The psychiatrist formed an opinion of her mental state at the time of the homicide. 5 Brewer & Treyens, Role of Schemata in Memory for Places, Cognitive Psychology 13.2 (1981). Published: 00:56 EST, 2 March 2023 | Updated: 01:01 EST, 2 March 2023. Instructions given to eyewitnesses should be clear, simple and standardized across jurisdictions. Its a stain on our justice system. Recently though, with the rise of social science, eyewitness testimony has taken a tumble from its lofty standing. But. 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. "Double-Blind" Process for Lineups and Photo Arrays. Laura Mickes is an academic at Royal Holloway, University of London. In 1999, Sally Clark, a solicitor, was convicted of murdering her two infant sons (one in 1996 and the other in 1998) at Chester Crown Court. 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 shooter had borrowed Heidelbergs car, and when Heidelberg went to retrieve his car later that night he was arrested by officers at the scene. Historically, eyewitness testimony has been in use not only in the United States and our penal system but all around the world. 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. In Millers case, the two parking lot attendants were immediately suspicious when the victims car approached the ticket booth. During Wednesday's interview with CNN, Amirabdollahian accused western media outlets of encouraging violent protests in his country. Ultimately, eyewitness testimony is a powerful tool that has the potential to make or break a case. Now the influential New Jersey Supreme Court has instructed police and judges to take into account an array of responses that might prevent mistaken identifications. Retrieved March, 2019. Juries are particularly prone to being swayed by eyewitness testimony, as evidenced in the Curtis Flowers case. 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 Confidence reported at trial after the eyewitness has received confirmatory feedback is not. For example, 21 police departments in the state conduct blind photo lineups, in which the person administering the viewing doesnt know who the suspect is. bn. 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Eyewitness Testimony: Recommended Practices, Eyewitness testimony continues to be commonplace in law enforcement and trials. Document Witness Confidence and Videotape Witness Identifications. Part of the Daily Mail, The Mail on Sunday & Metro Media Group, Beaming Prince Harry and Meghan enjoy a date night at exclusive $4,200-A-YEAR private members' club in LA - as friend claims they've been left furious over King Charles' 'cruel' decision to evict them from Frogmore Cottage, Biden LAUGHS at claim he was responsible for fentanyl overdoses of two brothers and says they died 'under the previous administration' - after mom's heartbreaking testimony to Congress, US housing market faces 20% correction amid further rate hikes and overinflated housing market, Dallas Fed warns, Is air travel going to get even MORE expensive? She was sentenced to life in prison. But a closer examination of those witnesses testimonies reveals a few disconcerting factors: the earliest testimony from a witness came a month after the murders, and other testimony came nine, twelve months later. Judges should include within jury instructions clear and concise instructions on how to evaluate and make use of eyewitness testimony during their deliberations. Arnaud, Celia Henry. Get in touch with our team of experts today! 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. Renowned Expert witnesses include doctors, psychologists, psychiatrists, social workers, and other professionals who are instructed to give expert opinions in legal proceedings. A full and fair examination of all the circumstances of the subject crime, and all the evidence involved, is necessary. Continue reading with a Scientific American subscription. Thirty Years of DNA Forensics: How DNA Has Revolutionized Criminal Investigations. CEN RSS, Chemical and Engineering News, 18 Sept. 2017. Expert evidence may be important in determining the right outcome. What would that mean for the reliability of the blood or fingerprint evidence, for example, collected at that scene? 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. Chester denied having anything to do with these other crimes but was identified by the victims based on these suggestive procedures. Imagine if police let unauthorized people have willy-nilly access to a crime scene that is under investigation. But if the six eyewitnesses chose Lydell Grant from the lineup only because they were cued to do so by the case detective, why were they so confident in their identifications? Witness misidentifications can affect both plaintiffs and defendants. An Iranian girl passed away and we were all very sorry about that. Thirty Years of DNA Forensics: How DNA Has Revolutionized Criminal Investigations., See here: Innocence Project, Eyewitness misidentification, Crime in the United States 2012: Persons Arrested,. His doctors maintained that he was suffering from pre-senile dementia, and he couldnt remember three numbers backwards or the name of the US president. A neurologist also claimed that Saunders brain was small for a man his age and showed evidence of shrinking. 