2023 Criminal Law CPD Series: Assessing witness credibility: Is it possible to tell whether someone is lying or telling the truth?

Substantive Law

Professional Skills

CPD Points: 1.5

About

Witness testimony can be extremely influential in legal investigations and trials; however, sometimes witnesses lie. Such deception can be detrimental to due process and can result in miscarriages of justice. Thus, it is important for legal personnel and factfinders to be able to determine whether someone is lying or telling the truth.

In an interactive seminar, I will discuss research investigating behavioural and content indicators of deception. This seminar will help legal practitioners understand the difficulties in discriminating liars from truth-tellers as well as the evidence-base for various lie detection techniques.

Presenter

Helen Paterson is an Associate Professor in Forensic Psychology at the University of Sydney. She investigates the reliability and credibility of eyewitnesses. In particular, her research focuses on best practice techniques to collect accurate and complete accounts from eyewitnesses. She also studies lies and the detection of deception.