Inaccurate Eyewitness Testimony

Eyewitness testimony is the sworn statement of a person who witnessed a crime or accident and goes to trial to provide the court with details of what he or she had seen. The process is not as simple as going to the police station and identifying a suspect in a line up. The witness is questioned about the events that led to the crime and why they were at the scene. Questioning covers what happened before, during, and after the crime occurred. The eyewitness is usually interviewed by a number of police and prosecutors. Questioning is followed up by the eyewitness choosing the person they had seen committing the crime in a line up of usually six individuals with similar characteristics. The testimony of an eyewitness plays a major role in the jury's verdict during a

trial. When there is no evidence to apprehend a suspect, prosecutors use sworn statements from an eyewitness in order to make an arrest. When all else fails the prosecutors have the memory of a troubled and possibly traumatized victim or witness make an identification on a person who looks similar to the one who committed the crime. As human beings we usually provide unreliable information about events or even create false memories because we have heard about something for a long time so it makes it into our memory storage. These false memories could simply be curiosity or can also be associated with real life experiences (Thean, 2013). Eyewitness testimonies tend to be controversial for this reason since the majority of witnesses themselves do not provide accurate descriptions of incidents yet jurors are still deeply influenced by them (Fisher, 1997). Although jurors rely on eyewitness testimony heavily to make their final verdict, studies have shown that the memory of an eyewitness is prone to error due to a number of factors including anxiety and stress, reconstructive memory, and bias leading questions. Reconstructive memory has an effect on eyewitness testimonies because witnesses tend to add parts to a story which never happened. When forming memories interpretation occurs immediately. Our memories are formed and stored in a way that makes the most sense to us by trying to fit information into schemas in order to organize it (Bartlett, 1932). When an individual is forced to recall an event then the more gaps there are in trying to reconstruct that memory. Bartlett (1932) found that when individuals were told to recall a story they had been told they began to focus on a small part and emphasize its importance while filtering the rest of what they heard out. Reconstruction of memories differed incredibly between the individuals Bartlett had used because what they remembered from the story had been altered to fit their schema causing false memories. Psychologist Elizabeth Loftus has done a number of experiments which focused on how subsequential information can change an eyewitness’s description of any event. The focus of her experiments has been how wording bias and misleading information can impact the way an individual imagines and describes an event after it has already happened. Loftus experiments consisted of a slideshow showing an incident such as a car accident occurring. Immediately after the group views these slides they are questioned about what they witnessed. One of the slideshows shown was of a car driving and hitting a pedestrian (Loftus, Miller, & Burns, 1978). Just like every other one of her experiments, it was followed up with questions. The questions consisted of misleading questions such as, “How fast was the car going when it passed the yield sign?” These questions were designed to have those part of the questioning to believe that there was a yield sign because they were asked about it. They knew there was a sign but because of the question they thought it was yield rather than stop. Afterwards the subjects of the experiment were shown a pair of slides. One was the original image all subjects had seen and the other was the same slide except the stop sign was changed to a yield. After both images were seen next to one another, subjects who had been asked the question about the yield sign were likely to say the original image was the one with the yield. The leading question caused the subjects to have an inaccurate memory of happened.

This experiment challenged the reliability of eyewitness testimony and validity of their memory while introducing what is known as the misinformation effect. Continuously, evidence has shown that mistaken eyewitness testimonies have lead to hundreds of wrongful convictions causing individuals to spend years in prison or even receive the death penalty for something they did not do. Most of the cases with a major false identification impact are ones where DNA was not used or the technology to identify individuals using DNA was not yet made. Inaccurate eyewitness accounts have been connected to about 73% of all DNA exonerations and freed hundreds of innocent people (Garrett, 2011). A famous incident of a wrongfully convicted person is the 1984 conviction of a former Marine, Kirk Bloodsworth. He is the first person to have been sentenced to death and later exonerated due to DNA evidence. Kirk was just 22-years-old when he was wrongfully convicted of the rape and murder of a nine-year-old girl. His conviction was largely based on the testimony of five individuals who claimed to have witnessed Kirk Bloodsworth committing the

crime. Thanks to new technology and the ability to finally identify individuals by their DNA, he was freed after nearly nine years in prison. According to the Innocence Project, an organization that uses DNA evidence to exonerate individuals who have been wrongfully convicted, over 240 convictions have been overturned since the introduction of DNA testing in the 1990s. As part of being human, eyewitnesses make errors in remembering details and sometimes even create their own idea of what happened to fit what they already know or understand. Any memory can be modified or supplemented due to an endless number of factors. What this tells us is that eyewitness testimony is not reliable and should only be used as a tool to help a trial rather than being a main piece of evidence. Yet the influence an eyewitness has on a jury is staggering. In another study done by Loftus (1982) it showed how a trial with eyewitnesses raised the chance of a guilty verdict. The mock trials conducted started with an 18% guilty verdict and when an eyewitness was introduced to the trials the chances of a guilty verdict were 72%. Even when the identification of the eyewitness was challenged and proven wrong the guilty verdict only dropped to 68%. That's absolutely insane. Eyewitness identification is only needed in 5% of trials so why do prosecutors use them as reliable evidence to a case? (Loh, 1981). It is because they know all these statistics and use them to their advantage.