Kate A Houston, Lorraine Hope, Amina Memon, J Don Read
Surveys on knowledge of eyewitness issues typically indicate that legal professionals and jurors alike can be insensitive to factors that are detrimental to eyewitness accuracy. One aim of the current research was to assess the extent to which judges, an under-represented sample in the extant literature, are aware of factors that may undermine the accuracy and reliability of eyewitness evidence (Study 1). We also sought to assess the knowledge of a jury-eligible sample of the general public (drawn from the same population as the judges) and compared responses from a multiple choice survey with a scenario-based, response-generation survey in order to investigate whether questionnaire format alters the accuracy of responses provided (Study 2)...
September 2013: Behavioral Sciences & the Law