What judges know about eyewitness testimony: A comparison of Norwegian and US judges

What Psychologists Know and Believe about Memory: A Survey of Practitioners

“…The Wise and Safer (2004) questionnaire is based on the survey of eyewitness experts reported a decade ago by Kassin, Tubb, Hosch and Memon (2001) and selected issues on which the memory experts agreed both on the answer and its empirical support and in addition were willing to testify in court. Confirming the results of a large body of research reviewed by Benton, McDonnell, Ross, Thomas and Bradshaw (2007), these studies show that US police officers (Wise, Safer, & Maro, 2011), US, Norwegian and Chinese judges (Magnussen, Wise, Raja, Safer, Pawlenko, & Stridbeck, 2008;Wise, Gong, Safer, & Lee, 2010;Wise & Safer, 2004), Norwegian jury eligible citizens and citizens who actually served jury duty (Magnussen, Melinder, Stridbeck, & Raja, 2010) and US law students and undergraduate students have limited knowledge about factors that may affect the reliability of eye witness memory. The one exception to this somewhat depressing message appears to be US defence attorneys (Wise, Pawlenko, Meyer, & Safer, 2007;Wise, Pawlenko, Safer, & Meyer, 2009), who perform closer to the memory experts of Kassin et al (2001).…”

Memory development: implications for adults recalling childhood experiences in the courtroom

“…However, these narratives were sparse on peripheral information and contained reconstructive errors 5 . In an effort to understand whether 'common sense' views of memory are consistent with what the scientific study of memory has revealed, a number of researchers [8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17] have posed questions about how memory operates to various legal professionals (lawyers, law enforcement officers, judges) as well as members of the general public who are eligible for jury service. As it turns out, the common sense view of memory is frequently inconsistent with the findings from memory research.…”

“…These views can be at odds [8][9][10][11][12] with what has been revealed by the scientific study of memory and its development. For example, many jurors and legal professionals (e.g., judges, lawyers, police) in North America 8 and Europe (e.g., Sweden 13 and Norway 14 ) are naïve when it comes to understanding how memories are formed, how they become distorted over time, and how stress and emotion affect remembering [15][16] . Jurors are similarly naïve when it comes to understanding whether children can remember events that happen only once, events that are traumatic, or which factors can affect the accuracy of memories across childhood (e.g., suggestibility, repeated questioning) 17 .…”

Expert Testimony on Eyewitness Evidence: In Search of Common Sense

“…Indicative of this pattern of responding, Granhag et al (2005) also reported that the legal professionals who were surveyed felt they were not up-to-date with research on the reliability of eyewitness testimony. In a further survey, Magnussen et al (2008) found comparable low levels of knowledge regarding eyewitness memory among a Norwegian judicial sample.…”

“…Taken together, the findings from the Innocence Project and surveys such as Wise and Safer (2004) and Magnussen et al (2008) suggest that the knowledge base of legal professionals on eyewitness testimony is inadequate. However, in spite of these findings, the acceptance of expert testimony on the quality of witness evidence in court is relatively uncommon.…”