A influência da memória na realização do reconhecimento pessoal e na tomada do depoimento da vítima nos crimes de estupro

Abstract

The present work aims to analyze how the fallibility of the memory may interfere with the means of obtaining evidence, such as eyewitness identification and victim statement; and how judicial decisions exclusively based on these pieces of evidence may be subject to errors, which occasionally leads to the conviction of innocent people. It is estimated that most of miscarriages of justice in criminal cases are resulted from a victim’s false identification of an innocent suspect. This is a frequent cause of wrongful convictions in judicial proceedings involving sex crimes, for instance rape cases, due to the overvaluation of victim statement and the impossibility of producing other evidence, such as an expert report. With this in mind, the objective is to examining how these pieces of evidence are being provided and which body evidence convictions for rape are being based on, seeking the existence of false memories and proposing a method that could be used in order to avoid this kind of occurrence. It was inferred that the use of cognitive interview technique may avoid the occurrence of eyewitness misidentifications and of false memories during a victim interview, since the way of conducting evidentiary proceedings is decisive for its consistency and trustworthiness. For the same reason, an appropriate valuation of evidence by the judge may be decisive for the outcome of the proceeding, mainly when an accusation is considered as confirmed, although the evidence has been produced without observance of legal requirements. The results of this work were verified by case studies that was explained by bibliographic research, in a propositional way.