Module 1 & 2 - An assignment that summarizes chapters 1 and 2. PDF

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An assignment that summarizes chapters 1 and 2. ...

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Module 1 & 2

Question 1 Go to the Innocence Canada website (https://www.innocencecanada.com/exonerations) and choose one of the following cases of an innocent person who was convicted based part on eyewitness identification: Robert Baltovich, Leighton Hay, or Thomas Sophonow. Write a summary of the case and highlight factors that may have led to the mistaken identification and wrongful conviction. Explain how the case relates to what you learned from the course videos or chapters from Modules 1 and 2. (14 marks) In 1990, Robert Baltovich's girlfriend, Elizabeth Bain, went missing. She left the house saying she is going to school and never returned. The police found her car, with the backseat covered with Elizabeth's blood. On November 19th, 1990, Robert was arrested and charged with Elizabeth's murder based on two eyewitness testimonies, Marianne Perz's and David Dibben's. Marianne testified that she had seen Robert and Elizabeth on the campus on the day Elizabeth disappeared. David claimed that he had seen Robert driving Elizabeth’s car three days after she disappeared. The jury accepted Marianne’s and David’s testimonies as evidence even though there were serious concerns about their testimony's reliability. Marianne didn't have a clear recollection of the man she saw that night, but later read an article in the news that included Robert's picture and suggested him as the suspect. Also, some family members of Elizabeth, who were suspicious of Robert, talked with Marianne. In an attempt to sharpen her memories, Marianne then underwent hypnosis and picked out Robert’s picture from a photo line-up after the session. David’s eyewitness testimony was also questionable in that he did not clearly saw the driver. His initial description of the driver was also not very specific and wasn't entirely matching Robert’s appearance. His testimony evolved as the interrogation went forward. After his wrongful conviction, Robert spent eight years in jail. This case underlies significant factors that could affect eyewitness memory and testimony. First of all, both eyewitness' testimonies included a very fuzzy recollection of the suspect. While Marianne wasn't sure who she saw, she happened to see a man's face as the suspect, then went on and talked to the family members. Both suggestibility and bias are significant sources of memory error, which I believe was inevitable in Marianne's case. David's testimony was also very problematic since he didn't clearly see the perpetrator's face. The fact that his testimony evolved during the investigation also suggests that his memory was subjected to suggestibility. I believe both the memory distortions were due to an unsuccessful encoding into and retrieval from the long-term memory. Although criminal justice doesn’t have control over these estimator variables (the distance between Marianne and the suspect, the lighting at the night David has seen the suspect), it’s very clear that the jury didn’t fully acknowledge them to assess the accuracy of the testimonies. There were also issues related to system variables in Robert's case. The line-up procedure consisted of several photos, which could dramatically reduce the accuracy of eyewitness identifications and lead to false alarms. Instead, showing the pictures one at a time would have increased the accuracy of the testimonies. Also, the use of hypnosis is now considered a

dangerous procedure that compromises the eyewitness's ability to separate memory from imagination, which leads to formulating inaccurate memories.

Question 2 Signal Detection Theory distinguishes between hits, misses, false alarms, and correct rejections. In the context of an eyewitness lineup, explain how the eyewitness could make a hit, false alarm, correct rejection, or miss. (4 marks) Eyewitness could make a hit when he/she correctly identifies the suspect. That is, responding “old” when the item shown is old. Likewise, correct rejection occurs when the eyewitness correctly identifies a new item as “new”. An example of this would be identifying the foil as the foil. False alarm appears when he/she identifies a new item as “old”. For example, identifying one of the foils in the lineup as the suspect is a false alarm. Lastly, a miss can occur when the eyewitness incorrectly identifies an old item as “new”. An example of this would be not remembering the suspect when his/her photo is shown.

