Order from us for quality, customized work in due time of your choice.
At present, eyewitness memories are often the single critical source of information for investigating what happened during a criminal offense. Nonetheless, it is sometimes inaccurate, not relevant to reality, and a significant contributor to unfair sentences. It is believed that false memories are more challenging to recover than correct reminiscence. As a result, eyewitnesses testimony cannot be fully trusted since the degree of its accuracy is not high.
Currently, there are many cases where the eyewitness testimony was the reason for the mistaken sentencing. According to Project Innocence, 71% of 342 prisoners acquitted based on DNA tests have been wrongly convicted based on false indications, which demonstrates the accuracy of eyewitness testimony (QHat, 2016). At the same time, it cannot be said that witnesses are never reliable. However, excessive stress can impair the ability to perform mental tasks (QHat, 2016). In other words, a persons capability to remember the details of a crime may be compromised by the fact that they have witnessed the offense. As a consequence, people can be persuaded to create new reminiscences of events that never really happened. In addition, according to the disinformation effect, memories can be altered by misleading questions to witnesses (Gustafsson et al., 2019). All these factors indicate that remembrance is reconstructive and not static, as a videotape, it is recreated in the mind like a puzzle.
To summarize, eyewitness testimony cannot be fully trusted, since, after excessive stress, the memory becomes fragile, prone to loss and change. Therefore, like any other evidence, it is subject to distortion. The jury must be aware of it before overly trusting witness memories. Moreover, it is necessary to use psychology knowledge to improve the processing of such evidence to make it more reliable and credible.
References
Gustafsson, P. U., Lindholm T., & Jönsson F. U. (2019). Predicting accuracy in eyewitness testimonies with memory retrieval effort and confidence. Frontiers in Psychology, 10(703), 1-10. Web.
QHat. (2016). Is eyewitness testimony reliable? [Video]. YouTube.
Order from us for quality, customized work in due time of your choice.