Beliefs of legal professionals about eyewitness testimony and identification

Abstract

This study examined the beliefs of judges, prosecutors and attorneys about eyewitness memory. Turkish legal professionals and lay people indicated their beliefs about a wide range of factors that affect the accuracy of eyewitness testimony and identification in a survey. The results showed that although some of their beliefs were correct, some of them were wrong. To illustrate, they did not know the advantage of sequential lineups and of warning the eyewitnesses about the possibleabsence of the culprit in reducing the number of false identifications and in providing a more accurate identification. They overemphasized the ability of judges todistinguish between accurate and inaccurate eyewitnesses and overemphasized the positive effect of remembering minor details on the identification process. Overall,attorneys were more knowledgeable about eyewitness memory than judges, prosecutors and lay people who were not different from each other. Moreover, eventhe attorneys̕ mean knowledge scores were not so high. The preventive measures toincrease the knowledge of legal professionals about eyewitness memory issues and tomake the eyewitnesses more reliable were also discussed.