Eyewitness Testimony Essay

The reliability of eyewitness testimony has been the subject of many studies in Psychology over the years.
‘Judges, lawyers and psychologists believe it to be just about the least trustworthy kind of evidence of guilt, whereas jurors have always found it more persuasive that any other sort of evidence’ Brown (1986)
Bartlett’s theory of reconstructive memory (1932) suggests that we tend to see and in particular interpret and recall what we see according to what we expect and assume to be normal in a given situation, which certainly questions the reliability of eye witness testimony.
One study that Bartlett conducted to test this story was the ‘War of Ghosts’, which was a story about 300 words long. Participants were asked to read it and then

In those cases, the jury found 74% of the defendant guilty of the crimes that they were accused of. Following the report, the Devlin committee considered eye witness testimony and its reliability and concluded and advised that no longer should a jury convict based purely on eyewitness testimony alone.
It is clear that something had to be done about the reliability of eyewitness testimony as there existed a complete paradox about this between judges and juries. Brown reported in 1974 that ‘Judges, defence attorneys and psychologists believe it to be just about the least trustworthy kind of evidence or guilt, whereas jurors have always found it more persuasive than any sort of evidence. Obviously that view may have changed now, the police now have much more sophisticated resources available to them when investigated crimes.
Eye witness testimony, when available, will always be valuable tool to the police when gathering evidence for a suspected crime. However the research that has been carried out over the years has had important implications for the police when interviewing