Tag
This overview explains the distinction drawn in Clark v. Arizona between observation evidence about a defendant’s conduct and thinking, and clinical testimony about mental disease or capacity. It describes the Court’s rationale and the criticism that separating these categories can remove context needed to understand behavior, then discusses how evidence tied to a specific mental-state element may be evaluated under ordinary evidentiary rules.
This plain-language overview explains what research says about detecting deception from a person’s demeanor, speech, or physiological responses and why those judgments matter when courts assess witness credibility. It describes the low accuracy of unaided human lie detection, reviews limits in training and mechanical methods such as polygraphs, and explains why confident impressions alone cannot reliably distinguish truthful from deceptive witnesses.
This overview describes how emotion can affect the formation, vividness, and later accuracy of memory, with examples relevant to witnesses and jurors. It explains that moderate emotion may sometimes support memory while intense stress can impair details, and that vivid recollection or strong confidence does not by itself show that a memory is accurate.
This overview explains how eyewitness memories are encoded, reconstructed, and affected by information encountered after an event, including wording and feedback. It reviews research on interview procedures, identification practices, and confidence, describing the Cognitive Interview as a structured, memory-informed method and noting that interviewing and identification conditions can influence both accuracy and later confidence.
This plain-language review explains how memory develops from infancy through childhood and how age-related changes can shape children’s accounts of events. It connects research on encoding, knowledge, retrieval, and suggestibility with legal questions about child testimony, including competency, interview methods, hearsay, and the conditions under which expert evidence may help a fact-finder evaluate a child’s statement.
Working memory is a limited, short-lived mental workspace that holds information in awareness while a person uses it, and it supports the initial encoding of an event. The paper connects this capacity limit to eyewitness accounts, explaining why a witness may not take in every detail during a fast event and why immediate confidence or recall does not by itself establish durable accuracy.
The paper examines how emotional violence and the presence of a weapon may influence eyewitness memory, including the tendency for attention to focus on central or unusual details at the expense of peripheral information. It reviews evidence that weapon focus is generally modest and often clearer for descriptions than identifications, and considers how threat, unusualness, and event conditions shape the effect.
Witnesses often remember the meaning of a conversation better than its exact wording, and their recollections can be shaped by context and assumptions about what a speaker meant. The paper describes how missing shared knowledge, distraction, motivated interpretation, and confusion about a memory’s source can alter reports of spoken statements, with implications for courtroom evaluation.
Children can provide accurate testimony, but the way adults question them can shape what they remember and report. The paper reviews research on leading or repeated questions, stereotypes, and accusatory interviewing, and describes open-ended, non-leading, well-documented protocols as a means of reducing the risk of suggestion-related errors.
A show-up presents one person to a witness for identification, often near the scene shortly after a crime, while a lineup presents several people. The paper reviews research indicating that show-ups can produce similar correct-identification rates when the culprit is present, while mistaken identifications of an innocent person become a concern when the culprit is absent.
