"Subtle cues can be inadvertently conveyed and social reinforcements provided by interrogators operating with a biased set of expectations. But here, too, therapists, interrogators, lawyers, or worried parents may be innocent of any conscious intent to produce false testimony" (Callahan, 1993, p
"With respect to CSAAS, courts allow such evidence because it corrects the mistaken impression that a child's inconsistent stories or delay in reporting abuse means that the child fabricated the abuse charge. Courts permit expert testimony on RTS to correct similar mistaken impressions about counterintuitive post-rape behavior or a delay in a victim's report of a rape" (Handberg, 1995, p
"Medieval and modern philosophical accounts of human cognition stressed the role of imagination. The 18th-century philosopher Immanuel Kant talked about imagination as the faculty for putting together various mental representations such as sense percepts, images, and concepts" (Loftus, 2002, March, p
To prove it, psychologist Craig Barclay conducted a test with graduate students at the University of Michigan. "Barclay's major thesis is that people do not reproduce the past, they reconstruct it in accord with 'self theories' of how they are likely to act" (Rubin, 1985, September, p
They found no clear evidence that males or females are markedly different in their accuracy, at least as far as choosing criminals from lineups. One analysis indicated females might be "slightly more likely to make accurate identifications but also slightly more likely to make mistaken identifications than are males (due to females being more likely to attempt an identification), thereby yielding an overall equivalent diagnosticity for males and females" (Wells and Olson, 2003, p
Legal scholarship, however, both in criminology and criminal law, is typically based on one of two premises: how to best utilize eyewitness testimony in a given courtroom situation and/or how to best overturn any sense of accuracy that an eyewitness may have imparted to the jury. Most of the literature cited were various permutations of injustices proven later from eyewitness testimony, yet all cited more modern psychological research showing advances in human memory and cognition studies that debunk the validity of most recalled memories viewed once under extenuating circumstances (Benton, et
The "forgetting curve" helps to illustrate this fact. Created by graphing the amount of memory lost after certain intervals of time, the forgetting curve provides a clear visual representation of the rate at which memories deteriorate: very rapidly in the period immediately following an event, and then much more gradually (or even imperceptibly) after a certain period of time (Cherry 2011)
The sights, smell, sounds, and touch (when applicable) of a particular person upon initially meeting them might all be information that becomes encoded as part of a particular memory (Discovery 2011). When memories are later recalled, the same sensory areas in the brain often light up, which is indicative of the importance of this initial encoding in the establishment and preservation of long-term memories (Holladay 2007)
This sensory information is at first only stored as very temporary information, however, and it must be moved into short-term memory before the encoded pathways are made in any way consciously useful (Holladay 2007). The storage of memory in short- and then long-term memory occurs as various chemical and physical changes take place, in response to certain electrical cues and chains of activity that can ultimately result in the creation of new neural pathways -- physical and electrical interconnections that did not exist before a memory was stored (Radvansky 2010)
Their lies range from outright fabrications to more subtle shadings of the truth. This is why the act of perjury is a crime: Intentional giving of false information (whether in criminal or civil cases) is a primary cause of injustice (Connell, 2002)
As Connell (2002) noted in the passage cited above, the specifics of the crime are one of the major causes of eyewitness distortion. The traumatic nature of the crime of sexual abuse, the shame that the victim often attaches to it, and the fact that the abuser may well have threatened the child with dire consequences if she or he reveals what happened are all factors that may shift children's eyewitness testimony away from the truth (Lepore & Sesco, 1994, p
Another possible problem in terms of interviewing technique that is more likely to cause problems with testimony from children but it also a potential problem with adults is the fact that when witnesses are repeatedly asked the same question they are likely (if only on a subconscious level) to believe that they are not providing the correct response and so change their answers. Thus while an interviewer may simply be trying to pin down additional details of an incident (for example), the eyewitness may believe that she or he is being challenged about the accuracy of his or her memory and statement and begin (again, most likely unconsciously and not in any attempt to commit perjury) to shift answers to coincide with what the witness believes the interviewer want to hear (Poole & White, 1991)
Event characteristics that may affect accuracy include the presence of a weapon, the sense of crisis or emergency, the length of time the witness has to observe the perpetrator, lighting and other factors that might affect the witness's capacity to make an accurate mental record, the recency of the event, the frequency of the event (for repeated episodes of sexual assault, for example), the uniqueness of the situation, and factors that might cause the witness to fear consequences if accurate testimony is provided. (Connell, 2002) One specific problem, as noted above, is that eyewitnesses are less reliable when asked to identify a member of a different race (with white witnesses somewhat less skilled at doing so, but members of all races being less accurate in their ability to identify individuals of different races than they are when identifying members of their own races (Wells etal, 1993, p
The media and other social influences can impact recall. "Careful studies have demonstrated that, regardless of the level of certainty an eyewitness expresses at the time of original identification…a witness's confidence in the correctness of the identification steadily increases over time," (Albright & Rakoff 2015)
¶ … eyewitness testimony is far from being a gold standard in criminal justice. At least 75% of wrongful convictions for violent crimes including rape and murder were based on eyewitness testimony, and many of those convictions led to the death penalty (Bohannon 2014)
For example, "A detective might smile, grunt, or nod approvingly when a suspect is chosen," (Bohannon 2014). Asking leading questions can distort memory or create false memories (McLeod 2009)
Eyewitness recall can be affected by any number of factors. "Although the individual may be unaware of it, memories are forgotten, reconstructed, updated, and distorted," (National Academy of Sciences 2014)