Eyewitnesses

Noted New Testament scholar Bauckham challenges the prevailing assumption the accounts of Jesus circulated as "anonymous community traditions," instead asserting that they were transmitted in the name of the original eyewitness.

'Jesus and the Eyewitness' argues that the four Gospels are closely based on the eyewitness testimony of those who knew Jesus. The author challenges the assumption that the accounts of Jesus circulated as 'anonymous community traditions', asserting instead that they were transmitted in the name of the original eyewitnesses.

For many of today’s Christians their go-to style of proclaiming the faith is to share their own experiences. While this may be a stepping stone to the conversation, we should not remain on our subjective and unprovable experiences. Rather, Christians should use the pattern set forth in the New Testament by the apostles and evangelists: the gospel of Jesus who died, was buried, and rose to life on the third day according to the Scriptures. In this book the sermons of the apostles and evangelists will be looked into to see how they both proclaimed and defended the Christian faith, giving all Christians the pattern to follow in their own opportunities to share the one true faith.

Eyewitnesses play an important role in criminal cases when they can identify culprits. Estimates suggest that tens of thousands of eyewitnesses make identifications in criminal investigations each year. Research on factors that affect the accuracy of eyewitness identification procedures has given us an increasingly clear picture of how identifications are made, and more importantly, an improved understanding of the principled limits on vision and memory that can lead to failure of identification. Factors such as viewing conditions, duress, elevated emotions, and biases influence the visual perception experience. Perceptual experiences are stored by a system of memory that is highly malleable and continuously evolving, neither retaining nor divulging content in an informational vacuum. As such, the fidelity of our memories to actual events may be compromised by many factors at all stages of processing, from encoding to storage and retrieval. Unknown to the individual, memories are forgotten, reconstructed, updated, and distorted. Complicating the process further, policies governing law enforcement procedures for conducting and recording identifications are not standard, and policies and practices to address the issue of misidentification vary widely. These limitations can produce mistaken identifications with significant consequences. What can we do to make certain that eyewitness identification convicts the guilty and exonerates the innocent? Identifying the Culprit makes the case that better data collection and research on eyewitness identification, new law enforcement training protocols, standardized procedures for administering line-ups, and improvements in the handling of eyewitness identification in court can increase the chances that accurate identifications are made. This report explains the science that has emerged during the past 30 years on eyewitness identifications and identifies best practices in eyewitness procedures for the law enforcement community and in the presentation of eyewitness evidence in the courtroom. In order to continue the advancement of eyewitness identification research, the report recommends a focused research agenda. Identifying the Culprit will be an essential resource to assist the law enforcement and legal communities as they seek to understand the value and the limitations of eyewitness identification and make improvements to procedures.

By shedding light on the many factors that can intervene and create inaccurate testimony, Elizabeth Loftus illustrates how memory can be radically altered by the way an eyewitness is questioned, and how new memories can be implanted and old ones changed in subtle ways.

Imagine. . . Witnessing the destruction of Pompeii. . . Accompanying Julius Caesar on his invasion of Britain. . . Flying with the crew of The Great Artiste en route to dropping the atomic bomb on Nagasaki. . . Civilization's most momentous events come vibrantly alive in this magnificent collection of over three hundred eyewitness accounts spanning twenty-four turbulent centuries -- remarkable recollections of battles, atrocities, disasters, coronations, assassinations and discoveries that shaped the course of history, all related in vivid detail by observers on the scene.

Methods, Measures, and Theories in Eyewitness Recognition Tasks provides a comprehensive review of the fundamental issues surrounding eyewitness recognition phenomena alongside suggestions for developing a more methodologically rigorous eyewitness science. Over the past 40 years, the field of eyewitness science has seen substantial advancement in eyewitness identification procedures, yet theoretical and methodological developments have fallen behind. Featuring contributions from prominent international scholars, this book examines methodological and theoretical limitations and explores important topics, including how to increase the accuracy of identifying perpetrators when using CCTV images, how to create more identifiable facial composites, and the differences in accuracy between younger and older eyewitnesses. Providing in-depth discussion on the limitations of traditional lineups, eyewitness memory fallibility, and the complications that arise when using laboratory simulations, along with suggestions for new methods, this book will be an invaluable resource for researchers in eyewitness recognition, lawyers, players in the criminal justice system, members of innocence commissions, and researchers with interests in cognitive psychology.