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. Speak to our experts today for advice. But eyewitnesses aren't always right, and poor investigative practices can make matters worse. What it means is that the malleability of memory can harm reliability. Any evidence can potentially be contaminated, including what is considered to be the gold standard of forensic evidence: DNA. He is the founder of Hale & Monico, Americas Justice Attorneys. Instructing an expert witness is not unusualthere are many much-publicised cases where the role of expert evidence has been significant. In 2011, Sally Challen was convicted of murdering her husband before Guildford Crown Court. However, Solicitor, Marilyn Stowe, had concerns about the expert evidence of Professor Meadow. A witness may mistakenly identify a criminal suspect. In an effort to overwhelm Chester and break him down, he was placed in a lineup regarding two incidents that took place in 1959 in a nearby State Park called Deer Park, one of which was that rape case and the other was a purse snatching. Three of the eyewitnesses reported that the detective told them that they had picked the same person other people had, though the detective himself denied having made such statements. Even where a judge determines that a given identification procedure is unnecessarily suggestive, the judge may nonetheless admit the results of the procedure if they are deemed reliable based on these factors.13 In his dissenting opinion, Justice Marshall criticized the Court for ignoring studies showing that unnecessarily suggestive eyewitness identifications had led to erroneous convictions even where such identifications had been deemed reliable.14 If a judge finds the eyewitness testimony unreliable, he can suppress its use at trial. 24 Federal Bureau of Investigation, Crime in the United States 2012: Persons Arrested,. 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. Marilyn Stowe instructed a pathologist to review the medical notes of both infants. While 30+ years of research is too much to summarize in a few paragraphs, we will outline the general problems with eyewitness testimony as well as some of them more major research that has been performed on the subject. or debate this issue live on our message boards. 10 Manson v. Brathwaite, 432 U.S. 98, 114 (1977). Many more sit in prisons who have not had the opportunity to have their cases re-investigated or samples re-tested. Psychological scientists, however, have challenged many of the assumptions of the legal system and the general public regarding the. Daryl G. Kimball and Frank von Hippel | Opinion. 27 The Innocence Project, Eyewitness Identification,. But when the witnesses had received a simple reinforcing comment following their identification (Good job, you got the guy), the mock jurors could no longer tell the difference between accurate and mistaken eyewitnesses. She questioned the statistical basis of Professor Meadows evidence, which had led to Sally Clark being sentenced to life in prison. Compiled by Ann Njarara, Bree Peilen, Daniel Neuman, Emory Cook, Linda Lin, and Perrin Lowrey, Introduction 3 Eyewitness Misidentification. Therefore, it is important that the individuals allowed to testify are accurate in their recollections. Just because memory is malleablefor example, it can be contaminated with the trace of an innocent persondoes not mean that it has to be unreliable. 14 Manson, 432 U.S. 98, 12526 (Marshall, J., dissenting). Most recently, in 2012, the Supreme Court clarified that the Due Process Clause does not require judges to assess the reliability of eyewitness identifications made under suggestive circumstances when the circumstances are not created by law enforcement officials.15 In other words, in cases where the proffered identification does not result from suggestive police procedure, the judge need not consider whether the identification also passes the second step of the Manson test. Thus, Chester was charged with three separate felonies as a way to overwhelm him and break him down. Eyewitness testimony can hold a lot of weight with jurors. No comments have so far been submitted. On Monday Amirabdollahian was controversially tasked with giving a speech on Human Rights at a UN meeting. When proper procedures are not followed, the potential for error exists. In the sad case of the 1960 Starved Rock murders, there were EIGHT confessions by Chester Weger made to different people at different times, including a re-enactment of the crime at the scene covered by more than a dozen reporters/photographers. There are a few ways in which eyewitness testimony can be inaccurate. Column: 15 minutes of fame flies by. Miller was placed in a lineup and one of the parking lot attendants positively identified Miller; the other parking lot attendant tentatively identified him. Confidence collected at the time of an identification during a double-blind lineup procedure is informative regarding the eyewitnesss accuracy. A "double-blind" lineup or photo-array is when the person interviewing the potential eyewitness does not which of the persons in a photo array or lineup is the actual suspect. Sally Challen claimed she experienced years of emotional abuse before killing him with a hammer. The person they think was the perpetrator in fact had nothing to do with the crime. The Manson admissibility test consists of two steps. 28 Brandon L. Garrett, Convicting the Innocent: Where Criminal Prosecutions Go Wrong 6368 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011). 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. 