The Importance Of Eyewitness Identification In The Criminal Justice System

Eyewitness identification is presented as evidence quite often in the criminal justice system. The reliability and accuracy of an eyewitness testimony is still being researched today. Over 300 wrongful convictions have been exonerated including 75% of those wrongful convictions done by eyewitness misidentification, have been overturned through DNA evidence according to the Innocence Project. A person’s memories are not videotaped therefore recalling a specific event can be challenging and inaccurate. There are many factors that that can intervene with the accuracy of which an individual remembers an event or more specific, a face. These factors include, their mental state, the weapon focus, the cross-race effect and the influence of both line-ups

It is often one of the most important types of evidence in a court room and plays a big role in the criminal justice system. In court, an individual is expected to remember information they saw while being present in a crime that was committed. Some people might think it is easy, if a person was there at the time of the crime committed there is no way they may get it wrong, but the reality is that many do misidentify the perpetuator and the justice system winds up incarcerating the wrong individual. Eyewitnesses have to retrieve their memories from the time the crime was occurred which can be troubling when our memories can easily be changed with what we believe to be true. Throughout the years, studies have in fact shown that eyewitness testimony is not reliable. There are many factors in eyewitness testimony that can cause a wrongful conviction some of them being, weapon focus, mental state, racial profiling and show-ups versus line-ups. The Innocence Project stated that eyewitness misidentification is the one of the main reasons to wrongful convictions which was proven by 70% of convictions overturned due to DNA testing. Two stories that are constantly used to demonstrate factors that come into play when identifying a perpetrator is the story of “Jennifer Thompson and Ronald Cotton” as well as the story of Brenton Butler which had a documentary created called “Murder On a

Weapon focus is the presence of a weapon affecting the reliability of an eyewitness when using her memory to remember the predators usually because of stress factors when the weapon is present. The individual is often paying more attention to the weapon than the face of the perpetrator and therefore definitely intervenes with their memory and remembering correctly the predator’s face. The method Lorraine Hope and Daniel Wright developed to test this theory was getting 45 college students, 21 males and 24 females. They were randomly chosen for different conditions. They would see a couple a pictures with numbers and had to press a certain key on the keyboard when an “odd number appeared” and at the same time pay attention to the surroundings in the slides. In the “weapon condition” there was a weapon that would appear and they would then measure response time. The other independent variable in this study was the “unusual condition” which was just a random object put into the slide. Last but not least, the “control condition” which was just a regular man’s leather wallet. The results of accuracy were as following; Weapon: 59%, Unusual: 70%, Control, 82%. These results show how often a gun focus can affect people’s concentration and accuracy when dealing with