Identifying Criminal Suspects

Identifying Criminal Suspects

Introduction

The role of eye witnesses is huge in order to administer justice in this world. The evidence or the statements given by these eyewitnesses can help us in identifying, charging and convicting the suspects in criminal cases. There are also some instances in which the only evidence available is the eyewitness evidence. But there also have been a number cases in which the evidence given by the eye witness was not perfect. Witnesses who are well intentioned do tend to identify the wrong person or they fail altogether to identify the doer of the crime. Since the eye witnesses play such a major role in the criminal justice system, it is very crucial that the information that they provide regarding the crime and the criminal should be reliable and accurate other wise the wrong person would be convicted and wrongly punished on their judgments and guessing, which does happen a lot. Therefore, in order to bring down the number of people who are convicted and suspected to be involved in specific crimes, when they are not in real, we have to have certain procedures which would improve the identification processes and prevent the wrong and innocent people from being selected as the suspects.

Discussion

Eyewitness identification can be described as a kind of evidence in which there is an eyewitness to a particular crime and he claims to be able to identify the criminal who was involved in that crime scene. In those situations where the eyewitness had the information regarding the suspect of the crime before it took place, issues such as the reliability and accuracy of memory for the purpose of identification are not much challenged or questioned. But in those situations, where the witness did not know before hand about the suspect, the reliability and the accuracy of identification is usually questioned. Researchers of the different areas of experimental psychology, particularly social and cognitive psychology have conducted various scientific studies regarding eyewitness identification since the middle of the 1970s. Today, we have so much of published experimental research that tells us that eyewitness identification evidence, under specific conditions can be very unreliable.

Recently, it has been witnessed that many innocent people have been subjected to wrongful convictions, which has been discovered with the help of post conviction DNA testing. From these wrongful convictions, eighty percent of these innocent people were the victims of wrongful conviction because of the mistaken eyewitness identification. These cases are proof enough that the major cause of conviction of innocent people is the mistaken eyewitness identification. (Cutler, 1995)

Memory is usually divided into three distinct phases by the psychologists. Acquisition is the first phase that revolves around the processes regarding the encoding of an event initially and the factors that have an impact on this encoding. The issues regarding acquisition include, attention, expectations, distance, lighting, arousal and other related factors that have a control over the amount, types, and accuracy of the encode information. People, who are present at the crime scene, often witness ...