A Teaching Aid for Improving Jurors' Assessments of Eyewitness Accuracy

Abstract

We investigated whether education can improve mock jurors' assessments of eyewitness accuracy in a criminal case. The interview-identification-eyewitness (I-I-Eye) teaching aid directed participants to attend carefully to how law enforcement interviewed the eyewitness and conducted the identification procedure, before considering what eyewitness factors during the crime might affect accurate identification. After viewing the I-I-Eye or one of two control aids, 293 undergraduate participants read a trial transcript about a criminal case that contained either strong or weak eyewitness evidence. The police consistently followed proper procedures for eyewitness evidence in the strong case, but not in the weak case. Only the I-I-Eye participants demonstrated sensitivity to the strong and weak eyewitness evidence by rendering more guilty verdicts in the strong compared with the weak case. The I-I-Eye teaching aid provides a framework for analyzing eyewitness testimony that may improve jurors' and legal professionals' assessments of eyewitness accuracy in criminal cases.

The effectiveness of judicial instructions on eyewitness evidence in sensitizing jurors to suggestive identification procedures captured on video

“…Our finding that the judicial instructions were ineffective in improving people's evaluations of eyewitness evidence replicates previous studies with different versions of judicial instructions (Ramirez et al 1996: Experiment 1;Pawlenko et al 2013). However, our study makes an important contribution because the Bayesian analyses provide informative evidence about null effects that is not possible with null-hypothesis significance testing (see e.g., Dienes 2014).…”

The Novel New Jersey Eyewitness Instruction Induces Skepticism but Not Sensitivity

“…A source credibility explanation could also accommodate the fact that the I-I-Eye Aid used by Pawlenko et al [ 13 ] induced sensitivity. Specifically, the I-I-Eye Aid was not presented within the context of the mock trial.…”

“…The relevant test would be to have the content of the New Jersey instruction delivered by someone other than the judge. Who that might be in practice is a complicated issue, but methodologically in the laboratory, one could simply pull the instruction outside the context of the mock trial, similar to how Pawlenko et al [ 13 ] presented the I-I-Eye Aid; the prediction being that in such case the instruction would induce sensitivity. Likewise, one would predict that the I-I-Eye Aid, if presented by the judge rather than researchers, could induce skepticism rather than sensitivity.…”

“…Such additional instruction has been found effective, albeit in a different pedagogical format. Pawlenko, Safer, Wise, & Holfeld [ 13 ], for example, tested whether a 24-slide PowerPoint presentation (which they called the “interview-identification-eyewitness factor” teaching aid, or the “I-I-Eye aid” for short), which explained various factors affecting the reliability of eyewitness identifications, affected verdict rates amongst mock jurors ( N = 293 undergraduate students) reading a vignette of a criminal murder trial. They found a promising result, namely, that the I-I-Eye aid increased sensitivity to the strength of identification procedures, relative to two different standard instructions.…”

Sensitizing Potential Jurors to Variations in Eyewitness Evidence Quality Using Counterfactual Thinking

“…Additional research should incorporate more realistic constellations of eyewitness factors to test the effectiveness of a counterfactual mindset on eyewitness evidence evaluation under more representative conditions (see Pawlenko, Safer, Wise, & Holfeld, 2013). It is noteworthy (and troubling), however, that despite such a strong operationalization, participants in the default mindset control condition did not appropriately recognize lower quality eyewitness evidence and, if anything, viewed it as higher quality than the high quality evidence (likely due to the post-identification feedback; see conviction rates and likelihood of guilt ratings in Figure 1, Panels B & C).…”