Are Children Reliable Sources for Witness Testimonies

It is therefore imperative that Judges take caution not to convict innocent people as a result of over-reliance on children’s testimonies. It should be noted that children testimonies are subject to influence by a lot of factors which might temper their credibility. Some cases in the past have been determined based on child witnesses’ testimonies. In the case of James Kendall v Her Majesty The Queen (1962), where Kendall was accused of killing his wife and her body never found. Judges Judson and Wilfred used the testimonies of Kendall’s children where they had claimed that the father killed their mother. For this reason, critical information may be missed in the process. The information given out by children when testifying are prone to inconsistencies especially on external elements due to their low developed memories.

However, several surveys show that many judicial systems around the world regard children witnesses as reliable sources of testimonies. Review of The Literature The credibility of witness testimony is the level of believability judges or lawyers holds about the acceptability of the information to be treated as accurate and honest. The capacity of a person to give a credible testimony is referred to as competency. Dale et al. (1978) observed that the competency of a child to give an honest testimony is greatly influenced by the environment the child put through including the processes that lead up to the affidavit. The courtroom can as well have some negative impacts on the minor in that he/she is subjected to recount a traumatizing experience which in some way can affect the credibility of his/her testimony because of the feeling that they are so exposed to strangers especially when they are victims of sexual harassment.

Another major factor that has been observed to influence the child witnesses is the kind of questions they are being asked in court by the judge or the accused’s lawyer. Children can be biased to give a wrong account of a past event due to their suggestibility nature. (2005) suggested that delving into a child’s religious beliefs is misleading as it shifts focus away from the actual information required by the court. The effects of the current competency inquiry procedures regarding whether or not testimony is sworn or unsworn has a significant influence on the final decision of a judge. Judges place more weight on sworn testimonies than unsworn regardless of whether or not the evidence given has some truth elements (Vrij & Mann 2004).

A child’s expression of a good understanding of the oath should not in all cases be used to make a final judgment of the matter at hand. Going by the current competency inquiry approaches, the majority of the questions a child is asked are irrelevant to the case at hand and doesn’t show a clear picture of whether or not the child is committed to telling the truth. It was designed by several researchers to support the judges in differentiating between fabricated and honest assertions (Godoy & Higueras 2005). This criterion devised to be used mainly in accessing the credibility of assertions given out by minors who are victims of sexual molestation. It is a core element of statement validity assessment (SVA) which was developed in Germany.

It is made up of three components which are mutually dependent from each other including a structured interview with the plaintiff, assessment of the person’s testimony and information integration with set checklist validity questions. The information obtained from this criterion helps in establishing whether or not the evidence given by a child witness has credibility. These sets backs should, therefore, be addressed by giving each criterion weight depending on the complexity of the matter and other diverse factors such as the age of the minor and the number of times the minor has given out testimonies. Alonso-Quecuty (1999) and Steller (1989) proposed the following qualitative criteria which should be applied in classifying the information obtained from this criterion. These include the assertion that the data collected from CBCA can be treated as credible, probably credible, indeterminate, probably not credible and lastly not credible.

By doing so, the analysis of the testimonies given by a minor will be concluded appropriately, and it will help in giving out a correct judgment that will be fair for both the victim and the accused. A more improved child witness identification procedure called Elimination Lineups was proposed by Puzzulo & Lindsay (1998). (1997) suggested that in order to accurately evaluate the rate of falsehood in a child’s criminal identification process, the proportion of the number of times the child gives a false-positive identification divided by the total size of the identification provides an index which translates to the level of positive identification accuracy of the child. Though many researchers opined that a child training should be conducted before undertaking the identification process, (Davies, Stevenson-Robb, & Flin, 1988) suggested that there were no established training tasks that could positively help improve the correctness of a child’s actual identification ability.

A two-judgment theory of lineup identification was developed in a bid to provide superior child witness identification procedure. It involves two processes; Judgement 1 which entails the child identifying a member who has more resemblance to the criminal. The second step is Judgement 2; This is done by allowing the child to make an absolute identification to ascertain if the selected member in Judgement 1 is the actual criminal or not (Lindsay et al. In the recent past, there has been a growing debate on whether to provide a training session or was the provision of a recall structure enough to interview a child witness. According to (McCabe & Peterson, 1991) a high recall ability and improved reporting accuracy of children aged between 3 and 11 years were witnessed.

Training a child through the narrative elaboration procedure according to the recent study resulted in an increased ability of a child to give a detailed report regarding information and emotions from past experience. Despite these benefits, narrative elaboration procedure has two disadvantages: it requires a long time for a child to undertake the necessary training before testifying in court and it is costly as it needs more finances to train a child. Statement validity analysis (SVA) is one of the procedures that are applied by courts to test the credibility of testimonies given by child witnesses. The third stage involves the CBCA systematic assessment of information in seeking to establish the truthfulness of a testimony given by a child witness. The fourth and last stage consists of the use of a checklist.

This final stage was designed to investigate the effects of alternative explanation on the choice of CBCA. If the evaluator addresses all the issues arising from the validity checklist, SVA provides an alternative examination of the outcomes of the CBCA procedure thus establishing the validity of the testimony given by a child witness. SVA like other procedures has its limitations. A parent or a guardian should also be present during the meeting, to assess the ability of a child to recall past events, questions which are unrelated to the case are asked (Yuille 1991). It contains practical elements that have been demonstrated to have a great significance in enhancing the recall ability of a child. The procedure has also proven to be a more flexible technique of successfully producing witness information.

Despite these advantages, it has limitations in that it doesn’t guard the susceptibility to suggestion hence tempering with the credibility of the testimony. Analysis/ Critique of Literature The court procedures discussed in this research paper presented a broader spectrum to the approaches which are currently followed by courts in handling cases related to child witnesses. The extensive research showed that despite several pieces of research which have already been done, several limitations still exist hence presenting the need for further improvements. Children are a crucial group that needs to be approached with much care due to their vulnerability to abuse from their adult counterparts. Future research focuses more on developing competency inquiry models that surpass the limitations that the current procedures have.

Since competency emanates from the mental ability of a child to perceive truth and lies, future research should liaise with metal experts to reliable ways of assessing the credibility of child witnesses. Summary and Conclusion In conclusion, after studying all the existing procedures that are available in grading the testimonies given by child witnesses, those bestowed with the responsibility to undertake these procedures should handle each process with total care. Child witnesses in felony trials—Competency and protection. New York Law Journal, 1-3. Bala, N. , Lee, K. , Lindsay, R.  Alberta law review, 42(4), 995-1017. Brown, D. , & Pipe, M. E. Individual differences in children's event memory reports and the narrative elaboration technique.  Anuario de Psicología Jurídica, 25(1), 13-19. Lyon, T. D. , Carrick, N.