Abstract
As citizens of this world, we harbor the belief in a just society to each and every individual. In special reference to the United States, we consider ourselves a very democratic country in comparison to the rest of world. This is as a result of our strong belief and trust in our complex justice system. Our belief rests on the fact that if a defendant is proven guilty by a court of law and continues to claim his or her innocence, we usually believe in the judgment more than what the defendant is trying to assert. The role of eyewitness in the prosecution of cases has for decades been controversial. The purpose of this paper is to determine the relevance of eyewitness in our justice system today. Towards this, an analysis of different cases involving the witnesses as core sources of evidence will be discussed and the implications of past research both for and against a position will be done. Finally, a conclusion based on the research works for or against the position will be documented.
Introduction
The role of courts is to lock up dangerous people to protect the society and keep our communities safe. It is unfortunate that the system is still far from perfect in that many innocent people find themselves behind bars. This is the main reason behind an increased study and research on the role of cognitive psychology on the evidence provided by eye witnesses. The most traumatizing cases involve those innocent people receiving guilty verdicts, torn away from their careers, families and faced with humiliation and isolation fro the rest of their lives. Wagner (2010) defines cognitive psychology “as the branch of psychology that studies mental processes including how people think, perceive, remember and learn and as part of the larger field of cognitive science, this branch of psychology is related to other disciplines including neuroscience, philosophy, and linguistics”. The sub domains in this field of study include perception, memory, decision making and judgment, intelligence, language, attention and problem solving.
Perception seeks to understand the complex processes of constructing subjective interpretations of information contained in our environment while attention seeks to solve the complications brought about by information overload in the process of cognitive systems. The sub domain of learning improves the internal, external and levels of intelligence response of an organism to its environment. Memory and attention forms the most developed aspects of cognitive psychology and most relevant to answer the question this paper seeks to address. Memory involves the study of memory acquisition, storage and retrieval. “Empirical investigation of attention has focused on how and why attention improves performance, or how the lack of attention hinders performance” (Weichselgartner & Sperling, 1987). Posner (1980) further explains the role of attention by stating that “Attention solves the problem of information overload in cognitive processing systems by selecting some information for further processing or by managing resources applied to several sources of information simultaneously”.
Human judgment and decision making are complex processes influenced by a number of psychological and environmental factors and their studies focuses on an analysis of these factors and processes. Lastly, problem solving and language process deals with the study on how human beings strive to achieve their goals through directed behavior and the formal structure of human beings languages and their rules and structures respectively. The research in cognitive psychology has proven to be very relevant in the analysis of the accuracy of evidence received from eye witnesses and the development of modern structure of information supported by research, knowledge and reasoning methods. In seeking to answer this question, relevant research works with statistics must be properly documented and the role of relevant cognitive psychology sub domains such as memory, perception and attention be analyzed. Towards this approach, a concrete summary and conclusion can then be drawn.
Literature review
Many experiments and research works have come to a conclusion that our judicial system lay a lot of weight on eye witnesses testimony to make judgments. It is disturbing that researchers have unearthed many cases of wrongful arrests due to mistaken identities brought about by eye witnesses having pointed at the wrong people. The study by Wells (1998) researched on a record of forty cases to ascertain the accuracy of eye witness evidences. “In all these forty cases, DNA proved that all forty convicted suspects were innocent and in thirty-six of these cases, eyewitnesses wrongfully accused the suspects” (Wells, 1998). This is a major flaw within our justice system and the belief in the accuracy of eyewitness evidence and testimony. “First of all we are talking about forty people being wrongfully accused and more than three quarters of them are accused thanks to their “perfect memory” witnesses” (Wells, 1998). Wells (1998) concludes that “This alone proves that eye witness testimonies should not be given as much credit as they are in today’s justice system”.
