FORENSIC PSYCHOLOGY,
INVESTIGATION AND POLICING
LECTURE 1:
EYEWITNESS TESTIMONY
Dr Sonia Shagufta
History of Eyewitness Memory
Earliest research investigated eyewitness memory
James Cattell (1895)
•Researched intelligence
•Asked people to recall things they witnessed in their everyday
life.
•Found that answers were often inaccurate.
Alfred Binet (1900)
• Binet showed children objects (e.g., Button
glued to poster board) and then asked them
questions about the object.
•Found that highly misleading questions resulted
in poor accuracy.
Assuage period of eyewitness research (1900)
•German for “testimony”
Von Liszt (1902); Stern (1910)
•Conducted “reality experiments” with staged
events.
•Around this time, psychologists began to appear
as expert witnesses in court.
Varendonck (1911)
•Called to be an expert witness in a case
involving the murder of a young girl.
•Staged an event at school and tested memory
for event.
•Concluded that children’s memories are
inaccurate and suggestible.
Hugo von Munsterberg
•Called into question legal assertions that
eyewitness memory is necessarily accurate.
•On the Witness Stand (1908)
•Has been described as the “father” of forensic
psychology
•He was very critical of lawyers for their failure to
recognise the value of psychology and massively
overstated his case.
•Probably put back the development of the
discipline for some decades.
Eyewitness research disappeared for around
50 years because:
•Wlgmore (law professor) criticised
Munsterberg’s book.
•WWI (World War 1) prevented further research
in Germany.
•Rise of behaviourism
Eyewitness research re-emerged in the 1960s
and 70s.
Robert Buckhout
•Wanted to change legal system
•Nearly 2000 witnesses can be wrong.
Elizabeth Loftus
•Studied flexibility of memory
•Post-event misinformation paradigm
Psychological experts today
•Functions of an expert witness
•Two primary functions:
1.Aid in understanding a particular issue relevant
to the case.
2.Provide an opinion – allowed to do so because
they are thought to have specialised knowledge.
•This contrasts with regular witnesses who can
only testify about what they have directly
observed.
Either side can ask judge to permit
•Expert witnesses may be clinical psychologists
or academic psychologists.
•In Australia it is not as common as in US for
academic psychologists to appear in court.
Challenges of providing expert testimony
The legal system’s criticisms of psychology:
1.Lack of ecological validity of psychological
research.
2.Psychologists may become advocates and lost
their objectivity.
3.Psychology can intrude upon the legitimate
activities of the legal system.
4.It’s all common sense.
Admissibility criteria
Experts must satisfy judges that they have
special knowledge above and beyond that of
average juror and that this expertise will assist
jurors.
Admissibility Criteria: England and Wales:
Experts no commonly used.
Just because an expert is well qualified does not
mean s/he is helpful to the jury – but there is a
danger that jury will think so and pay too much
attention.
Psychologists and psychiatrists are not needed
except where mental illness is an issue.
All other psychological knowledge is seen as
common knowledge.
However, more recently some relaxing
of Turner ruling and some
psychological experts are giving
evidence on issues other than mental
illness.
Admissibility Criteria: Australia
Australia and NZ are also constrained by the
Turner ruling – especially the “common-
knowledge” ruling.
Expert evidence relating to eyewitness
testimony is regularly disallowed.
Evidence ActNSW (1995) abolishes common-
knowledge rule.
R v Skaf (2006)
•Psychologists allowed to give expert evidence
regarding the reliability of certain aspects of
eyewitness testimony
•First time in NSW.
Examples of expert evidence
1. Fingerprints:
•Fingerprint evidence is analysed by humans.
•Been used in court for over 100 years.
•First study to objectively investigate fingerprint
identification accuracy was published in 2011
(Tangen, Thompson & McCarthy).
•Tested qualified practicing fingerprint experts
and novices. –
•Assessed accuracy for matched similar and not
similar pairs of prints.
•Overall, fingerprint experts were very accurate,
but not perfect.
•Experts tended to err on the side of caution by
making judgements that would free the guilty.
•However, they occasionally made the type of
error that can lead to false convictions.
2. Facial mapping:
•Techniques are not standardised and not consistently applied
by practitioners.
•Process may involve taking measurements, noting
characteristics, or other techniques.
•Much of the incriminating facial mapping evidence now
routinely accepted in Australian courts is of unknown validity
and reliability... judges and others should be reconsidering the
terms on which the criminal justice system engages with
ostensibly incriminating images and related opinion evidence”.
(Edmond, Biber, Kemp & Porter, 2009, p. 338)
•Good way psychologists are showing that some of these
methods are not valid.
Hair Analysis
•The Justice Department and FBI have formally
acknowledged that nearly every examiner in an elite FBI
forensic unit gave flawed testimony in almost all trials in
which they offered evidence against criminal defendants
over more than a two- decade period before 2000.” The
Washington Post, April 18, 2015
•Confirms long-suspected problems with subjective,
pattern-based forensic techniques (e.g. hair, bite-marks).
•People have been wrongfully convicted for crimes that
they did not commit.
Summary
•Psychology is the application of psychological knowledge
to the legal system.
•Forensic psychologists can play different roles:
1.Clinical: mental health issues as they relate to law.
2.Experimental: any aspect of human behaviour that relates
to the law.
3.Research in forensic psychology dates back over 100
years.
4.Expert witnesses provide the court with information that
assists the court in understanding an issue of relevance to
the case.
Thank You
