Eyewitness Testimonies

The Reliability of Eyewitness Testimonies Based on Memory
Memory most of the time is on the debate of its reliability, especially within the jury system and on eyewitness testimonies. The significance of eyewitness testimonies cannot be ignored, plus this plays as a crucial role in accusing the true culprit. Nevertheless, there are many innocent individuals, because of this, have to stay in prison for things that they have never done. Based on memory, there is no certain confidence that the testimonies describing what exactly happened at the scene. Tied to Adnan Syed’s case in Baltimore, which is one of the most famous cases that until now, it is still a curiosity and not yet have the true answer. The case is broadcasting on the media, under
Specifically, the four sins contributing in the presence of memory, but not the reliability of memory respectively are a misattribution, suggestibility, bias, and persistence (p. 4-5). In Schacter’s explanation on misattribution’s sin of memory, he illustrates the case of a cognitive psychologist named Donald Thomson back in the 1950s. The victim of Thomson’s case was assured about her memory of the individual who raped her at that night, and it turns out to be Thomson. Nevertheless, the psychologist, Donald Thomson has his strong alibi evidence, which is his presence on the live television show happening on the night and the time the victim was raped. The explanation for the victim’s false memory is that she remembered seeing Thomson’s features and characteristics on the televisions and recalled those as the features and the characteristics of the rapist’s. This example of Thomson illustrates the reliability of people’s memory on recalling concise details of previous events, which psychologist refers as the “problem of memory binding” (p.