Eyewitness Testimonies & Investigative Interviews
Juries frequently rely upon eyewitness-testimonies (EWTs) when deliberating. Therefore the accuracy of eyewitness’s memories are very important. Despite this, 75% of cases where DNA evidence revealed wrongful conviction, the guilty verdicts were found to be decided upon inaccurate EWTs (The Innocence Project, n.d.). Therefore research into memories, testimony collection, and court-case conductions may reveal the reliability of EWTs in providing the truth during investigative interviews.
Memories cannot provide reliable accounts as they are continuously reconstructed and influenced by schemas (Bartlett, 1932). Schemas are thought-patterns or behaviour based on prior-experiences, knowledge and contexts which enable us to interpret and organise our environment. Our schemas ‘fill in’ gaps in our knowledge and simplify how we process information. Unfortunately, this can impact our ability to recall information accurately as our memories are reconstructed and biased by these schemas - EWT recounts can therefore be significantly distorted in this way.
Recall accuracy can be influenced by many things throughout the investigative process such as being exposed to misleading-information or questions, anxiety and age. Leading-questions and post-event information are two examples of misleading-questions. Leading-questions increase the likelihood that witnesses’ schema will influence them to answer in a desired way, whilst post-event information is where misleading-information is added to a question after the crime.
Leading-questions in an investigative interview can impact the reliability of EWTs. E.g. Loftus & Palmer (1974) conducted a study where participants estimated the speed a car had ‘contacted’, ‘hit’, ‘bumped’, ‘collided’, or ‘smashed’ into another. Participants reportedly mistook seeing broken-glass when told ‘smash’ instead of ‘hit’. This suggests that at recall misleading-information is reconstructed with material from the original memory - damaging EWT reliability in reporting accounts of crime.
Bekerian & Bowers (1983) found that post-event information may affect memory-retrieval rather than memory-storage. In their study, participants watched scenes leading up to a car accident and found that despite being asked misleading-questions, their memories remained unchanged.
Furthermore, Loftus (1975) asked participants to watch clips of a car driving and asked them how fast it was going when passing a barn. A week later, 17% reported seeing the barn even though it didn’t actually exist. This shows that when misleading-information is added to a question after the event, memories can be altered. Post-event information effects could therefore also influence EWT during investigative interviews.
Inaccurate EWTs have had significant consequences in criminal-cases. E.g. in 1984, Thompsons flat was broken into where she was held at knife-point and sexually assaulted. Reportedly Thompson ‘carefully memorised’ the attacker’s appearance during the ordeal so to report him. With the police, a sketch was drawn of the suspect from Thompsons looking through ‘hundreds’ of images of facial features. From this the police apprehended Ronald Cotton, to which Thompson declared her absolute certainty multiple times that he was the perpetrator. Due to Thompson’s irrefutable certainty in her EWT, Cotton was imprisoned for 11 years. However, in 1995 DNA evidence revealed that Cotton was actually innocent (The Innocence Project, n.d.).
There have been many cases of wrongful imprisonment and executions due to inaccurate EWTs. The Innocence Project has worked to exonerate 362 wrongly convicted men, imprisoned by incorrect EWTs.
In regards to leading-questions, it is not conclusive whether inaccurate recalls are due to demand characteristics or genuine changes in witness’s memories. Nevertheless research demonstrates how easy it is to insert false memories into people’s lives (Loftus & Pickrell, 2003) as memories are vulnerable to suggestion and subtle association changes. Therefore it may be challenging for interviewers to extract truthful information from witnesses.
People commonly suffer anxiety when witnessing a crime which can distract them from noticing important details. Deffenbacher (1983) highlighted this with the Yerkes-Dodson inverted-U hypothesis, demonstrating that moderate emotional arousal increases memory accuracy and recalled detail – but only to an extent, where-after higher levels of arousal decreases recall quality.
Freud (1894) suggested that anxiety impairs memory recall and that ‘forgetting’ protects the individual from distress. This can be inferred by multiple studies such as Loftus et al., (1987) who established that during a crime, if the perpetrator is carrying a weapon, witnesses will focus primarily on the weapon instead of their face. This reduces witness’s ability to later recall facial details during investigative interviewing. Furthermore, anxious witnesses struggle to recall significant detail from peripheries of criminal scenes in comparison to witnesses who view neutral events (Oue et al., 2001). This supports how anxiety can impact attention to detail, effecting the reliability of a EWT in an investigative interview. Anxiety experienced from re-living the trauma of a crime and the investigative process itself may also worsen the witnesses’ ability to recount events reliably.
EWT accuracy and reliability during investigative interviews can additionally be affected by the witness’s age as cognitive abilities vary between ages and diminish as people get older. For example, children tend to be more accepting of inaccurate information from adults as they do not want to oppose authority figures. Roberts & Lamb (1999) revealed that in child abuse cases, 68/161 child interviews had been misinterpreted by investigators, to which 2/3 of the mistakes were not corrected by the children.
Nevertheless, children demonstrate far greater accuracy and detail when relaying serious events such as theft (Ochsner et al., 1999). However, this accuracy is dependent upon how they are questioned, as very young children demonstrate increased susceptibility to post-event information and leading questions. Krackow & Lynn (2003) reported that children under 6 who had been inappropriately touched answered truthfully when questioned directly and inaccurately when asked with a leading question. Child abuse cases have significantly increased in recent years, meaning that more children are having to deliver testimonies. Young children are able to do so with accuracy but only if correct procedures are employed so to prevent the risk of suggestibility, guessing, or demand characteristics from impacting their statements (Huneycutt, 2004). Therefore it is critical that police consider carefully their mode of questioning during investigative interviews in order to get a truthful and reliable EWT.
