Iran's foreign minister could not stop smirking as he was grilled about his country's record on women's rights in a combative interview with CNN's Christiane Amanpour on Wednesday. Officers of the law should be instructed by their superiors about the potential inaccuracies and dangers of witness testimony. 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. by TCR Staff, The Crime Report May 24, 2021, This and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.. Laura Mickes is an academic at Royal Holloway, University of London. On the strength of six eyewitnesses lineup identifications, Lydell Grant was sentenced to life in prison in 2012 for the murder of a young Texas man, Aaron Scheerhoorn, who was stabbed to death outside a Houston nightclub in 2010. At his criminal trial, both parking lot attendants identified Miller as the perpetrator. In other words, the confirmatory remark made the mistaken eyewitnesses just as persuasive as the accurate ones. By the way, Weger signed EVERY SINGLE PAGE of the FIRST confession which was transcribed by a court reporter who testified under OATH Weger was not threatened or harmed when he made his damning statement. 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. For every one of those tests, the eyewitnesses were, at best, uncertain. U. L. Rev. The Manson admissibility test consists of two steps. The FBI estimates that 521,196 of these arrests were for violent crimes.24 Accurate data on the number of crimes observed by eyewitnesses are not available. I can vouch for the truth of his observations, having been involved in several cases dealing with witness misidentifications while representing both plaintiffs and defendants. 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. Psychologists have learned a lot about why such errors happen. Noting a victims initial confidence level at the initial identification can be important, so as to track if the witness grows more or less confident with the identification over the course of the trial, which might be an indicator of eyewitness unreliability. Arnold Schwarzenegger vetoed legislation that, among other things, would have set up a task force to examine eyewitness testimony and establish voluntary guidelines to ensure that it was accurate. The answer seems like a resounding yes if you consider some well-known and rather disconcerting information. He claimed police did not have the power to use firearms in the riots. But in 2006, DNA testing on the victims slip exonerated Miller and established the identify of another man, Robert Weeks, as the real perpetrator. Mr. And have you read a recent peer-reviewed paper that you would like to write about? After she had spent several years in prison, an independent consultant psychiatrist was instructed as an expert witness. Advertise to our national and international criminal justice audience at The Crime Report and support our mission. In contrast, a high-confidence ID is highly accurate, a surprising fact that has only recently come to be appreciated by experimental psychologists. Hale is an Emmy-nominated executive producer for several true-crime documentaries highlighting wrongful convictions. Expert witnesses are often instructed in cases where expert evidence is necessary to enable the court to understand specific issues, such as capacity, intent, causation etc. 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. Similarly, a witness may mistakenly perceive the circumstances of a crime or event, such as a car accident. Historically, eyewitness testimony has been in use not only in the United States and our penal system but all around the world. 5 Brewer & Treyens, Role of Schemata in Memory for Places, Cognitive Psychology 13.2 (1981). According to the trial transcript, most of the eyewitnesses testified to having been positive when they picked Grant out of the lineup. Get in touch with our team of experts today! EvgeniyShkolenko/iStock via Getty Images Plus, Chicago Sun-Times/Chicago Daily News/Chicago History Museum via Getty Images, Scientific best practices for conducting eyewitness lineups, smile when witnesses are looking at the suspect, no longer tell the difference between accurate and mistaken eyewitnesses, alter witnesses memories of the original crime, less able to recognize the actual perpetrator, is informative regarding the eyewitnesss accuracy, 25 states have adopted these core procedural reforms, Committee Member - MNF Research Advisory Committee, PhD Scholarship - Uncle Isaac Brown Indigenous Scholarship. 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. 'This is not the way to conduct an interview. There, the prosecution claims that Flowers stole Doyle Simpsons gun from the glove compartment of Doyles unlocked car and then walked back to his home on the West side of town. This evidence was not presented in the initial trial. 