To What Extent is an Eyewitness Testimony Credible and Therefore be Used in Court?

Eye witness testimonies are the evidence given in court or in police investigation by someone who has witnessed a crime or an accident. Eye witness testimonies are affected by a number of factors, but the one that I am going to focus on is anxiety. Laboratory studies and some ‘real life’ studies have generally shown impaired recall in people who have witnessed particularly distressing or anxiety induced situations.

Trauma-Related Amnesia: A Window of Uncertainty in the Serial Podcast The malleability of memory is an enigma. While memory can be unpredictable at times, there remains an opportunity to manipulate the brain to extract memories. In court cases, however, extracting memories become problematic and challenging.

Have you ever heard of a person being convicted because of a witness testimony of events that didn’t actually happen? In many cases, a person is wrongly convicted because an eyewitness does not correctly remember what happened. In some situations, this is because the witness lied to authorities, but in other situations it is because of a false or modified memory. Memories are created all the time, but they are not always accurate. We conclude our past from information that we store in our brains, but we also create memories from what we have expected, seen, heard, or imagined.

According to Scheck, Neufeld, and Dwyer (2003), the majority of convictions overturned by DNA evidence involved mistaken eyewitness testimony. The Innocence Project estimates that around 70% of the convictions due to eyewitness misidentification have been overturned by DNA evidence (2015). A main factor in this occurrence is that eyewitness memory is unreliable (Wright, 2007). Eyewitness identification in a line-up is an important tool in criminal investigations. The eyewitness evidence that results from these line-ups has an impact on the subsequent investigation and prosecution procedures (Wells, 1984). Furthermore, according to Wright, it is not just about witnesses making errors when identifying, misidentifying, or not identifying, a suspect

Is our justice system fair? Is our justice system truly set out to do what it was meant to do? Or are there social factors and memory errors that come into play that can change a conviction outcome. In today’s court rooms we have, Defense attorneys, Prosecutors, judges, juries, evidence, forensics experts, witness testimonies, and of course the human memory. What better type of evidence than the human memory, right? Unfortunately, human memory is subject to the power of suggestion and unable to truly recall an event when told to recall. In other words, the story may not be the same as the one that actually happened the day of that event because many variables come into play like cross examinations and the way a question can be asked can alter the answer or how the event was perceived. The main focus of this paper is to see how the human brain is not able to effectively recall events which could possibly convict an innocent person of wrong doing. Also how lawyers use the misinformation effect to their advantage. In order to understand how something as simple as a question can decide a person’s faith we must first answer some questions. First, How does memory actually work and how is memory retrieved when your need to answer a question or being cross examined? Second, how does the misinformation effect play a role when a witness needs to testify against the defense or vice versa? Third, how can structuring a word or sentence effect the outcome of a conviction?

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.

A specific process of which we must doubt the reliability of is the role of memory in eyewitness testimony. Eyewitness testimony is used as vital evidence in the legal system in order to convict criminals, however, it does rely on the reliability of memory, which has been a highly contested topic. Previously, eyewitness testimony has been a highly reliable source in the conviction process. It was trusted by courts of law and law enforcement, however, various research studies have now created reasonable doubt behind the reliability of these testimonies due to the fact that it is now evident that memory can be distorted and reconstructed, an active process in which information

(Wright ET. Al, 2009, p.2) backs up this claim and he also suggests that “one person’s error can become part of another person’s account, and this error can lead to miscarriages of justice.” the original account of what happened could be altered making the recollection of the event not actually accurate. There are factors in which people combine their own memory with another’s memory includes confidence of the person, expertise of an individual and the social costs of disagreeing with each other. An incident in 2008 involving the murder of a TV presenter Jill Dando backs up the suggestion that discussion by witness can lead to unreliability.

The challenges of memory recovery have not escaped judicial attention. Courts have increasingly found repressed memory testimony to be

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

It is a common misconception that the human memory is accurate and reliable (Poston, 2014). For example, the supposition that memory is mostly dependable forms a major part of the legal system. Judges, attorneys and juries are inclined to trust the testimony of a confident eyewitness (Van Wallendael et al., 2007) and confessions are considered among the most compelling forms of evidence (e.g., Cutler, 2012; Kassin, Bogart, & Kerner, 2012). However, 30 years of ground-breaking work by Elizabeth Loftus around the theory of false memory has cast doubt over the role memory should play in legal proceedings (Loftus, 2005). Loftus defines false memory as a phenomenon that occurs when a person believes they remember something that did not actually

Mark L. Howe and Martin A. Conway’s article Memory and the Law: Insights from Case Studies discusses how memories that have to be recalled or often not properly encoded because the memory took place during a time of extreme stress or under the influence of drugs or alcohol. This is difficult when memory is often an important piece of evidence in a trial, but due to a chance of failure in encoding or retrieval it is not always the most reliable evidence therefore it should be supplemented with more reliable evidence.

Exploring Psychology explains how memory is reconstructive and able to reproduce (Myers, 309). This means that not only do we forget the actual facts of an event, but we alter the memories and began to believe them. This can be due to many factors that affect memory storage. There may be a misinformation effect where information that is heard may alter one’s memory of a particular experience. This is similar to source amnesia where a false memory is gathered from something we heard, read, or even imagined. Juries are undeniably aware of the fallibility of eyewitness testimony. Although there are multiple factors altering memory, improving memory is possible through practices such as rehearsing repeatedly the memories, activating retrieval cues,

The facts given to me did not surprised me at all because memory sometimes could not be precise in some cases. For instance when it comes to the judicial system, when memory is served as evidence, as it does in many civil and criminal legal happenings, there are a great number of limitations to the truthfulness of the evidence. Perhaps because memory does not provide us with an actual representation of events we experienced in the past. I believe the memory of a person testifying on a case could either break or make the case. This disconnect between the science of memory and the beliefs hold by those individuals involved in judicial processes can lead to a fundamental failure of justice. This is why memory is a very important aspect of our

Reconstructive memory is the hypothesis that memories may be mangled by a person’s earlier information or wants incorporating an event. Zack et al (2000) initiated this idea as memory, along with dynamic entertainment and interpretation of events. Instead of just inspecting the built-up facts that we optically discerned or ken to have transpired, recollection draws after comprehension and information that we as of now have in our encephala of past comparative occasions (customarily kenned as schemas). A influence of a schema in an eyewitness testimony may emerge as the witness makes a ‘memory’ of what transpired-in the occurrence a hoodlum may have apprehended a lady's purse and flee, yet because of the past information and experience put