Those interviewing children need appropriate training so to be aware of developmental factors and capabilities. Children need to be familiarised with legal procedures and how to respond to questioning – e.g. letting the child know how and when to use a “don’t know response”. Furthermore, children making line-up identifications need to be informed about non-verbal response options – e.g. indicating scratching their head to demonstrate not remembering. Children also need to be given instructions and demonstrations of how to select someone from a line-up or to convey that they are not there. The professional working with the child should not be involved in the investigation itself so to prevent the risk of bias. They need to ensure that appropriate language is used for the child’s age and developmental-capabilities with the prohibition of leading-questions or misleading-information.
Elders also have a tendency to be less accurate and detailed in their accounts and are more vulnerable to misleading-information (Brimacombe et al., 1997; Wright & Holiday, 2007; Cohen & Faulkner, 1989). Elders also tend to make more incorrect identifications, with males particularly being more prone to error when exposed to misleading information (Loftus et al., 1991).
Coxon & Valentine (1997) also highlighted such age-effects in EWT accuracy. In this study, different age-groups were asked questions regarding a video of a kidnapping - some groups were asked questions containing misleading-information, whilst others were not. The results revealed that young-adults answered more correctly than older-adults and children, whilst older-adults displayed less suggestibility than younger-adults. Children and elders were less accurate in their recall than young-adults, therefore proving to be less reliable truth-tellers in investigative interviews as witnesses. Elderly participants provided less complete recalls but were not susceptible to misleading information. These results support that EWT reliability varies between age-groups - that elders remember the least but what they do remember is more reliable than any other age-groups.
There are many other factors that can influence the accuracy and reliability of EWT during investigative interviews. E.g. Greathouse & Kovera (2009) established that line-up administrators can subconsciously bias witnesses’ judgements. Therefore it is recommended that double-blind line-ups are used instead so that the officer conducting the line-up has no connection to the case and does not know the suspects identity.
Moreover, certain personality-types have been found to be more affected by misleading-questions, anxiety and demand characteristics. People scoring higher in empathy and imagery-vividness measures also tend to have poorer memory-recall and are supposedly more vulnerable to producing less truthful EWTs in investigative interviews (Tomes & Katz, 1997).
In addition, EWTs can be affected by perceived possible consequences. E.g., Foster et al., (1994) highlighted that people who witness crime and believe their evidence can help a court case are more likely to produce accurate EWTs.
Psychology explains that there are multiple ways to enhance someone’s accuracy and retrieval of memories, such as using external (context-dependent) cues (Abernethy, 1940; Godden & Baddeley, 1975), internal (state-dependent) cues (Overton, 1972; Darley et al., 1973); the ‘chunking’ method (Simon, 1974; Baddeley et al., 1975); mnemonics, visual imagery mnemonics, verbal mnemonics (Bower & Clark, 1969; Marston & Young, 1974; Baltes & Kliegl, 1992; Herrmann, 1987); and active processing (Craik & Lockhart, 1972; Morris et al., 1985).
However to improve the richness and reliability of EWTs during investigative interviewing the Cognitive Interview (CI) (Fisher & Geiselman, 1992) is generally used. CI was developed from Tulving’s (1974) theory suggesting that there are multiple retrieval-paths for memories which are not necessarily accessible through one method alone. Therefore CI employs 2 techniques by changing the narrative order (e.g. recount the event from the end, backwards) and by changing the perspective of the witnessed event (e.g. recount what happened from the perpetrators perspective). This should enhance memory retrieval so to create a fuller picture.
Other principles underpinning CI comes from Tulving & Thomsons Encoding Specificity Theory (1973), whereby memories consist of multiple features that consequently require multiple retrieval cues in order to access the most information. This principle involves a ‘mental reinstatement of context’ by getting the witness to mentally return to the crimes environmental context (e.g. the location, what the weather was like), and the emotional context (e.g. how they felt). From this, witnesses are encouraged to ‘report everything’, even if elements feel trivial. By doing this, CI encourages the more important memories to re-surface. CI encourages the witnesses’ use of prior knowledge in their recall, as well as their expectations and schemas which all contribute towards increasing their EWT accuracy.
If CI is used within a short time-frame after the event of a crime, it proves to be very efficient in producing the most recalled information and reliable EWTs when compared to standard interviewing techniques (Ginet & Py, 2001; Geiselman & Fisher, 1997). This has proved especially true when getting witnesses to engage in ‘context reinstatement’ and to ‘report everything’. When doing this, recall has been the most accurate and detailed (Milne & Bull, 2002).
Despite CIs success, it is comprised of multiple techniques that are used differently across police-forces, therefore making comparative assessments of its validity difficult. Furthermore, CI is only suitable for witnesses over 8yo, as it yields less accurate responses in children younger than other techniques do (Geiselman, 1999).
The Enhanced Cognitive Interview (ECI) (Fisher et al., 1987) also serves as a key investigative interviewing technique so to attain increased EWT reliability. This method includes extra features such as minimising distractions and anxiety, asking the witness to speak slowly, and by getting investigators to ask open-ended questions. Research has demonstrated that ECI is notably superior in gathering facts in comparison to standard investigative interviewing techniques (Fisher et al., 1989). However, despite this, ECI has also been found to elicit false-positives when incorrect items are recalled.
In conclusion, it seems unlikely to be possible to elicit ‘the whole truth and nothing but the truth’ from eyewitnesses during investigative interviews due to age, anxiety, and personality-factors as discussed. However, EWT reliability and accuracy can be improved by officers receiving appropriate training and being mindful of bias, questioning-techniques, witness developmental-factors and capabilities so to avoid negatively influencing vulnerable and malleable memories.
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