Eyewitnesses In The Criminal Justice System

The forensic technique eyewitnesses is a term meaning a person who has witnesses an event that is important to a criminal investigation or criminal justice trial. The eyewitness will at first tell a police officer what he or she have witnessed, but after telling the police officer the eyewitness may be required to do other things to help the investigation or trial as well. Nowadays the most normal thing a eyewitness will do is to point a person out in a line-up, but a eyewitness can also be required to witness at court and tell their story about what he or she witnessed. (http://www.simplypsychology.org/eyewitness-testimony.html).

Eyewitnesses has always been used to help investigations and in the criminal justice system. Further back in
Ms. Thompson was an ordinary girl who one day was raped with a knife pointed towards her. About a year after the crime had been committed, Ms. Thompson pointed out her offender. The man she pointed out was a restaurant dishwasher named Ronald Cotton. Mr. Cotton went to trial and ended up in prison after Ms. Thompson had identified him as her offender. After 10 years of imprisonment Mr. Cotton´s judge was overruled after have being able to test his DNA against the DNA that was found on the crime scene, and it did not match. The man who committed the crime against Ms. Thompson ended up in prison for another crime around the same time Mr. Cotton was innocent convicted, and the true offender of the rape told another inmate that he was the real offender. Mr. Cotton and the real offender was very similar in their appearance and their looks. This case had a huge impact on eyewitnesses as a tool in investigations and in criminal justice trials. The public started to hesitate on whether the technique of eyewitnesses was as accurate as they had always thought. People started to see this technique as unreliable and inaccurate.