Continue reading »]]> Sam Hallam has been released on bail this afternoon as the prosecution announced no opposition to the overturn of his conviction.

Sam has been in jail since 2004, convicted of murder on the basis of flawed eyewitness evidence and has been subject to a serious miscarriage of justice. Lady Justice Hallet is presiding over the appeal and will give a ruling tomorrow. Sam is now 24 years old, he was 18 when convicted, and he was present in the courtroom at today’s hearing.

Members of the Eyewitness Group have been following Sam’s case since going to see the play Someone To Blame, which highlighted the miscarriage Sam faced. They took this photo today of Sam leaving the courtroom today.

For information on this story, click here.

Continue reading »]]> A new website has recently been launched for the 13th European Congress of Psychology 2013, which will be hosted in Stockholm, Sweden.

Amina has accepted an invitation to give a State of the Art Presentation at the congress. She will be giving a speech about her research into eyewitness testimony, connecting the various research areas she works in, including social influences on memory accuracy and credibility. There will also  be a key note speech delivered by Elizabeth Loftus on her research into human memory.

The Congress is expected to welcome over 3,000 delegates from around the world and aims to promote and improve psychology as a profession, as an applied discipline and as an area of scientific research. Please click here for more information about the 2013 Congress.

Continue reading »]]> The Centre for Anatomy and Human Identification at the University of Dundee has brought together the works of a range of academics to produce this new and exciting book, Craniofacial Identification, published by Cambridge University Press.

Continue reading »]]> Dr. Ashok Jansari, a reader at the University of East London,  has been involved in the making of an exciting new television series soon to be aired on Channel 4.

Hidden Talent is a new six-part series which discovers people with extraordinary hidden talents through a series of tests. Overseen by scientists and academics, over 900 people from all around the country undergo testing, and a number are found to have special physical, mental, sensory or creative talents – of which they were totally unaware.

Dr. Ashok advised on the 5th episode in the series – Super Tasker and Super Recogniser, which will air on Tuesday 22nd May 2012, 9pm (UK). Super Recognition is anability that about 2% of the population have, of being incredibly good at remembering faces. This is a skill that is finding its way into society, with recent work in the Metropolitan police looking at officers who have been very successful in identifying suspects from the London riots using CCTV footage.

For further information on this series please click here for the official press release.

Continue reading »]]> Members of the Eyewitness Group are kitting up every week and making the most of the beautiful scenary right on Royal Holloway’s doorstep.

A mixture of ages, fitness levels and research interests from the Royal Holloway Psychology department get together once a week to run around Virginia Waters Lake in Windsor Great Park.

It’s not just your academic muscles that need regular work-outs so keep up the good work everyone!

Photo: Erin Hawkins, Amina Memon, Francesca Ainsworth, Rebecca Lucas, Debbie Gooch, Courtenay Norbury, Polly Dalton & Szonya Durant

Continue reading »]]> This Wednesday, the 7th March, members of the Eyewitness Group went to Kings Head Theatre in Islington for a performance of Someone To Blame.

This verbatim play was written using extracts from  interviews with friends and family members, as well as police interview and court transcripts from the trial, of Sam Hallam. Sam is a 24 year old from London who has been serving a life sentence since 2004 for murder, of which he is innocent.

The only evidence against him at the trial in 2005 was based on two eyewitnesses who gave inconsistent and unreliable testimonies; one witness retracted their evidence in court.

The play was incredibly moving and raised a number of issues in the reliance on eyewitness testimony, many of which are at the forefront of the work conducted by the RHUL Eyewitness Group
Sam’s date of Appeal has been set for the 16th & 17th May 2012 – members of the eyewitness group are planning to go along to the Appeal. The play is running at Kings Head Theatre until the 31st March.

Continue reading »]]> The ‘European Homicide-Suicide Study’ (EHSS) started in 2006 as a collaborative project including seven European countries with the aim to put criminological research on HS on a new and more solid basis. The empirical cornerstone of this project is the collection of complete national samples of Homicide-Suicide (HS) cases covering a whole decade (ca. 1996 to 2005). With nearly 2000 cases of HS, it is the largest sample of its kind world-wide.

With the occurance of three HS in the UK in the past three months, BBC News discusses the rising occurance of this type of crime, and how little research has been conducted in this area so the development of the EHSS database is welcomed by academics and practitioners worldwide. To see the original article, please click here.

Continue reading »]]> Last weekend, some of the Royal Holloway Eyewitness Group members donned their volunteer t-shirts and took part in Royal Holloway’s annual Science Open Day.

Over 3,800 people came along on the day to explore the campus and take part in the interactive demonstrations, lectures and even tours of our MRI Scanner were on offer.

Click here to watch a youtube video about the day.

The Eyewitness Group marked their territory with a bit of police tape which caught people’s attention and had a few demonstrations on the day. Julie had people queueing up to make their very own e-fit face composite of their mum, nan, dad, siblings, with some very accurate, and some not quite so, composites being created. Francesca and Kirsty were testing people’s eyewitness skills with a short video clip and a police line-up, demonstrating how difficult it is to correctly identify faces…especially when the suspect has grown a beard! Amina, Ben and Elina were busy at work handing out questionnaires and attacting interest of potential future participants.

At the end of the day we were all exhausted but in the best way possible, glad that we were able to pass on some of our eyewitness knowledge some budding future scientists.

Look out for us at next year’s open day!!

Continue reading »]]> The Royal Holloway Eyewitness Group welcomed Leanne ten Brinke to the Psychology department yesterday to give a departmental talk on her PhD research.

Leanne completed her PhD in the Porter Forensic Lab at the University of British Columbia, Canada. Her thesis examined the detection of deception using behavioural cues based on Darwin’s inhibition hypothesis. The hypothesis states that some facial movements related to emotion are involuntary and will therefore ‘leak’ the genuine emotion that the individual is feeling.

Leanne discussed this hypothesis during her seminar and discussed her research into ‘high-stakes’ lying. Television footage of relevatives pleading for the safe return of their loved ones was coded frame by frame for facial movements that display emotion. Half of the pleaders were known to be guilty of the individual’s disappearance and were therefore attempting to deceive and/or conceal their emotions during the plea. She found that deceptive pleaders were unable to replicate genuine sadness, nor were they able to fully conceal any positive emotions compared to genuine pleaders. She discussed the practical implications of these findings. Click here for the full paper.

There was a great turn out for the seminar and a lot of discussion was generated during the question and answer session afterwards. The Eyewitness Group would like to thank Leanne for coming in to give this seminar and wish her all the best in her new Post-doc position at University of California, Berkeley.