Dna Testing And The Criminal Justice System - 716 Words

Convictions prior to the advancement of DNA testing in the criminal justice system were commonly found to be later wrongful and due to eyewitness misidentification (Scheck Neufeld, 2001). Hence, there has been increasing research by psychologists in eyewitness memory and particularly in line up practices. In criminal identification, a simultaneous line up (SIM) is typically used and involves presenting the witness with all line-up suspects at once with the offender (target) placed amongst other innocent suspects (foils) that resemble the offender (Wells Olsen, 2003). With these conditions, witnesses have a tendency to compare suspects with each other in order to determine the one that have the closest resemblance with the offender, a process called relative judgement (Steblay, Dysart, Fulero Lindsay, 2001). In the simultaneous line-ups with target present, there are more hits as the closest resemblance is the perpetrator but while in target absent conditions, the closest matching foil is often picked and resulting in more false alarms (Steblay, Dysart, Fulero Lindsay, 2001). Therefore, to prevent the potential of misidentification, alternative line-up presentations have been developed to inhibit relative judgement processes such as sequential line-up in Lindsay and Wells (1985). Sequential line-ups (SEQ) involves presenting a line-up of photos in a sequential format and eyewitnesses can only view the photo once and must determined whether the photo matches theShow MoreRelatedJustice Systems And The Justice System Of Other Nations1732 Words   |  7 Pagesbeen and will be discussed concerning our justice system and the justice system of other nations. Contrarily there are varying types of courts all throughout these other nations as well. 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The Criminal Justice system was put in place by the agencies and established by the governments to help control the crimes and apply penalties to those that violate the law. Many people feel that the criminal justice system is there to protect and serve while others feel that the criminal justice system fails them daily. Over 30 years ago Alan Newton was convicted of a crime