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. The processes at play in Lydell Grants case are predictable and unfortunately common. Compared to administrators conducting double-blind lineups, these informed administrators are more likely to ask witnesses about the suspect and smile when witnesses are looking at the suspect rather than at another person in the lineup. document.getElementById( "ak_js_1" ).setAttribute( "value", ( new Date() ).getTime() ); This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. First, the judge must determine whether the procedure used by law enforcement officials in obtaining the proffered eyewitness identification (e.g., photographic array or lineup) was unnecessarily suggestive.11 The judge must then weigh this determination against the following five factors to assess the reliability of the identification: In practice, therefore, the test is flexible. The parking lot attendants provided a description of the driver to a police sketch artist and the sketch was published in a daily police bulletin. With surprising ease, for example, participants in a memory experiment can be led to believe that they saw a stop sign when they actually saw a yield sign or that they became lost in a shopping mall as a child when no such experience actually occurred. The prosecution then claims that Flowers then walked again from his house to Tardy Furniture to commit the murder, passing an auto body shop and a drycleaner on the way, as well as Highway 51. In one study, people playing the role of jurors were able to reliably distinguish between accurate and mistaken eyewitnesses when the witnesses had not received any confirmatory feedback. Assistant Professor of Psychology, Arizona State University. U. L. Rev. Claimed to have called out to Flowers that day. To see why, let us revisit those DNA exoneration cases that so often involve eyewitness misidentification. The ability of a person who witnesses a crime to later pick the perpetrator out of a lineup is atrociousright? Do you ask other countries who are in our region but are allies of the United States the same kinds of questions that you're asking me about the women's hijab? She unsuccessfully appealed against her conviction in 2000. But in 2006, DNA testing on the victims slip exonerated Miller and established the identify of another man, Robert Weeks, as the real perpetrator. Expert witness evidence is not needed in all legal proceedings but it plays an important part in many cases. Working closely with our specialist human resource colleagues, we offer a holistic advisory and support service for employers encompassing both the legal and people risks of workforce management. This helps to safeguard against overly eager police officers who might implicitly encourage eyewitnesses (with tone of voice, body language, etc.) Psychologists have learned a lot about why such errors happen. Pictured: Protestors take part in an anti-Iran demonstration on December 24, 2022 in Istanbul, Turkey, Women burned their headscarves in Kurdish-controlled north-east Syria in September 2022. 2023 Scientific American, a Division of Springer Nature America, Inc. Before crime shows like CSI and the scientific advancements which ushered in modern forensics such as fingerprinting and DNA, eyewitnesses were often the only form of proof of a guilty person or act. The puzzling question in this case, though, is why did six eyewitnesses independently identify Lydell Grant as the killer and then confidently testify in court? This allows jurors to make more informed decisions while evaluating particular eyewitness testimony. or debate this issue live on our message boards. Prior to admitting eyewitness testimony, judges should make inquiries into the reliability of the eyewitness, looking for any indications of unreliability. Pay farmers handsomely to give up their water rights. The Law Enforcement Command of the Islamic Republic of Iran claimed she had a heart attack at a police station, collapsed, and fell into a coma before being transferred to a hospital. In response to this issue, the National Research Council (NRC) formed a research committee in 2013 chaired by Judge Jed S. Rakoff of the Southern District of New York and cognitive scientist, Thomas Albright of the Salk Institute for Biological Studies.31 The group released their findings in 2014 in a report titled Identifying the Culprit: Assessing Eyewitness Identification. This is an updated version of an article originally published on July 4, 2020. (Sometimes there is an issue of racial bias connected with eyewitness misidentification, but this was not a factor as the parking lot attendants were also African American.). was a video tape, and his presence and the time of the event were confirmed by two athletic directors, his coach, and members of the opposing team. Recently, post-conviction DNA exonerations of innocent persons have dramatically highlighted the problems with eyewitness identifications. They range from photo lineups in which none of the other images resembles the suspect to subtle pressure on a witness from an officer who knows which picture is the correct one. University of Virginia law professor Brandon Garrett analyzed trial materials for 161 DNA exonerated individuals who had been misidentified with high confidence by one or more eyewitnesses in a court of law. Andy Hale is a civil rights attorney, specializing in wrongful convictions in Chicago, Illinois. 