Wrongful Convictions By Smalarz And Wells

According to Smalarz and Wells (2014), the leading cause of wrongful convictions is eyewitness misidentification. Smalarz and Wells described a unique case where a rape victim, JT, had the opportunity to correctly identify her attacker. JT’s lawyer had received reports of her attacker bragging about getting away with the rape while he was in prison for another crime. The victim, JT, incorrectly identified the attacker, she actually choose the same person she choose in her first line up after the assault. The information JT’s lawyer presented her had essential information on the case and to convict the culprit but, the timing of the information was received too late. There are a multitude of reasons why memory recall can be impaired after an
All the participants as witnesses in the study were told during the final lineup that the initial lineup seen was mistakenly that they had been sent to the incorrect lineups, participants were told to disregard the initial lineup. This deception strengthens the experiment because it nullifies any confirming feedback the participants received. The manipulation between mistakenly identifying the culprit involved creating to versions of the culprit-absent lineup. The culprit lineup also consisted of student who participated in the study (n=20). The lineups were to be rated in the scale from 1 (extremely dissimilar) to 7 (extremely similar). 30 photographs were presented to the witnesses in random order and, two still shot images from the video to allow witnesses to compare. After the photographs were rated, six photos with similar ratings were selected for a biased lineup. This was done to elicit misidentification. Participants in the biased lineup were not informed that the culprit might not be there. All participants had to choose an individual from the lineup, they did not have the choice to say that the culprit was not there. All participants were misidentification. After the manipulation, participants were randomly selected and divided in to two groups. Group 1 received PF (“Good Job” “You chose correctly”) while group 2 did not. All participant the completed a PF questionnaire to determine the confidence in their identification. Next, the experimenter explained to the participants, a mistake was made in presenting the incorrect line up. A second group of roundups is given which, included the picture of the culprit with 5 other filler photos that were similar to the culprit. Again a forced choice recognition test was used since, participants were not allowed to say not there (Smalarz & Wells,