Essay On Eyewitness Identification

What exactly is an eyewitness identification? Well, according to the English dictionary eyewitness identification is a person who actually sees some act, occurrence, or thing and can give a firsthand account of it: Eyewitness identification is also known as Eyewitness ID. With this in mind, everyday people are accused of crimes, whether they are falsely accused or not, people still end of facing time. For example, people can be accused due to someone’s actions being misleading, someone may have imagined someone there, or something that never happened, but also someone’s lack of memory could cause them to lose track of what happened that day or night. For instance, automatic encoding is also known as automatic processing, in which this term means “the encoding of details like time, space, frequency, and the meaning of words”. According to the Psychology book, an example of

256, Spielman). Inaccurate eyewitness identifications can confound investigations from the earliest stages. Critical time is lost while police are distracted from the real perpetrator, focusing instead on building the case against an innocent person” (Sheck, InnocenceProject.com). So the question arises “how reliable would you predict an eyewitness’s testimony of a crime to be”? Well, the eyewitness can have several factors that indicate their decisions. These factors include misinformation, imagination, and things such as amnesia. With that being said, misinformation can be very misleading, this means that an eyewitness can identify a potential suspect with the wrong information. The eyewitness can have a full description of the potential suspect, however, some of the information they have may be misinterpreted or ultimately wrong. What I mean by this is that at first they may have said that the suspect was a “different height, weight, age range, hair color, etc.” (Sheck,