Title: What judges know about eyewitness testimony: A comparison of Norwegian and US judges
Abstract: Abstract We surveyed 157 Norwegian judges about their knowledge and beliefs about eyewitness testimony, and compared their answers to a prior survey of 160 US judges. Although the Norwegian judges were somewhat more knowledgeable than the US judges, both groups had limited knowledge of eyewitness testimony. The Norwegian judges, like the US judges, frequently differed from eyewitness experts in their responses to such important issues as whether eyewitness confidence is related to identification accuracy at trial and what is the best method for conducting identification procedures. As was true for the US judges, more knowledgeable Norwegian judges had many of the beliefs that may be necessary for reducing and mitigating the effects of eyewitness error. The results suggest that increasing judges' knowledge of eyewitness testimony may be an important component of the solution to eyewitness error. Keywords: eyewitness testimonybeliefsjudgesUSANorway Notes 1. The Kassin et al. (2001) experts did not agree about the impact of very high stress on the accuracy of testimony, and so Wise and Safer (2004) did not include statement no. 15 in their survey. However a recent meta-analysis (Deffenbacher, Bornstein, Penrod, & McGorty, Citation2004) clearly demonstrated the negative impact of extreme stress at the time of crime on later accuracy. 2. Judges gave two slightly different responses to the eyewitness statements. For eyewitness statements 7–11, judges answered whether they believed the statement was generally true, generally false, or I do not know. For the remaining eyewitness statements, the judges answered on a 1–5 Likert scale with labels of strongly agree, agree, neither agree nor disagree, disagree, and strongly disagree. Generally true or generally false was used as the responses for eyewitness statements 7–11 rather than a Likert scale to make it easier for the judges to answer these questions. This change in the responses was necessary since for these eyewitness statements the judges not only indicated how they would respond to the statement but also how they believed the average juror would respond and, for the US sample, what legal safeguards they would permit attorneys to use to educate jurors about the eyewitness factors. 3. The correlation is negative because the responses 'strongly agree' and 'agree' were values of 1 and 2, respectively, on a five-point Likert scale for statement 16.
Publication Year: 2008
Publication Date: 2008-06-01
Language: en
Type: article
Indexed In: ['crossref']
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Cited By Count: 41
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