Why Is Eyewitness Testimony Reliable

Eye witness testimony is a form of evidence that has been used to convict various criminals in various cases. It is a legal term that refers to an account given by person/persons of an event that they witnessed. Witnesses are used to identify perpetrators or provide details of the crime scene. The account given often has an immense influence on the jury and as a result weighs heavily on the final verdict of a crime. However, this system has often been criticized for its inaccuracy. It has raised questions regarding the extent of reliability of memory. Memory is defined as the process in which information is encoded, stored, and retrieved. However, memory is not concrete. There are various studies that attempt to prove its reconstructive nature.
Taking this into consideration, eyewitness testimony may not always be reliable as it depends solely on a person’s ability to remember faces or events. To a large extent memory (a cognitive process) is unreliable. This essay attempts to provide evidence for the unreliability of memory and as a consequence, eye-witness testimony. One study that attempts to prove the reconstructive nature of memory was conducted by Bartlett in 1932. The aim of the study was to investigate whether people’s memory is affected by schemas (mental representation of knowledge) and the extent to which memory is reconstructive. Bartlett asked British participants to hear a story and reproduce it after a short time. He then asked them to repeat it over a period of month or years. The story he told them was an unfamiliar Native American legend. His results showed that participants remembered the main idea of the story but changed unfamiliar elements to make sense of the story by using terms more familiar
Her study aimed to investigate the influence of (mis)leading information in terms of both visual imagery and wording of questions in relation to eyewitness testimony. The study consisted of two laboratory experiments. The first experiment called for 45 students of the University of Washington. They were each shown seven film-clips of traffic accidents. The clips were short excerpts from safety films made for driver education. The clips were 5 to 30 seconds long. After each clip, the students were asked to write down what the witnessed. They were later asked to answer questions .There were five conditions in the experiment .The independent variable was influenced by means of the wording of the questions. The basic question was 'About how fast were the cars going when they ***** each other?' (collided, smashed, bumped, hit). The results showed that the phrasing of the question influenced the speed estimate. ‘Smashed’ produced a higher speed estimate than ‘bumped’. They concluded that the results could be due to a distortion in the memory of the participant. The phrasing of the question distorted their memory of the event. They also concluded that the results could have been influenced by response-bias factors. This means that participants could have been unsure of the speed and so adjusted their response in order to fit in with the