Ashanty Barrios 11/7/13 English 106 A.

Halliday First Draft Research Paper Todays court system heavily relies on eyewitness testimony to prosecute a person. The purpose of having an eyewitness is to have some kind of evidence, in most cases, provide a lead suspect in some of the most serious crimes out there such as arson, robbery, homicides and sexual assaults. A key component of an eyewitness testimony however, is reliance on a persons memory. It is a controversial topic that has be subjected to many experiments and questions pertaining to just how reliable this kind of evide nce may be. In Charles Brainerds article about the science of false memory, he applies some of Elizabeths Loftuss (a pioneer in the study of false memory reconstruction) methods of examination to explain the advantages and disadvantages of using eyewitness testimony in the court of law. Several studies have shown that 57% of the time, witnesses will falsely identify a suspect based solely on the information and suggestions given to them by the investigators and police officers. This mostly occurs when witnesses are shown several pictures of innocent people that have the same characteristics as the suspect. Many times, forensic psychologists will deliberately do this to test out how accurately the witness can testify and if they are even eligible to testify as an eyewitness (Brainerd, 2005). One way they do this is having a suspects face appear

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Comment [C1]: Dont use this as a title

Comment [C2]: Should this be in quotes?

multiple times in a mug book, which is a collection of pictures of ex convicts, innocent people, and any available suspects. The reappearance of the suspects face multiple times is to test their attention. Once they can identify a single person or photographs of a single person as the culprit it is called a show -up (Brainerd, 2005). This is one of the most common procedures in testifying as an eyewitness. Brainerd believes that it is very simple to distort peoples memories into favoring one suspect or another. Not only this, but he also believes people can falsely identify an individual simply to comply with social norms. For example, when several individuals are lined up and the witness is then asked to pick who the suspect was, many times they will choose a suspect without actually recognizing anyone, just so that they chose someone. The pressure that is applied to them causes them to become nervous and therefore comply with the instructions given to them about picking someone. Now let us take memory distortion, for example. Many times, which is normal as a matter of fact, people will claim to have verbatim episodic memories of the incident. This means they can recall the event exactly as it occurred and when asked, can clearly recite small details about the incident. This phenomena is known as recollection or remember phenomenology (Brainerd, 2005). What happens most often is that the witnesss will have cues that will trigger some kind of memory of the incident. This is where distortion can come into play. If the actual culprit was tall, had dark hair, and wore a dark hoodie, when the witness is shown several pictures of people and one of them as at least two of the following attributes, more than likely they will choose that person as their suspect. This is due to familiarity, or know phenomenology (Brainerd, 2005). The witness is

somewhat familiar with what the suspect looks like and therefore will choose that person because their memory was distorted. Another key point to mention is how easily suggestions may alter the way a person perceives a situation. Simply by repeatedly asking, how did suspect 1 one do this? or when suspect 1 one went here, what did they do? they are subconsciously engraving in the witnesss memory that without a doubt, suspect one is the culprit. With this, they can create vivid but false memories of what may have occurred based solely on the information given to them by officials. One also has to take into account the mental and physical state of the witness at the time the incident occurred. As Brainerd mentions in his article, intoxication reduces attentiveness and stresswould be expected to impair the consolidation of verbatim traces of those experiences (2005). As one can see, there are many factors that can alter ones memory. With the many studies done on memory and its reconstruction, Brainerd believes that an eyewitness testimony does not help the situation at hand. It may actually lead to innocent individuals being locked away all because of one individual. At this point, it is safe to question our adversary system and the debate of whether or not eyewitness testimony is a valid piece of evidence will continue.

Candice Votava I think it is very good. You should back up some of your personal knowledge with more sources to make your paper more credible. You could probably sight you psychogoly textbook if you got some of this knowledge from there. Its fine that you dont have a works sighted page yet, but you will need one eventually. Also you have to title this ABarrios1 and the one you fix ABarrios2.