Use of Eyewitness Testimony and DNA Testing in the Criminal Justice System - Essay Example

Use of Eyewitness Testimony in the Criminal Justice System affiliation Use of Eyewitness Testimony in the Criminal Justice System The honesty of the eyewitness testimony has being very important in the criminal justice system. The eyewitness testimony can make a great impact on the jury’s decision on making a judgment. Lying under oath is a major crime and it can ruin the reputation and integrity of the justice system. It is a crime if the witness knowingly gives a false statement but misremembering is not a crime. The decision made by the jury is in secrecy and it looks at the credibility of the witness testimony (Wise, Fishman & Safer, 2009). Reaching at a consensus decision is a tough choice without leaving out the possibility that the witness testimony might have been inaccurate. The criminal justice system has used an eyewitness testimony for a very long time in conviction of criminals. The information provided by the eyewitnesses has since deemed as relevant in the prosecution of guilty people. The information, collected as evidence may include identifying the perpetrators, remembering a conversation that happened or any other details that a witness recalls (Wise & Safer, 2012). A witness with no reason to lie and very confident with his recollection of events is a very strong piece of evidence. If no other evidence is present to support an eyewitness testimony, the police and the court will always accept his /her testimony. The eyewitness testimony has to be reliable as it can have serious consequences to the supposed guilt/innocence of a defendant. Recently, eyewitness testimonies have been under a lot of scrutiny due to the emergence of DNA testing. DNA testing came in and it did at times prove the wrongful conviction of innocent people due to inaccurate testimony given by the eyewitness (Wise, Fishman & Safer, 2009). This prompted the criminal justice to start doubting out the legitimacy of the testimonies. Relying more on the witness testimonies can sometimes lead to false convictions. In the US, about 75,000 eyewitnesses undergo the process of identifying a criminal suspect and about a third of these numbers are sometimes wrong (Wise, Safer & Cushman, 2011). The eyewitnesses are sometimes incorrect more than we can think of. Of all the criminals convicted, half of them got released due to the emergence of DNA testing that cleared them as convicted criminals. Eyewitness error has been identifies as the leading cause to wrongful conviction. The human memory is not perfect as it is fragile and the memories from it can be subject to decay or distortion. The eyewitnesses can sometimes misremember or misquote how the events occurred. The human brain sometimes has the tendency of introducing fabricated facts into the memory. The witness can describe very vividly the occurrence of events that never happened. Experiments have revealed that an eyewitness can sometimes give a false statement unwillingly due to the limitations of the human memory (Wise, Fishman & Safer, 2009). When identifying a particular person in a lineup, the witness will never reconsider his/her initial choice. The person he/she picks out of the lineup for the first time will still be the same for other lineups having the same person even though he/she might not be a suspect. The shortfall in a person’s memory can have a great impact on the jury decision that can be incorrect. The human memory can be neither exact nor fixed. The retained information is the basic information but the specific into the in-depth information is lost over time. With time, the memory can accept new information that distorts it with misleading information. People can expect that a human mind in times of high stress should be sharp in terms of remembering the specifics of the ordeal (Goldstein, 2014) . In the real sense, this is not true as cases of violence, stress or a weapon used in such circumstances actually makes the memory weak. The racial differences between the eyewitness and the suspect can also hamper the issue of identification. There is the confusion of someone seen in one place with someone else seen in another place. Other issues such as the interruption between the event and the identification and the duration the witness learns about the suspect may affect the testimony of the witness. In most cases, the jury will tend to decide on whether a suspect is guilty or not based on witness testimony (Pawlenko et.al, 2013). The jurors should not always but hope on eyewitness reports because even though most of the time they are correct, other factors can make the reports biased. However, the jurors always have a hard time knowing between accurate from inaccurate eyewitnesses (Martire & Kemp, 2009). They do not know much about the eyewitness factors. The only thing that the jurors can use to evaluate an eyewitness is his/her confidence. Eyewitnesses, who are very sure and confident about their identification of the suspects, tend to sway the jury into believing the facts. The study describes such eyewitness’s testimony as slightly more accurate as compare to those people who are less confident. The criminal justice system has identified this