This study examined children's accuracy in response to truth-lie competency questions asked in court. The participants included 164 child witnesses in criminal child sexual abuse cases tried in Los Angeles County over a 5-year period (1997-2001) and 154 child witnesses quoted in the U.S. state and federal appellate cases over a 35-year period (1974-2008). The results revealed that judges virtua...

Thefts were staged 108 times for as many witnesses who were subsequently given a photo lineup for identifying the thief. The thefts were staged under conditions designed to yield low (33%), moderate (50%), or high (74%) proportions of correct identifications of the thief. Corroborating past research, the relationship between witnesses' identification accuracy and witnesses' confidence was negli...

We examine eight unwarranted assumptions made by expert witnesses, forensic interviewers, and legal scholars about the reliability of children's eyewitness reports. The first four assumptions modify some central beliefs about the nature of suggestive interviews, age-related differences in resistance to suggestion, and thresholds necessary to produce tainted reports. The fifth unwarranted assump...

The field of children's testimony is in turmoil, but a resolution to seemingly intractable debates now appears attainable. In this review, we place the current disagreement in historical context and describe psychological and legal views of child witnesses held by scholars since the turn of the 20th century. Although there has been consistent interest in children's suggestibility over the past ...

After the Supreme Court's ruling in Crawford v. Washington that a criminal defendant's right to confront the witnesses against him is violated by the admission of testimonial hearsay that has not been cross-examined, lower courts have overturned convictions in which hearsay from children was admitted after child witnesses were either unwilling or unable to testify. A review of social scientific...

Undergraduate participants were tested in 144 pairs, with one member of each pair randomly assigned to a "witness" role and the other to an "investigator" role. Each witness viewed a target person on video under good or poor witnessing conditions and was then interviewed by an investigator, who administered a photo line up and rated his or her confidence in the witness. Witnesses also (separate...