Wednesday, February 22, 2012

The Accuracy of Eye survey Testimony and Its Flaws

As citizens of the United States of America, we believe the U.S. Is a very flourishing country compared to the rest of the world. For the most part, we also trust and respect our complicated justice system. If a conjecture is proven guilty by the court of law and claims he or she is innocent, we normally have more faith in the court's decision rather than what the conjecture is trying to say. After all, we do want as many criminals as inherent behind bars, right? If the crime committed was very disturbing such as murdering a child we come to be very furious and we want to make sure that someone pays for that. Once the court rules a guilty verdict against a conjecture in such a horrible case, we feel safe for an additional one day in our comfortable homes. All thanks to our excellent judicial law an additional one criminal is behind bars.

The U.S. Courts do often help safe the rest of society by locking up dangerous people. Unfortunately the law is far from excellent and innocent people receive guilty verdicts. These innocent people are torn away from their families, careers, free life and faced with humiliation. They often face many years or life behind bars and even the death penalty. Such a harsh punishment for the someone who did not commit the crime. It is scary to think that anyone of us can fall in to this loop-hole in our judicial law where we can face time in prison even though we are innocent.

John Adams Biography

How could this happen, how can the court misjudge such life impacting cases and come up with the wrong verdict? Researchers had done many investigations on wrongful arrests, they found that the large majority of arrests were mistaken because eyewitnesses have pointed out the wrong people. Having as many criminals as inherent behind bars in today's law comes with a price, the price of innocent people going to jail too. The emotional victims want someone to pay for the crime, as long as someone gets punished they will feel better. The victim will go home and feel safer, sometimes not realizing that an innocent someone is paying a price so the victim can feel cozy.

The Accuracy of Eye survey Testimony and Its Flaws

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Mr. Adams's Last Crusade: John Quincy Adams's Extraordinary Post-Presidential Life in Congress Specifications

When John Quincy Adams—the sixty-three-year-old former president, U.S. senator, secretary of state, and diplomat—was elected to the House of Representatives by his Massachusetts neighbors, he embarked on a spectacular late-life career.

He became Congress’s most acerbic and influential critic of slavery as well as a tireless proponent for human freedoms and First Amendment rights. This remarkable congressional career utterly transformed him, the public’s perception of him, and his legacy—in many ways redeeming his failed presidency. Mr. Adams’s Last Crusade renders an insightful portrait of a man who placed his country above politics.


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Many experiments terminate that jurors and law professionals rely a lot on eyewitnesses to come up with a guilty or not guilty verdict. Gary Wells (1998) researched forty extra cases. In all forty cases Dna proved that all forty convicted suspects were innocent. In thirty-six of these cases eyewitnesses wrongfully accused the suspects. This is a major flaw with eye scrutinize testimony. This is a crime in itself! First of all we are talking about forty people being wrongfully accused. More than three quarters of them are accused thanks to their "perfect memory" witnesses. This alone proves that eye scrutinize testimonies should not be given as much prestige as they are in today's justice system.

A real life example of the eye scrutinize testimony flaw is the Harris and Adams case. A police officer pulled over a vehicle at night to let the driver know that his headlights were turned off. The driver pulled out a gun and killed the officer. conjecture Harris was found a month later denying that he shot the officer. Harris claimed he picked up a hitch-hiker who was driving the car and the hitch-hiker shot the officer. The second conjecture Adams who was the hitch-hiker claimed he was innocent but three witnesses claimed they saw him shoot the officer because Adams had a mustache and long hair which fit in to their description. Although Harris confessed that he stole the car and the loaded handgun, Adams was expensed for the murder because three witnesses claimed they saw a description of Adams shooting the officer. Years later, the freed Harris was expensed for a different murder and confessed on death row that he also shot the police officer twelve years earlier. Adams was finally released after an innocent twelve year sentence. Three witnesses pointed the finger at the wrong person.

How can three different witnesses point at the wrong person? Human memory is not like video or photo camera that can bring up a clear picture later in time. Our memories are often distorted by our schemas and other factors. If we are missing a piece of the picture when trying to remember something, our mind will replace it with something else. In this situation we will have a skewed memory. It was dark surface when the officer pulled the car over, therefore we can only see parts of the situation. Our mind can fill in those dark spots with other schemas when we try to remember the situation at a time to come time. The other qoute can be the biased questions that police officers and investigators ask the eyewitnesses. For example if the officer has seen the conjecture in custody, the officer's questions to the scrutinize may be biased by the suspect's true description. Unknowingly, the officer might even make hints as to whether the scrutinize is on the right track for describing a similar description of the suspect.