limitation and has identified ways of preventing such incidences from occurring (Goldstein, 2014). A witness gets closely cross-examined by the lawyer in order to find out whether his /her statements of facts about the testimony are accurate. The jurors are educated about doubts surrounding eyewitness’s testimony (Goldstein, 2014). The police are sometimes the cause for the distortions in the eyewitness testimony. They may influence the testimony intentionally or through slackness with can have dire consequences on the suspect. In some situations, eyewitnesses have confessed of identifying the wrong suspect but due to the detective’s influence, they end up believing that it was the correct person. The detectives usually end up giving indirect clues about the description of the suspect during the lineup (Wise, Safer, & Cushman, 2011). The eyewitness memory processes details that it perceives to the right thing but in the real sense, it is the wrong thing. In other times, the eyewitness may lie about what he or she might have seen during the incident. Because the reliability of the eyewitness testimony is very important in a case, the criminal justice system has come up with several measures of preventing the distortion of eyewitness testimonies. From experience, a witness misidentifies a suspect because the police officer handling the mug shots for the suspects or a live lineup knows about the suspect (Matire & Kemp, 2009). The solution is to have a blind administration whereby nobody knows about the suspect. During the lineup, the suspect should not stand out from the rest like being the only person of a particular race in the lineup. There should be a variety of people on the lineup and no person should be easily identifiable (Wise, Fishman & Safer, 2009). The witness cannot look at the same suspect in multiple lineups. The post-investigation feedback should not include the suspect and that the investigation will continue irrespective of the results. After the lineup process, the eyewitness should record a statement, explaining the experience of the identification process. The identification process should record the events of the lineup process in order to safeguard the innocent suspects from any misbehavior by the lineup administrator. It helps the jury determine if the procedure conformed legally to the rules and laws (Wise & Safer, 2012). The criminal justice system still uses the eyewitness testimonies up to this date. The fact remains that most people do not create the best witnesses to a crime. A person could have never seen the actual criminal or just saw somebody similar to a suspect. Witnesses even lie about what he/she might have seen. The police can influence the eyewitness into saying what they want them to say (Pawlenko et.al, 2013). The receding memory of the witness can distort what a person exactly remembers, which can be a big blow for the case. Despite all this problems in the testimonies of the eyewitnesses, they remain as the primary evidence in many criminal cases. Eyewitness testimonies have since used to determine whether a particular person was present at the crime scene. That was the only way that police could have used to prove that a certain suspect was at the scene. DNA testing came in and changed everything, which enabled the police to identify who exactly committed the crime. DNA testing is a much more accurate than the testimonies of the eyewitnesses. With science, the guilty people can be arrested and convicted while the innocent persons never again get wrongfully convicted for cases they did not commit. However, the eyewitness testimonies should remain relevant in order to complement the DNA results (Wise & Safer, 2012). The victims will testify about their offenders, which will make sure that all the occurrences that the witness narrates really happened with the suspect present. The police should also be quick in recording the statements from the witnesses to avoid the occurrences from disappearing from the memory of the witness. The use of both DNA testing and testimonies from the eyewitnesses should be the way to go in proving the guilt or innocence of a person. All this will make a criminal case run smoothly without the fear of presenting inaccurate information. References Goldstein, E. (2014). Cognitive Psychology: Connecting Mind, Research and Everyday Experience. Boston: Cengage Learning. Martire, K. A., & Kemp, R. I. (2009). The Impact of eyewitness expert evidence and judicial instruction on juror ability to evaluate eyewitness testimony. Law and Human behavior, 33, (3): 225-236. Pawlenko, N. B., Safer, M. A., Wise, R. A., & Holfeld, B. (2013). A teaching ais for improving jurors assessment of eyewitness accuracy. Applied cognitive psychology, 27, (2): 190-197. Wise, R. A., & Safer, M. A. (2012). A method of analyzing the accuracy of eyewitness testimony in criminal cases. Court Review, 48, 22-34. Wise, R. A., Fishman, C., & Safer, M. A. (2009). How to analyze the accuracy of eyewitness testimony in a criminal case. Connecticut law Review, 42, 435-513. Wise, R. A., Safer, M. A., & Cushman, B. (2011). A survey of law officers and its significance for cross-examining witnesses about eyewitness accuracy. The Champion, 35, (12): 16-25. Read More