Cognitive Eyewitness Testimony

We believe that the best method would be cognitive interviews. In many cases, eyewitness testimony is an important source of evidence which highlights the importance of obtaining an accurate and complete information from them in order to prevent wrongful conviction. Cognitive interviewing is a method where interviewers has a set of rules and guidelines for interviewing the eyewitness which is neither aggressive or accusatory. Where standard police interviewing is often full of interruptions and has an over-reliance on a predetermine list of questions, this method does not interrupt the witness and allow them to control the flow of information through enabling them to tell the events of the story. Our textbook explains that this interviewing process improves the number of correct information generated regarding the event in comparison to other techniques. It has also showed better memory retrieval and communication which in turn produce a larger, more accurate and detailed body of information that we can obtain from the eyewitness.

Another reform in police procedure in pretrial identification methods would be to do a sequential lineup rather than a simultaneous line-up when gathering eyewitness evidence. This way it prevents judgement error, in which

First of all, eyewitness memory is very unreliable, yet, very important in order to decide whether or not to convict an individual. A incorrect or inaccurate judgement could lead to a false conviction. Therefore, it is imperative to be able to be able to extract accurate, detailed and correct information from them. Detecting deception methods discussed above such is not as effective as cognitive interviewing if the goal is to reduce wrongful convictions because it directly and indirectly reduces the possible error rate of eyewitness