Question 3 Chapter 2 describes three stages of memory and explains how memory errors arise in these stages. Explain what stages are involved and how that process could work in at least one of the three stages. Include an example, either hypothetical or from your own experience, of how a memory may become distorted. (6 marks) The three stages of memory are encoding, storage, and retrieval. We register the external stimuli into our sensory memory in a matter of a second, and this process occurs without any conscious effort that there is no perception or other cognitive processes involved, and unattended information gets lost. For example, when we pay attention to an external stimulus, it starts being processed in short-term memory. Encoding happens when the attended stimuli in the short-term memory are being stored into our long-term memory. Storage refers to our long-term memory, where we maintain information over time. The last stage, retrieval, occurs when we try to remember an item from our long-term memory. Memory error in the encoding process might be caused by not rehearsing the information correctly. For example, when I see someone in the bus, if I don’t pay attention to his/her facial features or other physical appearances and rehearse that information into my short-term memory, the chances are almost zero that I will correctly remember anything about that person after a few minutes. Similarly, if I don’t process the person’s features at a sufficient level of depth, it will not be encoded into my long-term memory, which will make me impossible to remember them correctly after a day or so. It is also possible to experience an information loss over time in the storage phase. For example, even if I correctly encode the person’s features into my long-term memory by repeating it every day for weeks, I may simply forget the details after a period of time. There are many causes of memory errors in the retrieval stage. We tend to remember the

events the way we store them into our memory, which is based on our interpretations, inferences, beliefs, feelings, etc., rather than the memory itself. So, for example, when I process and store the person’s facial features into my long-term memory, I will be subject to remember my feelings and thoughts the time when the encoding occurred. If I said to myself (or just thought consciously or non-consciously) “he has a big noise”, it is very likely that I will remember his noise bigger than it is. Suggestibility, memory bias, and source misattribution are also some of the examples of memory errors in the retrieval stage. Memory might be distorted in any of its stages.

Question 4 Define and describe system and estimator variables, and provide one example of each. (4 marks) System variables are a set of variables that might influence eyewitness accuracy and that are under the control of the criminal justice system. For example, when administrating photo arrays, police can decide who the foils will be, what are the instructions will be given to the eyewitness, how many photos will be presented (e.g., six-pack or one at a time), or any other procedures to increase the accuracy of the testimony (e.g., double-blind procedure, confidence level scale, etc.). System variables greatly influences the eyewitness testimonies and can lead us to more accurate eyewitness identifications when used correctly. Estimator variables are a set of variables that might also influence eyewitness accuracy but that are not under the control of the criminal justice system. An example of an estimator variable is the exposure time, the time length the eyewitness has seen the perpetrator's face. Estimator variables are powerful tools for us to understand, assess and estimate the accuracy of eyewitness identifications.

Question 5 Eyewitness lineups/photo arrays have been described as similar to experiments. Describe in detail three ways in which they are similar. Explain one way in which experiments and lineups are not similar? (6 marks) There are many similarities between line-ups/photo arrays and experiments. For example, both include one suspect and a number of foils in the procedure, or just one suspect. Both procedures are administered by an authority (police or researcher), carry one eyewitness, and aim to find the suspect with the description given by the eyewitness. However, the two might differ from each other in terms of the determination of the outcome. In the experiment, the new/ old recognition test can be applied that the researcher can measure the hits, misses, false alarms, and correct rejections. In contrast, this test can't be done in the real line-ups since the police can't know who the suspect is. Also, for this same reason, target-absent line-up can only be used in the experiments.

Question 6 In mock witness experiments, participants are not shown any targets (i.e. people they will later be asked to identify), but are instead shown lineups of people they have never seen before. How do these experiments work, and what are the purposes of these experiments? (6 marks) In mock witness experiments, the researcher first obtains a copy of the line-up/ photo arrays shown to the eyewitness. He/she then gets the description of the suspect provided by the eyewitness. Further, he presents the photo arrays and description of the suspect to the participants who have never seen the suspect or the foils before. The participants' task is to identify who the suspect might be. The purpose of this experiment is to measure the fairness of the actual line-up/ photo array, more specifically, its functional size. In a fair line-up, participants would pick the suspect only one-sixth of the time (when there are six pictures), which would indicate that the foils are also matching the description of the suspect. If they pick the suspect more, functional size becomes smaller than the line-up's nominal size, which means that the lineup wasn’t designed fairly....