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7 Aust. & N.Z. J. Criminology 1 (1974)

handle is hein.journals/anzjc7 and id is 1 raw text is: AUST. & N.Z. JOURNAL OF CRIMINOLOGY (March, 1974): 7, 1 EDITORIAL Experimental Psychology and the Criminal Process IT IS often stated, if not generally agreed, that our trial process is not only very good but is beyond comparison better than any other system yet devised. But is it really so very good? The notion of Beyond reason- able doubt, allied with the adversary system, has long been held as a reason for the effectiveness of our criminal process, but more recently there have been mutterings that all is not so well, and certainly not so well in our present scientific technological age. Arne Trankell in his book Reliability of Evidence) sets out some of the basic problems related to perception and memory and then gives two examples of reported perceptions being, in fact, inaccurate. These two examples - Murder in the Corridor and A Thck Bundle of Brown Envelopes - are presented in the section headed Experimental Witness Psychology. This aspect of the witness and his evidence must give rise to some real misgivings, especially when counsel endeavour to claim that a witness is lying when his evidence is not wholly in accord with other facts. A number of matters may be briefly touched upon and some of these have been discussed by Haward(2). The question of how a certain individual may behave under certain clearly prescribed circumstances is a matter that can valuably be clarified by experimentation. To this end Haward(3) gives an example (Scane v Ainger) which concerned a mentally defective individual riding a bicycle, and in particular how he rode the bicycle when faced with turning into an intersection. By experimentation one can note (a) how the plaintiff rides and (b) how a group of similar mentally defective individuals ride and react to a particular problem. Another matter of importance is that of identification. That this is an issue of very considerable gravity in the functioning of the criminal law is clearly attested to by Blom-Cooper and Lord Russell of Liverpool when discussing the A6 murder more properly known as R v Hanratty(4). Further, Blom-Cooper (p. 57) cites the cases of Adolph Beck in 1896 and, in 1954, Emery, Power and Thompson, as proven examples of in- accurate identification. When dealing with this issue Trankell(5) uses the example taken from the trial, in Sweden, of Goran Johansson in the Oland arson case in 1957. In this case a witness claimed to have recognised the car of the accused with the accused driving, this under conditions of darkness when the only lighting being from headlights. The evidence was challenged and, finally, the defence requested that the court appoint a witness psychologist to clarify the situation (p. 70). Trankell, who was the appointed psychologist, describes an experimental situation he set up such that it was shown that the witness had one chance in 46,656 (1/6)6 of doing as well as he did in the experimental situation. A similar type of situation occurred again in Sweden in the Moller murder case in 1959 when it was shown experimentally that a witness only had one chance in 177,147 of doing as well as she did.- This type of approach should perhaps be encouraged in our courts and become a common occurrence. 1

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