Eyewitness Testimony: Reliability and Justice
This worksheet explores the complexities of eyewitness testimony, its impact on the justice system, and factors influencing its reliability.
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Eyewitness Testimony: Reliability and Justice
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Read each question carefully and answer to the best of your ability. This worksheet explores the critical role and potential pitfalls of eyewitness testimony in the legal system.
1. Which of the following factors is LEAST likely to affect the accuracy of eyewitness testimony?
The witness's age
The time of day the event occurred
The witness's favorite color
The presence of a weapon during the event
2. What psychological phenomenon describes the tendency for misleading information presented after an event to alter a person's memory of the event?
Source monitoring error
Misinformation effect
Encoding specificity principle
Flashbulb memory
3. The phenomenon where a witness identifies someone from a lineup who was not the perpetrator, simply because they look most like the perpetrator, is known as .
4. Factors such as stress, weapon focus, and cross-racial identification can significantly impact the of eyewitness accounts.
5. Eyewitness testimony is generally considered the most reliable form of evidence in criminal trials.
True
False
6. The Innocence Project has found that mistaken eyewitness identifications are a leading cause of wrongful convictions.
True
False
7. Describe two specific recommendations that legal experts and psychologists have proposed to improve the accuracy of eyewitness identifications during police procedures.
Match each term with its definition.
8. Weapon Focus
a. The process of retrieving memories from past events.
9. Memory Reconstruction
b. The tendency for a witness to focus on a weapon during a crime, leading to poor recall of other details.
10. Sequential Lineup
c. A lineup procedure where suspects are presented one at a time to the witness.