A real test on the validity and accuracy of eye witness testimony if further dented in the analysis of (Harris and Adams case, 1989). “A police officer pulled over a vehicle at night to let the driver know that his headlights were turned off but the driver pulled out a gun and killed the officer instantly” (Harris and Adams, 1989). This led to the eventual arrest of suspect Harris a month later and his denial of any involvement in the shooting of the police officer. His claim that the officer was shot by his companion (Adams) who was driving the car on the time of the murder was not given much consideration and the eye witness testimony led to the conviction of Adams. Even though Harris confessed to the counts of stealing the car and loading the gun, three witnesses provided evidences that they witnessed Adams shoot the officer because he had a moustache and long hair. This exactly fit into their description of the murderer. Harris was to confess years later that he personally shot dead the police officer after another conviction of murder. This led to the release of Adams after innocently being locked behind bars for twelve years. What remains an answered to date was how three people could all point their fingers at the wrong person.
Another investigative work done by Tollestrup, Turtle, and Yille as demonstrated by (Ross, Read, and Toglia, 1994) also focused on the ability to stay attentive at a particular scene, accurately store the observed pieces of information and retrieve them later in their accurate and correct form. This involves specific studies on cases where the suspects personally confessed to committing the crimes. It was surprising that according to Ross, Read, and Toglia (1994) “These cases were composed of eyewitness bystanders and eyewitness victims and the bystanders proved to have a more accurate memory of the crime scene than the victims involved”. Furthermore, Ross, Read, and Toglia (1994) adds that “100% of the bystanders remembered if the suspect had facial hair, only 60% of the crime victims remembered this correctly and only 48% of the bystanders and 38% of the victims involved remembered the hair color of the suspect”. This directly relates to the cognitive psychological sub domains of attention and memory of human beings. The imperfections in these two aspects of cognitive psychology in human beings casts doubt on our ability to use the testimony of eye witnesses as major parameter in reaching a verdict within our justice system. The summary and conclusion of this study further reinforces the fact that eye witness testimony consist of inaccuracies that in most instances has contributed to the declining standards in the levels of integrity in our justice system. “This study shows that eyewitness testimony is very weak and that if the eyewitness was the victim of the crime, chances are their testimony is even weaker because of many factors that bias their memory” (Ross, Read, and Toglia, 1994).
Implications of Past Research
“The study of the capacity and fragility of human memory is one of the most developed aspects of cognitive psychology” (Gabrieli, 1998).The implications of the past research for the use application of eye witness testimony as core evidence in court case has led to the silent sufferings of many innocent people. The idea of an innocent member of the society spending life behind bars, isolated from his family, torn away from his career and separated from the rest of us for the rest if his or her life is traumatizing. While this position has strongly been held by the jurors, prosecutors, lawyers and those who have final say on convictions, they have maintained this position because of their role in balancing the tenets of justice.
Research implications against this position have led to the evaluation of our entire justice system and a deeper understanding of the role of our cognitive psychotically abilities. “Brain imaging and lesion studies identify separable brain regions active during storage or retrieval from distinct processing systems” (Gabrieli, 1998). The effect of applying an inaccurate method of testimony has serious implications on the integrity of our justice system. The jurors have had to re-evaluate the strength of such testimonies before arriving at a decision. This has reduced errors attributed to weaknesses in our attentive and memory cognitive psychological sub domains.
Summary and conclusions
Our ability to collect, store and retrieve information is not as accurate as we believe. Our belief is that eye witnesses’ testimonies should not purely form the basis of judgment of a court case. This is because several research works proves that human cognitive abilities have higher percentages of errors that we believe. The way forward here is to focus more on the search of more evidence thorough investigations even in cases where a number of eye witnesses seem to speak of the same circumstances.
References
Gabrieli, J. D. E, 1998, Cognitive neuroscience of human memory. Annual Review of Psychology, vol. 49, pp, 87-115.
Harris and Adams case, 1989, 873 f2d 929 Harris Vs Adams. Web.
Posner, M, I 1980, Orienting of attention. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology. Vol.32, pp 3-25.
Ross, D, Read, J, & Toglia, M 1994, Adult Eyewitness Testimony. Cambridge University Press.
Wagner, V, K, 2010. What Is Cognitive Psychology?
Weichselgartner, E, & Sperling, G 1987. Dynamics of automatic and controlled visual attention. Science. Vol. 238, pp,778-780.
Wells, Gary, 1998. The Accuracy of Eye Witness Testimony and Its Flaws.