Eyewitness testimony is widely held to be the most powerful and pervasive type of evidence routinely introduced into courts of law and the most important source of evidence leading to conviction. The aim of the current research was to address the issue of eyewitness testimony in the British legal system. Specifically, the research was designed to examine contemporary understanding of the potential limitations of eyewitness memory and to compare the Cognitive Interview with the 'standard' British police interview. The survey of opinion about the limitations of eyewitness memory included all those groups involved in the legal process; police investigators, solicitors, barristers and members of the public (potential eyewitnesses and jurors). The major findings from this survey were that there was considerable lack of awareness of the actual implications of adjudicative facts that bear on the reliability of eyewitness testimony, and that solicitors and barristers were more in tune with findings of empirical research than were police officers. Investigation of the Cognitive Interview and its constituent parts failed to replicate the extremely positive results reported in the body of previous research by the interview authors, Fisher and Geiselman: significant and consistent enhancement effects were not typically found. The practical and theoretical explanations of these findings are discussed with particular reference to the importance of the method of training and the recent developments of the Cognitive Interview.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:737434 |
| Date | January 1993 |
| Creators | Noon, Elizabeth |
| Publisher | University of Leicester |
| Source Sets | Ethos UK |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Source | http://hdl.handle.net/2381/34678 |
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