Another study was done by Patricia Tollestrup, John Turtle, and John Yille. The study focused on how we acquisition or pay attentiveness to a unavoidable scene, how we store that facts and how we retrieve it later from our memory. They studied cases where the conjecture confessed to the crime. These cases had eyewitness bystanders and eyewitness victims. The bystanders proved to have a more precise memory of the crime scene than the victims involved. 100% of the bystanders remembered if the conjecture had facial hair, only 60% of the crime victims remembered this correctly. Only 48% of the bystanders and 38% of the victims complicated remembered the hair color of the suspect. The worse part is that both the bystanders and the victim eyewitnesses chose the right criminal 48% of the time in a lineup. This study shows that eyewitness testimony is very weak. It also shows 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. an additional one major conjecture why eye scrutinize testimony should not take as much weight as it does today.

Jurors in a court case often don't realize the imperfections of eye scrutinize testimony. They don't realize how imperfect our memories can be. If the jurors hear a great deal of unavoidable information about the crime from the witness, the jurors can undoubtedly be convinced by such a testimony. In an unusual event such as a short crime scene, a scrutinize only collects pieces of the scene and later tries to put it altogether in to a story. an additional one friction we have with memory is cross-racial identification. We have more mystery identifying someone of an additional one race other than ours. For example a black scrutinize might have a harder time identifying a white conjecture because blacks find it easier to differentiate between blacks. A black scrutinize will have a harder time differentiating between whites the same as whites will have a tough time differentiating between Asians or Hispanics.

Another flaw that sometimes if not often puts innocent people in jail is the unavoidable testimony of a victim that was seriously hurt or violated (Loftus). When this victim says with reliance "this is the guy that did it, I will never forget that face..." it is hard not to discredit their feelings and the fact that they lived through that horrible crime. Therefore it becomes easy to go with their testimony. A huge qoute that Elizabeth Loftus talks about is the fact that judges will often not allow an scholar to testify to the jury about the flaws of eyewitness testimony. Some judges will allow it, but others will make excuses as to why this scholar testimony is not allowed. This leaves the jury uneducated about eyewitness flaws which potentially leads to a wrongful verdict.

When added researching the subject, I was amazed at some of the statistics I read about the inaccuracy of eye scrutinize testimony. This is even if the crime occurred in broad daylight and there were many witnesses. I was also amazed at how much the courts rely on witnesses. Elizabeth Loftus went on to interpret that when a judge decides not educate the jury of memory inconsistency of eyewitnesses, the jury for the most part decides the verdict from their "gut feeling". They ignore the balance that needs to be gift between physical scientific evidence and scrutinize testimony. The jurors without the simple instruction rely too heavily on the witness. This leads the jurors to make the wrong decision and perhaps convict the wrong person. an additional one great point that was made by Loftus is the repetition of looking the accused person. When the victim spends time looking the someone in photos, in lineups, in the courtroom, the conjecture even if truly innocent becomes encrypted more and more in the victims memory. This makes it inherent that if the victim saw the true criminal he or she probably wont recognize the criminal anymore especially if the victim saw the criminal once for a short time during the crime.

Our capability to remember accurately is not as dependable as we think it is. We are often unaware that our memories convert which causes us to convert the story from what undoubtedly happened. We often forget the significance of the factors that can skew our memory and perception. Unfortunately we think factors such as reliance and details are more leading and dependable when in fact these factors cause errors in decision making. When a case is made, the court law and the police should not rely so heavily on eye scrutinize testimony, they need to continue to find more evidence in a case even if there are witnesses who sound like they have a good story.

Read some true stories that related to flawed eye scrutinize testimonies and you will see how damaging it can be!

The Accuracy of Eye survey Testimony and Its FlawsChris Hedges Death of Liberal Class + Occupy Wall St Feb 7 2012 Tube. Duration : 80.03 Mins.


Filmed February 7, 2012. A talk by Chris Hedges tying together the collapse of the liberal establishment (free press, church, unions, public education, culture) with the rise of the corporate state, and the Occupy Movement; Q+A follows. In regards to occupy wall street, Hedges reiterates his point that for Occupy to remain "mainstream" and non-threatening and welcoming to main street America, the movement has to remain smart, organized, disciplined, and above all nonviolent. 0:05 Intro by David Robb 3:18 Chris Hedges on James Luther Adams 7:33 Chris Hedges 43:35 Chris Hedges on Occupy Wall St 54:04 Question 57:07 Question and answer on George Orwell. 1:10:19 Question 1:14:55 Question 1:17:54 Question Part of All Souls Church Lifelines program. closed captioned, english subtitles.

Tags: chris, hedges, death, liberal, class, occupy, corporate, state, #ows, #occupy, #occupywallst, #occupywallstreet, speaker, speakers, goldman, sachs, closed, captioned, cc, subtitles

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