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. Continue reading with a Scientific American subscription. A witness may mistakenly identify a criminal suspect. Widespread civil unrest broke out in Iran following the suspicious death of Amini on September 16, 2022. So are The Conversations authors and editors. Once a suspect has established that he was the victim of suggestiveness, a pretrial hearing will be held in which the full range of reasons for possible misidentification are examined. Instead of concluding that DNA evidence is inherently unreliable because of the contamination that apparently occurred in this case, a more reasonable conclusion would be that for DNA testing to be reliable, proper protocols must be followed. Two other eyewitnesses, a couple, remembered discussing their selection with one another and confirming each others decisions. Its a fact that eyewitnesses make mistakes. Subsequent memory tests, including the dramatic one that occurs in court in front of the jury, constitute contaminated evidence. It comes just two days after diplomats walked out of a speech given by the Iranian minister to the UN's Human Rights Council in Geneva. The psychiatrist found that she had an adjustment disorder at the time she killed her husband, enabling her solicitors to challenge her conviction for murder. What law enforcementand the publicneeds to know. The variables include: viewing conditions (lighting-distance-duration), distracting stimuli (weapons-loud noises) and internal states of the observer (attention-motivation-skill-prejudice). However, there has yet to be research showing what ideal instructions would look like, as each case involving eyewitness testimony varies from each other. John Worboyss victims alleged that he assaulted them after offering them champagne which he had spiked with drugs. The psychiatrist formed an opinion of her mental state at the time of the homicide. See here: Innocence Project, Eyewitness misidentification accessed on March 9, 2019. The case shed renewed light on the country's treatment of women, with a growing number of female Iranians choosing to flout the Sharia-based law to wear the hijab. 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. 10 Manson v. Brathwaite, 432 U.S. 98, 114 (1977). Published: 00:56 EST, 2 March 2023 | Updated: 01:01 EST, 2 March 2023. But. Neighbors told arriving firefighters that they had heard a thunderous crash at about the same time as the blaze is believed to have begun. 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. 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 way to avoid these problems with eyewitness testimony is for police to adopt best practices based on the psychological research. It is not uncommon for the Parole Board to instruct expert evidence from psychiatrists and psychologists. As an experimental psychologist who conducts research on eyewitness identification, Ive seen hundreds of examples of highly confident yet mistaken eyewitnesses both in the laboratory and in actual court cases. If a judge finds the eyewitness testimony unreliable, he can suppress its use at trial. In Millers case, the two parking lot attendants were immediately suspicious when the victims car approached the ticket booth. Knowledge awaits. 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. The NRCs recommendations for law enforcement and judges are below.32. Why are we still having these debates? If New Jersey can have statewide guidelines, so can California. 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. Your comment will be posted to MailOnline as usual. Current procedures for collecting and assessing evidence from eyewitnesses are often not designed to minimize contamination.This problem does not apply to other kinds of forensic evidence. 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. the opportunity of the witness to view the criminal at the time of the crime; the accuracy of the witnesss prior description of the criminal; the level of certainty demonstrated at the identification procedure; and. In much the same way, an eyewitness can be led to falsely remember someone committing a crime that was actually committed by someone else. (Joshua Boucher/The State/AP) In reviewing the case, it is more than apparent that the convicted man had motive, opportunity and means to commit this crime. In 1932, Yale University law professor Edwin M. Borchard documented nearly seventy cases of miscarriage of justice caused by eyewitness errors in his book, Convicting the Innocent.22 He served 61 years in prison before being released on parole in February 2020. 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. Instead evidence collected at the contaminated crime scene would probably be declared inadmissible. It is important to strive to continue to conduct social science research on the nature of eyewitness and the efficacy of potential reforms like the ones above in order to create effective safeguards against unreliable eyewitness testimony. 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. He was sentenced to 30 months in prison. 70 percent of the 349 wrongful convictions. Following criticism of the decision, the high court ordered the parole board to re-examine Worboys case. 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. 3 Eyewitness Misidentification. Nonetheless, the attendants mistakenly identified Miller in a subsequent police lineup. 8 Clifford & Hollin, Effects Of the Type of Incident and the Number of Perpetrators on Eyewitness Memory, Journal of Applied Psychology 66.3 (1981). Arizona State University provides funding as a member of The Conversation US. 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. 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