Richard Miles: Eyewitness Testimony

"Racial Profiling and Criminal Justice." The Journal of Ethics, vol. 15, no. 1-2, 2011. , pp. 79-88. Nclive, doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10892-010-9098-3.

Coker gives great evidence that supports racial injustice in the criminal justice system. She discusses on the Supreme Court’s rulings and accusations of racial preference in the system. This article is helpful because it supports my thesis on race playing a role on the system of criminal justice. Hurwitz, J., & Peffley, M. (1997). Public perceptions of race and crime: The role of racial stereotypes.

Eyewitness testimony is sent to sensory memory whereby it involves retaining information and details. In order to recall specific features of a person, the victim must be very observant and concentrate during the event and after when trying to remember these details. This can be transferred to short-term memory, which has the capacity of remembering 7±2 memories, and if subjects rehearse what they have seen then the memory can be stored in long-term memory. Memories can then be retrieved when needed for testimony.

The issue of racial profiling has been called to national attention recently resulting in inefficient policing due to high tensions between law enforcement officials and minority races. The American justice system must take the initiative to end the improper treatment and wrongful deaths of people of

The criminal justice system depends majorly on eyewitness identification for investigating and prosecuting crimes. Psychologists have been the only ones who have warned the justice system of problems with eyewitness identification evidence. Recent DNA exoneration cases have corrupted the warnings of eyewitness identification researchers by showing that mistaken eyewitness identification was the largest factor contributing to the conviction of many innocent people eyewitness testimonies are not reliable therefor you would assume they would be taken out of court, but instead

Witnesses to crimes are sometimes asked to view a police lineup to see if they can identify the culprit. Using experimentally created events, psychological researchers have long warned that eyewitness identification evidence is less reliable than people seem to believe. Corroborating the concerns of psychologists, since the advent of forensic DNA testing in the 1990s, 258 people convicted by juries in the United States have been freed based on exculpatory DNA tests, and 200 of these were cases of mistaken eyewitness identification (Innocence Project, 2010). Examination of the reasons for these mistaken identifications has provided rich avenues of investigation guided by cognitive and social perspectives. Here we focus on (a) variables that

Introduction and thesis: The topic chosen for this essay concerns the relationship between racial profiling and sentencing. It is relevant to the course material because it concerns the ways someone is treated depending on his or her ethnic origins, and it makes it an interesting sociological and criminological phenomena. This is the reason why I chose to write on this topic, and because I find it an important issue in our society. This essay will demonstrates that visible minorities are more likely to be subjects to harsher sentencing than the majority, and more than them. Literature review: Our society is made of a majority and minorities, and it allows diversity.

British Jurist, William Blackstone, famously stated, “It is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer” (Norris, Bonventre, Redlich, & Acker, 2010). The number of innocent people getting their convictions overturned is steadily increasing in the United States. The recent surge in overturned convictions is a product of The Innocence Project. The Innocence Project is an organization that was founded in 1992 by Peter Neufeld and Barry Scheck at Cardozo School of Law. The purpose of their organization is to exonerate individuals have been wrongly convicted through DNA testing.

In 1907, Hugo Mustenberg examined the reliability of eyewitness identification in his book, “On the Witness Stand”. In a study of 65 wrongful convictions completed

Context consists of such factors as emotion and environment, and it is necessary to recreate those factors in order to access the memory that has been naturally primed to be recalled in reference to them (Cutler, Penrod, Martens, 629). Thus, when addressing these identification errors made by eyewitnesses and when trying to fix them it is essential that the officials involved in the criminal justice system who are questioning the witnesses “reinstate the context surrounding an event” (Cutler, Penrod, & Martens, 629). In other words, eyewitness identification errors need to be fixed, as well as discrepancies of reliability and accuracy within a jury and among the jury members. Furthermore, authors Kovera and Borgida discuss how social psychologists are not allowed in the courtrooms even though that would be very beneficial as they can share the knowledge of these phenomena that can often lead to injustices (1376). Perhaps the first step to more forcefully addressing and working on these influential estimator and system variables as well as jury biases will be to change that rule.

The assumption that individuals or entire communities are guilty often has significant material implications. A study done by The Center for Policing Equity demonstrated recently that African Americans were much more likely to be subjected to the use of force, even at routine stops, than whites. This force is often fatal, even when the target is innocent. Because of the recent media frenzy about race and policing, it is important to first examine the ways in which people respond to the assumption that they are guilty, and then examine the most successful ways to respond. To be clear: this paper focuses entirely on people who are innocent but presumed guilty, and does not cover people who have committed crimes.

These conclusions are made jointly exploit the difference between legal and philosophical differences between the treatment, different effects, and in recognizing the impact of different, and sometimes does not make sense (eg Miller 1999: Chapter 5; 1991 Kennedy) positive. intentional acts of racial discrimination, now constitute a struggle now facing our society beyond the most important obstacle to its racist history (98 Kennedy 1991). I propose in this section principle, the risk guilty man began to be stopped or searched his face should not rely on racial or ethnic groups. Many people oppose this principle in this society there are a number of obligations (than those who respect the basic legal rights, etc.) to those who knowingly violate

In a court, the victim may simply point on an innocent man due to his/her emotion of resentment on the criminal. Thus eyewitness accounts, which capable of being altered by emotions, can appear to be inaccurate. When exposed to criminal cases, the stress and anxiety level can easily affect the accuracy thus reliability of eyewitness accounts. A research done by 1Clifford and Scott (1978, cited in Loftus, 1979) experimented about the ability of eyewitnesses to perceive violent and non-violent events. Forty-eight volunteers with equal number of men and women watched two tapes with the start and end manipulated to be the same, of one involving non-violence and the other one with violence.

Wrongful convictions can happen when an eyewitness recalls memories and details that are not their own or in cases where the person seems familiar to the eyewitness but not because they committed a crime. Summary It was informative and interesting to read "Safeguards against wrongful conviction in eyewitness

Eye witness identification involves selecting an accused perpetrator from a police line up, sketch or being at the crime scene during the murder time. After selecting a suspect, witnesses are asked to make a formal statement confirming the ID of the suspect (s) or other surrounding details which the eyewitness can testify in court. Eyewitnesses are always required to testify in court but eyewitnesses with psychological disorders, substance dependancy are at a higher chance of identifying the wrong suspect therefore wrongfully assisting convict the perpetrator in the wrong  (Hal Arkowitz,  Scott O. Lilienfeld,  January 1, 2010). 
Anxiety or stress is always associated with crimes involving traumatic events that have previously taken place.