Why Are Eye Witness Testimonies Unreliable

Eyewitness misidentification is the single greatest cause of wrongful convictions in the United States. After DNA testing came out, 72% of convictions were proved to be wrong because of false eye witness testimonies. Eye witness testimonies are the accounts given in the courtroom during a grand jury or trial by a witness at the event of a crime. False eye witness testimonies convict innocent people into prison. Out of the 80,000 prosecutions a year that rely on eye witnesses, about half get convicted. Of those half, we are still sending 5,000 innocent people to prison each year. There are many reasons why eye witness testimonies are unreliable. Eye witness testimonies rely on 3 basic things, the characteristics of the witness, scene, and actual
Some people may argue that eye witness testimonies can then rely on actual identifications like a line up, but those are proven to be unreliable too. If the suspect is a different race than the witness, they are harder to identify. Out of 271 cases results showed that 65% of eye witness identification were correct with same race and only 45% correct with different race. Line ups can be unreliable because of the type of line up used, the selection fillers who are the people in the line up who aren’t the actual suspect, the number of fillers and the instructions to the witness before the identification. Some line ups have the witness look at one potential suspect at a time, which is proven less reliable than a actual line of people. But, if the people all look too different it’s hard to rely on because there wasn’t much detail about the person needed, and if all the people look too similar, the witness could chose the wrong person on accident because of certain features they both have. The number of people can’t be too much and overwhelm the witness and confuse them, but can’t be too little to again give it