Does the Type of Eyewitness Testimony Presented in Court Influence Perceptions of Guilt?

Abstract

The study's general purpose was to answer the question: "does the type of eyewitness testimony presented in court influence perceptions of guilt? To fulfill this desire, the researcher used an independent variable “eyewitness testimony” with three main constraints; “no eyewitness, unchallenged eyewitness, and discredited eyewitness." The explained variable used in the experiment was guilt rating. The test utilized a within-subject design to investigate how different participants reacted to various constraints. The significant findings were that no Eyewitness group (M = 4.71, SD =1.47) and the Unchallenged Eyewitness group (M = 4.75, SD = 1.51) did not have a significant difference. But Discredited Eyewitness group (M = 3.99, SD =1.34) has a higher difference than the later.

Introduction

Case determination in a criminal investigation is usually a critical process since it determines people's ability to be prosecuted fairly, leading to justice on the aggrieved party. While the police's work is to instill law and order and arrest suspects, criminal investigating agents have a more demanding job since they have to gather sufficient evidence that can lead to prosecution or setting free of suspects. In a crime scene, for example, investigators need to collect different types of evidence ranging from physical ones such as hair, footprints, left processions, as well as non-visible evidence such as DNA. All these criminal-related pieces of information that can be used to associate a suspect to a particular wrongful activity can be collected using different approaches. One of the key methodologies entails tracing, filtering, and recording eyewitnesses (Wells & Turtle, 1986). Therefore, eyewitnesses play a key role in putting a crime scene's events into a context that can facilitate jurors to make a fair and rightful decision. However, for eyewitness testimony to be indisputable and accurate, such participants must not have underlying eye conditions, be unchallenged, as well be indiscreditable.

Eyewitness is a topic worth investigating considering the increased number of criminal activities that take long before jurors deliver verdicts. Additionally, since it can be complicated to assess an eyewitness's creditworthiness, this study will play a key role in evaluating the level of objectivity that an eyewitness can have and how such factors may impact guilt rating. Wise and Safer (2004) noted that many legal cases are a lesser burden to legal experts if eyewitnesses can provide believable accounts of events of what transpired in a crime scene, hence making determination fast and fair.

Literature Review

Empirical studies show that eyewitnesses are critical factors that hasten or impend the delivery of justice promptly. Mainly, when a witness is not accurate in their presentation, such that they do not meet the threshold quality of their narrations, it becomes a burden to jurors. Additionally, a vast number of studies evaluated prove that proceeding of a case that has eyewitnesses and those without take totally different routes, particularly when a scene did not provide sufficient hard-evidence to convict a suspect. One such study is one by Jiang and Wang (2018), who investigated the psychology of eyewitness and how it potentially affects case determination. In this conclusion, Jiang and Wang state that eyewitnesses with a sharp memory and without underlying psychological conditions are likely to provide truthful accounts of what happened.

Another study by Laney and Loftus (2016) investigated the effect of memory and biases and how witnesses can attain objectivity in their vignette. In this study, the researchers believed that determining the level of bias in a witness is complicated, mainly without information comparison from other participants. For example, during an observation, an eyewitness may have observed some events, but due to the inability to synthesize, Laney and Loftus believed that they might have inclined to any conclusion, leading to a lack of impartiality. Nayak and Khajuria (2019) concurred with this postulation to investigate "the probative value of eyewitness testimony in criminal justice." The ea is that subjectivity on how participants depict a picture of what transpired in a crime scene cannot easily be assessed in a non-controlled witness verification process. In...