Eyewitness Testimony

Eyewitness evidence has always been considering critical information when it comes to court trials and convictions. But how reliable are eyewitnesses? Scientific research has shown that eyewitness’s memories are often not accurate or reliable. Human memory is very malleable and is easily changed by suggestion. Relying on eyewitness evidence instead of scientific data often leads to wrongful convictions. Scientific evidence is much more reliable, and should be more important in court cases than eyewitness evidence.

According to “The Science Behind Eyewitness Identification Reform” there are two main variables that affect eyewitness testimonies “Estimator variables: are those that cannot be controlled by the criminal justice system. They include simple factors like the lighting when the crime took place or the distance from which the witness saw the perpetrator, and the degree of stress or trauma a witness experienced while seeing the perpetrator” and “System variables: are those that the criminal justice system can and should control. They include all of the ways that law enforcement agencies retrieve and record witness memory, such as lineups, photo arrays, and other identification procedures”. Eyewitness misidentification has led to 75% of false convictions that were overruled by modern DNA testing according to “The Innocence

It is said that there are many different versions to a story. There is one persons story, then there is an other person’s story, and then, there is the truth. “Our memories change each time they are recalled. What we recall is only a facsimile of things gone by.” Dobrin, Arthur. "Your Memory Isn't What You Think It Is." (online magazine). Psychology Today. July 16, 2013. http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/am-i-right/201307/your-memory-isnt-what-you-think-it-is. Every time a story is told, it changes. From Disney movies to books, to what we tell our friends and colleagues. Sometimes the different sides to the story challenge the

Eyewitness testimonies are based on a person’s ability to recall what took place accurately. Memory research has proven that a person’s memory is not a recording but it is reconstructive. Loftus and Palmer’s study set out to prove that the memory could be reconstructed through the use of language.

The investigation into memory - how we encode, store and retrieve data - made great advances in the 20th century. Along with biological influences memories define who we are, without them our individuality would be lost. This essay will scrutinize the multi-store model of memory and working model of memory to determine their legitimacy. Each model will be examined on its merits at how it explains cognitive functions. Through tools such as the cognitive interview, eyewitness testimony has been deployed in countries around the world to send millions to lengthy prison sentences. Despite its widespread use, the question remains: how much can we trust someone’s memory in the courtroom?

It has been shown that eyewitness misidentification is one of the biggest factors in wrongful convictions, which has been overturned due to DNA (Innocence). Forensic evidence is one of the factors used to determine ones’ guilt or innocence in the court of law; however, some of the evidence used can pose a problem in court. Eye witness testimony has caused a lot of faults in court cases because it is portrayed as a strong factor of evidence. Eye witness testimony should not be used as primary evidence because of how unreliable, misidentified, and the impact it can have in the court of law. Eyewitness identification should have different alternatives in how it should be presented to the witness so that bias is not present.

An eyewitness testimony is a proceeding whereby the witness of a crime will stand in court and recall the events which they perceived and is involved in the identification of the perpetrator (Laney & Loftus, n.d.). Eyewitnesses testimonies have become a staple for many legal proceedings and is often taken as hard evidence for a crime which someone has committed. However, there has been a staggering number of innocent people who have been convicted of a crime based on eyewitness testimonies. This is what led to the creation of the Innocence Project whose mission is to use DNA evidence to free wrongly convicted individuals ("About - Innocence Project," n.d.). This essay will explore some of the reasons behind mistaken eyewitness testimonies,

Research studies in relation to eyewitness testimony have been going on for hundreds of years. A study done in 1999 by Marcus D. Durham and Francis C. Dane at Mercer University, looked at ways to assess prospective jurors’ knowledge of the factors that may influence eyewitness behavior. Those factors include topics such as race, memory processes, age, and stress. In addition, the researchers “compared students’

Since the development of DNA evidence, More than 300 people have been exonerated in the United states alone, since 1989 as a result of eyewitness misidentification (Hsu, cited in Wixted et al, 2015). Consequently, The Innocence Project was founded in 1992 to assist those individuals who have been wrongfully convicted. The organization claims that over 70% of overturned cases are the result of eyewitness misidentification (Innocenceproject.org, n.d.). Whilst this is American data, it illuminates the tragedy that can emanate from such an unreliable element of the justice system. This essay will argue that eyewitness identification

In eyewitness identification, in criminal law, evidence is received from a witness "who has actually seen an event and can so testify in court.” (Law.com Legal Online Dictionary) While this could be an important piece of the investigation, it can never take the place of DNA, or forensic evidence. Unfortunately, that happens all too much, with our overburdened legal and criminal justice systems. “Eyewitness misidentification is widely recognized as the leading cause of wrongful conviction in the U.S., accounting for more wrongful convictions than all other cause combined.” (Boston College Journal of Law and Social Justice, Volume 35:1, p.2) While we have been aware of this problem for many years, innocent people are still being convicted daily. Too many people

There are many different factors that play a part in the increased chance of a witness correctly identifying a suspect. Such factors should be brought to the attention of the jury and the judge to help in properly assessing whether a witness is correctly identifying a suspect. A study by Magnussen, Melinder, Stridbeck, & Raja (2010) found that of the three different types of people: judge, jury, and general public, that for the most part all where fairly ill-informed on the reliability of eyewitness testimony with judges having the most. Judges only had about an 8% difference in knowledge when compared to jurors. With this information it is very clear that education on the reliability of eyewitness testimony needs to become more of a general knowledge information for the everyone, especially people who are involved in upholding the law. Another factor to look into when evaluating the accuracy eyewitness testimony is the role that memory plays. Memory is divided into three processes: perceiving, remembering, and recalling information (Simmonsen, 2013). There is plenty of room in all three of those stages to forget or falsely remember something. Some factors that play a part when a person perceives an event is the amount of time they are exposed to the event and the suspect. A study conducted by Horry, Halford, Brewer, Milne, & Bull. (2014) found that witnesses were increasingly more likely to correctly identify a suspect if they had been exposed to the suspect for sixty

Researcher Elizabeth Loftus, encapsulated the reliability of human memory and the notion about the inaccuracy of eyewitness accounts. She hypothesized that if eyewitnesses are asked questions with false presuppositions, the erroneous information will be incorporated into the witness’s memory and alter the memory of the witnessed event.

Eyewitness identification and testimony play a huge role in the criminal justice system today, but skepticism of eyewitnesses has been growing. Forensic evidence has been used to undermine the reliability of eyewitness testimony, and the leading cause of false convictions in the United States is due to misidentifications by eyewitnesses. The role of eyewitness testimony in producing false confessions and the factors that contribute to the unreliability of these eyewitness testimonies are sending innocent people to prison, and changes are being made in order to reform these faulty identification procedures.

Several early studies of memory explain how memories tend to create distorted accounts of previous experiences. Bartlett's 1932 study showed how schemas can generalize information, eliminating several details that make up the whole event. In his study, he used the method of serial reproduction to recreate an old Native American folktale, altering the story with each repetition. This experiment suggested that memory is not an identical reproduction of an experience, but a combination of actual events with already existing schema. This connects with eye witness testimony in that memories can be distorted, changed to support what makes sense to the witness, therefore leading to the questioning of reliability in

An Article Review of “Memory blindness: Altered memory reports lead to distortion in eyewitness memory” by Cochran et al. (2016)