Cognitive Key Question

Question 1

what is the key question?

Answer 1

is eyewitness testimony to unreliable to trust?

Question 2

A01

provide evidence for the question (stats)

Answer 2

• There have been 375 DNA evidence-linked exonerations between 1989 and 2020, where 69% (259) of cases were convicted based on eyewitness misidentification (Eyewitness Identification Reform, 2020)
• Those who have been wrongfully convicted can receive compensation of up to £500,000 if they spent up to 10 years incarcerated, or £1m if over 10 years, with compensation decisions based on legal costs and income loss, as well as, damage to physical or mental health and damage to reputation (Gov.uk, 2023)
• On average, 9.1 years of a person’s life is lost per wrongful conviction, with a total of 32,789 years of people’s lives lost to incarcerations (The National Registry of Exonerations, 2024 )
• A 2017 report found 185 people who were exonerated while on death row, showing for every 8.3% of executions in the US, a wrongfully convicted death-row prisoner is exonerated (Death Penalty Information Centre, 2021)
• Due to bad forensic evidence 454 (44%) people were convicted of murder, 140 (14%) were wrongly convicted of sexual assault, 142 (14%) were wrongly convicted of child abuse.

Question 3

A01

provide an example of a case where a wrong eyewitness testimony was given

Answer 3

Example of the issue: Ronald Cotton
- Cotton was wrongly convicted for the sexual assault of two women (two counts of rape) and two counts of burglary.
- Cottons conviction relied on the testimony of one witness and there were many problems with the way information was gained from the witness after the crime.
- Later, DNA evidence proved that he was not guilty, and he was released from prison 11 years later.

Question 4

A01

What were the implications for society of this mistake? (Ronald Cotton case)

Answer 4

• The actual criminal is then able to go on and commit more crimes
• Police lose credibility
• affects other innocent people’s lives
• Taxpayers fund compensation

Question 5

A02

what two theories effect reliability of eyewitness testimonies?

Answer 5

• weapons focus - causes issues with identification of suspect
• Reconstructive memory - witnesess may be better at identifying suspects of their own race (own race bias)
• Both affect reliability as anytime the witness is not using their correctly stored knowledge of events, their testimony becomes variable and is more likely to be inaccurate

Question 6

A02

what is weapons focus and how does this affect eyewitness recall of an event?

Answer 6

• When an eyewitness sees that a weapon is being used during a crime, they tend to focus on it – sometimes in great detail.
• This distracts them from encoding other information that may be relevant to their testimony. Therefore, they remember less about the event because they were distracted by the weapon, which can make their testimony unreliable.

Question 7

A02 - weapons focus

what two things effect weapons focus and how?

Answer 7

• Attention - Because the weapon is so unusual in many cultures it is focused on more closely at the expense of peripheral information, (e.g. the weather). This focused causes eyewitnesses to encode less information about the crime.
• Arousal - The inverted U theory suggests that the high state of arousal caused by presence of a weapon might make the eyewitness focus on the weapon but remember less about other details.

Question 8

A02

How does weapons focus affect eyewitness testimony? (with example, paragraph answering the question)

Answer 8

• Research into weapon focus has shown that when a weapon, such as a gun, is used during a crime witnesses may be less accurate in their identification of the suspect, as they pay more attention to the weapon than the suspect.
• For example, if someone has a gun pointed at them they may be so focussed on the threat of the gun that they do not pay attention to what the criminal looks like and therefore cannot identify them later making their testimony unreliable.
• Arousal - If there is low cognitive arousal when a weapon is present, the person is too calm and would cause for their recall of the situation to be inaccurate. However, if there’s a balance between stress and calmness when there’s a weapon present, the person’s performance in recall will be more detailed and reliable. However, when Arousal is extremely high, with a weapon present, would hinder their peripheral information due to being highly stressed, causing an inaccurate description of the situation.

Question 9

A02

How does reconstructive memory affect eyewitness testimony? (with example, paragraph answering the question)

and

explain how schemas can affect identification of suspects?

Answer 9

• Witnesses may be more accurate in their identification of own race suspects than those of a different race.
• For example, a witness may find it difficult to identifying differences between people who look nothing like them and so may use schemas to incorrectly fill in the gaps in their memory resulting in an unreliable testimony - identifying the wrong suspect.

Schemas:
- when testifying, witnesess may point out information about the criminal wrongly such as their race.
- This would be due to their schema stereotyping a race to a certian crime.
- Furthermore, due to levelling, the eyewitness may exclude information they deem useless such as the weather.
- Own schemas about own races are bias and people incorrectly attribute features to another race, incorrect information

Question 10

Structure

Answer 10

A01 - facts and figures about unrelisble eyewitness testimonies
- percentages of wrongful convictions, importance given to witness testimony etc
- link to A01 points to implications for society i.e. money spent imprisoning the wrong person, actual criminal free to commit more crimes, lost of trust in criminal justice system

A02 - application of theories
- apply theory 1 - weapon focus causes unreliable testimony…..
Explain how this might lead to wrongful conviction
- apply theory 2 - reconstrcutive memory causes unreliable testimony
Explain how this might lead to wrongful conviction