Eyewitnesses In The Criminal Justice System

The forensic technique eyewitnesses is a term meaning a person who has witnesses an event that is important to a criminal investigation or criminal justice trial. The eyewitness will at first tell a police officer what he or she have witnessed, but after telling the police officer the eyewitness may be required to do other things to help the investigation or trial as well. Nowadays the most normal thing a eyewitness will do is to point a person out in a line-up, but a eyewitness can also be required to witness at court and tell their story about what he or she witnessed. (http://www.simplypsychology.org/eyewitness-testimony.html).

Eyewitnesses has always been used to help investigations and in the criminal justice system. Further back in
time the importance of eyewitnesses was very big while investigating who performed the crime, and then to convict the suspect. But, it lead to many wrongful convictions and innocent people started to being punished for something they did not do, and the guilty ones walked free. Eyewitnesses had a big reliability until year 1901 when William Stern, a psychologist from Germany, and criminologist discovered that eyewitnesses was not as accurate as they thought. Mr. Stern performed an experiment to come to this conclusion. William Stern´s discovery regarding eyewitnesses was among the first to start to hesitate whether eyewitnesses are reliable or not.

In 1906, a man called Hugo Munsterberg who was working as a defense lawyer started to write a book about eyewitnesses. On the witness stand, which was the name of Mr. Munsterberg´s book. Hugo Munsterberg stated in his book that suggestion could create false memories. Mr. Munsterberg explained in his book how psychology in a courtroom affect eyewitnesses testimonies and memories. (http://historyforensicpsych.umwblogs.org/eye-witness-accounts/).

A case that changed how the investigative technique eyewitnesses was seen was the case about Jennifer Thompson.
Ms. Thompson was an ordinary girl who one day was raped with a knife pointed towards her. About a year after the crime had been committed, Ms. Thompson pointed out her offender. The man she pointed out was a restaurant dishwasher named Ronald Cotton. Mr. Cotton went to trial and ended up in prison after Ms. Thompson had identified him as her offender. After 10 years of imprisonment Mr. Cotton´s judge was overruled after have being able to test his DNA against the DNA that was found on the crime scene, and it did not match. The man who committed the crime against Ms. Thompson ended up in prison for another crime around the same time Mr. Cotton was innocent convicted, and the true offender of the rape told another inmate that he was the real offender. Mr. Cotton and the real offender was very similar in their appearance and their looks. This case had a huge impact on eyewitnesses as a tool in investigations and in criminal justice trials. The public started to hesitate on whether the technique of eyewitnesses was as accurate as they had always thought. People started to see this technique as unreliable and inaccurate.
(https://www.themarshallproject.org/2015/10/30/eyewitness-testimony-is-unreliable-or-is-it#.bOYy4ctXI).

In the 1970´s a woman named Elisabeth Loftus brought back the focus on eyewitness research since Hugo Munsterberg´s book On the witness stand. Ms. Loftus made studies and experiments and came to the conclusion that a witnesses memory could be affected by the person asking question about the even they witnesses. Ms. Loftus concluded that a memory can be affected by the way the interviewer is asking his/her questions. Elisabeth Loftus inspired others such as Robert Buckhout and Gary Wells to continue to make research about eyewitnesses, even though skepticism existed regarding research about eyewitnesses.