9 According to the innocence project, mistaken identification is a leading factor in wrongful convictions. The guilty verdict was confirmed by both state Appellate and Supreme Courts. It marks the longest-running anti-government protests in Iran since the 1979 Islamic revolution, with hundreds killed as a result. Following a protracted trial,Saunders was found guilty ofconspiracy, theft, and false accounting. Specifically, the eyewitness had identified the defendant from her window, as the defendant was standing in the dark next to a police officer; however, the eyewitness had pointed to the defendant spontaneously, without the police asking her to do so.16 The Court ruled that, because the police had not induced the identification under suggestive circumstances, the trial judge had not erred in admitting the eyewitness testimony without assessing its reliability under the second step of the Manson test.17 Despite the frequency of use, we have been confronted as a country with many incredible failures of eyewitness testimony such as misidentifications that led to convictions and sentences of people who were later discovered innocent.1 Science has played no small role: post-conviction DNA profiling made possible by the development of the polymerase chain reaction, which enables amplification of crime-scene DNA to quantities sufficient for forensic analysis have meant that DNA identification is becoming increasingly used even in cases where it was previously not viable: those where we have smaller samples.2 As of now, almost 350 people, many serving long prison sentences, have been exonerated because their own DNA was discovered to be incompatible with evidence long ago collected from the crime scene. Nationally, more than 75% of convictions that have been overturned because of DNA evidence involved erroneous eyewitness testimony. Why not be the first to send us your thoughts, Because she had already servednine years and four months of her initial life sentence, she was released following the change of conviction. But studies demonstrate that a variety of factors can lead to the misidentification of criminals. Yes, the 1959 Matthiessen (Not Deer Park) State Park rape/robbery played a role in Wegers arrest (the rape victim ALSO ID Weger separately and BEFORE the line-up mentioned here), but it played NO role (not mentioned at all) in his trial or subsequent conviction. In the Miller case, a woman was raped in her car in a parking garage in downtown Chicago. 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. Not only do such statements inflate eyewitnesses confidence in the accuracy of their identification, but they lead them to falsely remember having been that confident all along. The court tried to deter false identification with a stepped process. In addition to implementing double-blind lineup procedures, its essential that lineup administrators document eyewitnesses confidence immediately following an identification. The transcript from Lydell Grants trial revealed that the homicide detective in charge of investigating the case administered the lineup to the eyewitnesses. 21 Commonwealth v. Walker, 625 Pa. 450, 47678 (2014). Prosecutors, though, have no murder weapon, bloody clothes or eyewitnesses, leaving them to build their case about Murdaugh's murky timeline of his whereabouts when the crime happened in 2021 . 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Examples of when an expert witness may be needed include: To hire an expert witness, you may make contact with us via our simple online contact form, call us on 01865 587 865 or by requesting a call back from our team via the link below. In assessing the reliability of eyewitness identification, federal and state courts are still divided on (1) whether expert testimony on eyewitness identification should be allowed under either Daubert or Frye and (2) the proper exercise of trial court discretion when deciding whether to admit such expert testimony.18 In contrast, a high-confidence ID is highly accurate, a surprising fact that has only recently come to be appreciated by experimental psychologists. There have been many famous expert witness cases. Judges should strive to make sure the jury is informed of all of the identifications an eyewitness has made prior to the trial. Finally, a witness may have more difficulty making a correct identification when he and the suspect are of different races. The Louisiana Supreme Court remanded the case based on prosecutorial and police misconduct, including improper argument at the trial and failure to disclose the existence of exculpatory witnesses. Juries should also be informed as to the manner of the identification, the eyewitnesss confidence and other factors that might influence reliability. Pregnant), Left and got about 1-2 blocks away and saw a man running west, away from downtown, it was her neighbor Flowers, Clemy pointed it out to Roy but Roy did not recognize him, Couldnt remember his clothes or shoes, did not describe seeing blood on him, Latarsha, Clemys cousin, remains convinced that Clemy made up the story because she felt pressured by law enforcement and because she might be able to get money Latarsha was also taken by the police at 19 to be asked questions and Johnson implied that she might get some of the reward money (30k) if she corroborated, Saw a man running across the street 1-2 blocks away that day of the murders, he was alone (not with Clemy) and it was earlier in the morning and when he was with Clemy later, they did not see anybody running, Law enforcement came and found Roy and he ended up giving a statement to John Johnson, Was shown Flowers picture (school picture) ONLY Flowers asked if that was the person Roy saw running Roy said no and John Johnson pushed Roy that it was Flowers and that Clemy was with him when it happened eventually Roy said he broke down and agreed to the story because he wanted to get out of there (he was afraid of Johnson), After that, Johnson recorded Clemy telling her story of seeing Flowers running away from downtown.
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