About the lecture

In this lecture, we think about eye witness testimony and jury unreliability, focusing in particular on: (i) an introduction to the idea that memory decays, reducing the reliability of eye witness testimony; (ii) the jury and expert witness’ lack of understanding of memory decay and its relationship with eye witness testimony reliability; (iii) weapon focus and stress as example factors which can impact memory; (iv) the fact that line-up administrators provide unintentional cues to witnesses regarding who the suspect is; (v) some key ways of improving eye witness testimony accuracy from a line-up, including using a double blind procedure; (vi) Malcolm Alexander, who was wrongly convicted of rape and imprisoned for thirty-eight years; (v) the issues present in the case brought against Malcolm Alexander, including the presence of weapon focus during the crime; (vi) Antonio Beaver, who was wrongfully convicted of a violent carjacking and imprisoned for ten years; (vii) the issues present in the case brough against Antonio Beaver, including improper practices during the line-up; (viii) the limited ability of mock jurors to distinguish between good and bad witnesses; (ix) Benton and colleagues’ 2006 study, which investigated the knowledge of laypeople about memory; (x) some key differences in knowledge of relevant information between laypeople and experts in the legal system; (xi) a 2011 meta-analysis, which found that laypersons’ knowledge is improving with time, but is still significantly different from that of experts.

About the lecturer

Dr Cody Porter is a senior lecturer in social psychology in the department of Health and Social Sciences at the University of the West of England. Dr Porter’s research interests are in information elicitation, lie detection and offending behaviour. Some of Dr Porter’s recent publications include ‘Implementing converged security risk management: Drivers, barriers, and facilitators’ (in press) and ‘Applying the asymmetric information management technique to insurance claims’ (2022).