In 1991, Anita Hill's testimony during Clarence Thomas's Senate confirmation hearing brought the problem of sexual harassment to a public audience. Although widely believed by women, Hill was defamed ...by conservatives and Thomas was confirmed to the Supreme Court. The tainting of Hill and her testimony is part of a larger social history in which women find themselves caught up in a system that refuses to believe what they say. Hill's experience shows how a tainted witness is not who someone is, but what someone can become.
Why are women so often considered unreliable witnesses to their own experiences? How are women discredited in legal courts and in courts of public opinion? Why is women's testimony so often mired in controversies fueled by histories of slavery and colonialism? How do new feminist witnesses enter testimonial networks and disrupt doubt?Tainted Witnessexamines how gender, race, and doubt stick to women witnesses as their testimony circulates in search of an adequate witness. Judgment falls unequally upon women who bear witness, as well-known conflicts about testimonial authority in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries reveal. Women's testimonial accounts demonstrate both the symbolic potency of women's bodies and speech in the public sphere and the relative lack of institutional security and control to which they can lay claim. Each testimonial act follows in the wake of a long and invidious association of race and gender with lying that can be found to this day within legal courts and everyday practices of judgment, defining these locations as willfully unknowing and hostile to complex accounts of harm. Bringing together feminist, literary, and legal frameworks, Leigh Gilmore provides provocative readings of what happens when women's testimony is discredited. She demonstrates how testimony crosses jurisdictions, publics, and the unsteady line between truth and fiction in search of justice.
Effect of feedback from a 'snitch' - study participants witnessed a staged crime and selected offender from line-up - follow-up interviews provided feedback and assessed confidence.
Encoding misleading questions in two types of questions - study participants completed concurrent distractor task during some of the questioning - misinformation effect - results showed concurrent ...distractor task reduced size of misinformation effect for closed specific questions and no impact on misinformation effect for open presumptive questions - implications for interviewing.
Influence of non-verbal vocalisation on voice identification performance - importance of non-verbal vocalisation in earwitness identification - laughter as important auditory information - acoustical ...features of laughter - study conducted presenting verbal and non-verbal information including laughter - identification significantly worse in speech alone condition compared with laughter conditions.
Overview of psychology and law research with the Implicit Association Test (IAT) - eyewitness memory for peripheral and central details - direct eyewitness - misinformation paradigm - difference ...between witnessed and non-witnessed details.
The development of forensic DNA testing has led to the discovery of hundreds of cases of mistaken eyewitness identification in which innocent people were convicted. Although these discoveries of ...wrongful convictions from mistaken identification based on DNA testing have been a surprise and shock to the legal system and the public, psychological scientists have been less surprised. This is because psychological scientists were "blowing the whistle" on the eyewitness identification problem for decades prior to forensic DNA testing. Today, most law enforcement agencies in the United States have adopted reformed policies and procedures on eyewitness identification that are based on research by experimental social and cognitive psychologists. This article describes core aspects of this research and how the research has managed to have this impact on the U.S. legal system. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).
Special measures have been introduced to improve the conditions under which children appear in court, but critics argue that the measures are still not going far enough. The aim of this thesis is to ...explore experiences of young people in the courtroom and the impact of procedures that have been employed to improve the conditions under which they appear as witnesses. Chapter Two provides a systematic literature review exploring the emotional victim effect and its potential influences within child witness populations. It was concluded that the emotional presentation of a child victim influences juror ratings of credibility across a range of conditions. Empirical research presented in Chapter Three examines professional perceptions of the pre-trial cross-examination method currently being implemented in England and Wales. Results suggest that overall, professionals believe pre-trial cross-examination will be helpful in reducing distress of child witnesses; but its application requires careful thought. The Bonn Test of Statement Suggestibility (BTSS, Endres, 1997) is critiqued in Chapter Four, concluding that the BTSS is useful in forensic applications when considered alongside measures of cognitive and situational factors. The main finding from this thesis is that child witnesses should be treated on an individual needs basis. However, further advancements in both research and practice are needed and options discussed.
The U.S. legal system increasingly accepts the idea that the confidence expressed by an eyewitness who identified a suspect from a lineup provides little information as to the accuracy of that ...identification. There was a time when this pessimistic assessment was entirely reasonable because of the questionable eyewitness-identification procedures that police commonly employed. However, after more than 30 years of eyewitness-identification research, our understanding of how to properly conduct a lineup has evolved considerably, and the time seems ripe to ask how eyewitness confidence informs accuracy under more pristine testing conditions (e.g., initial, uncontaminated memory tests using fair lineups, with no lineup administrator influence, and with an immediate confidence statement). Under those conditions, mock-crime studies and police department field studies have consistently shown that, for adults, (a) confidence and accuracy are strongly related and (b) high-confidence suspect identifications are remarkably accurate. However, when certain non-pristine testing conditions prevail (e.g., when unfair lineups are used), the accuracy of even a high-confidence suspect ID is seriously compromised. Unfortunately, some jurisdictions have not yet made reforms that would create pristine testing conditions and, hence, our conclusions about the reliability of high-confidence identifications cannot yet be applied to those jurisdictions. However, understanding the information value of eyewitness confidence under pristine testing conditions can help the criminal justice system to simultaneously achieve both of its main objectives: to exonerate the innocent (by better appreciating that initial, low-confidence suspect identifications are error prone) and to convict the guilty (by better appreciating that initial, high-confidence suspect identifications are surprisingly accurate under proper testing conditions).
Eyewitness memory researchers have recently devoted considerable attention to eyewitness confidence. While there is strong consensus that courtroom confidence is problematic, we now recognise that an ...eyewitness's initial confidence in their first identification - in certain contexts - can be of value. A few psychological scientists, however, have confidently, but erroneously claimed that in real-world cases, eyewitness initial confidence is the most important indicator of eyewitness accuracy, trumping all other factors that might exist in a case. This claim accompanies an exaggeration of the role of eyewitnesses' "initial confidence" in the DNA exoneration cases. Still worse, overstated claims about the confidence-accuracy relationship, and eyewitness memory, have reached our top scientific journals, news articles, and criminal cases. To set the record straight, we review what we actually know and do not know about the "initial confidence" of eyewitnesses in the DNA exoneration cases. Further reasons for skepticism about the value of the confidence-accuracy relationship in real-world cases come from new analyses of a separate database, the National Registry of Exonerations. Finally, we review new research that reveals numerous conditions wherein eyewitnesses with high initial confidence end up being wrong.
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