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Compose a 1250 words assignment on eye-witness testimony. Needs to be plagiarism free!
Compose a 1250 words assignment on eye-witness testimony. Needs to be plagiarism free! The chances of an eye witness to testify and be believed by the jury calls for the ability to discriminate between accurate and inaccurate eye witnesses. The need to make this distinction by the jury as well as the court will be essential in knowing if the witnesses will be believed primarily when they are accurate and be disregarded when they are not. The innocent would still suffer the social and financial hardships associated with arrest and trial but would rarely be convicted as a result of mistaken identification. On the other hand, there are the cues available that can help people to calibrate their belief of the likelihood that an eye witness is accurate. If so, then eyewitnesses will be believed in those situations in which they are most likely not telling the truth.
In 1974, the delving commission was formed in England to examine eye witness procedures after several cases of mistaken identification came to light. Delving (1976) examined all the police line-ups that are commonly referred to as identification parades conducted in England in 1973. In the process, over 2000 parades were analysed and a suspect was identified in 45 per cent of the parades where 82 per cent of those identified were subsequently convicted. The identification comprised the only evidence in over 300 cases and of these 75 per cent of the suspects was found to be guilty showing the compelling real-world evidence that eye witnesses are believed. However, suspects identification in the Devlin report were made in less than half of the cases analysed and it could be argued that the identified suspects were indeed guilty in these cases. The accuracy of the identification was believed to be high and the suspects were guilty thus the eye witnessed should have been believed.
On the other hand, the advent of DNA evidence has made it increasingly possible to prove that innocent people are convicted. To date, innocence projects have helped to exonerate at least 142 wrongly convicted people (Scheck & Neufeld, 2004) which have been attributed to mistaken identification as the primary reason for the conviction in over 80 per cent of these cases. .
