood the difficulty of evaluation
of the veracity or falsity of the eyewitness testimonies through
this method because of the large amount of circumstances,
accompanying the facts that the eyewitness makes statements
about. He considered his theory to be just a probability and
not a certainty. That is the reason he also considered that
the court does the same thing – it bases on the probability
and not reliability. Nevertheless Laplas’s scheme is
very interesting as a scientific attempt to evaluate the reliability
of the eyewitness testimonies.
5. Conclusion
Human memory there fore is something very personal and comparative.
It cannot be a base for any important decisions such as the
court verdicts. The eyewitness puts all his believes, settings
and attitudes to the testimony he makes.
It is vital to keep in mind that memory changes with time
and every subsequent attempt to retell what has happened will
be jus another subjective interpretation of the event. Eyewitnesses
can support or refute general facts about the case, but never
the details and their testimony should never be put above
the actual evidence presented to the court. The only exception
are the cases when eyewitness testimony is the only available
evidence, but these cases should by analyzed on a very specific
model, as they do not coincide with what people call “justice”.
If to act like this it is possible to accuse any innocent
person and put him behind the bars. How just is this? Should
eyewitness testimony be taken into account at all? It goes
without saying that the information got from the witnesses
can be important, but only general information in the first
place and its verity will be considered rather relative in
the second.
The following words by Norretranders and Sydenham perfectly
describe the whole situation around the eyewitness memory
reliability:”We do not see what we sense. We see what
we think we sense. Our consciousness is presented with an
interpretation, not the raw data. Long after presentation,
an unconscious information processing has discarded information,
so that we see a simulation, a hypothesis, an interpretation;
and we are not free to choose”[7].
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Eyewtiness memory is unreliable
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Eyewitness identification procedures
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