Monday, November 6, 2017
The Reliability of an Eyewitness
During the process of going over the Mike Brown case, I realized that a big part of the case was just built off of eyewitness testimony. But is there too much trust put into eyewitness accounts? According to Scientific American, memories are reconstructed each time we try to recall them, and therefore can be altered to make the person believe that something happened, that actually did not. With all of the possibly false stories circulating about the Mike Brown shooting, is it not entirely possible that a person would think they saw something they truly did not. This is not to blame the witnesses, as this is entirely subconscious. According to a study conducted by Jacqueline Pickrell and Elizabeth F. Loftus, in which they gave subjects 4 highly detailed events, three of which they had experienced, and a fourth, which was fictional. About 1/3 of subjects claimed they had recollection of the fictional event, and in a follow up interview 1/4 still stood by the story. After looking at this study, how much trust can we really put in witnesses?
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I fully agree with you on this and found the science behind it interesting. I thought it would also be beneficial to include the more surfaced reasoning why eye witnesses can't always be trusted, and that is due to them being on one side or the other and slightly modifying the truth to benefit the person they are identifying with.
ReplyDeleteGood point Nathaniel, it is pretty important to have a good testimony from a witness because it could make or break the case. Especially with the science behind this, it could explain why some innocent people get convicted and vice versa. This is a real eye opener to how legitimate the witnesses are and they may not be even noticing their incorrectness.
ReplyDeleteI definitely agree with them. I definitely think that if the experiment showed that 1/3 had recollection of the fictional event, they should have not put so much trust in them. What do you think they could have done though, to make sure that their eyewitnesses were more reliable?
DeleteI think in any case when you witness something, your mind is going to forget things or change things if you are bias towards one party. Therefore, I would write down everything that happened in the situation as soon as I saw it so that I could provide the most accurate description of what happened.
DeleteBut not everyone who sees a tragic event has time to write down the details. It could possibly be traumatizing for them.
DeleteI think they should always interview the witnesses as fast as possible, so it is a raw and unprepared speech about what they saw. Once the media takes hold of a situation and starts circulating stories, false ideas might take hold of a witness and they will believe they saw something they didn't.
DeleteI agree but that is already in their protocol to get the witnesses stories taken down as soon as possible but in many times the witness will surface later on in the investigation or be called to the stand later during the trial and will bump with their own stories rendering them as unreliable.
ReplyDeleteI think part of the problem in eyewitness testimonies is people's unwillingness to admit what they don't know. It is better to admit to not knowing than to make up something. It has been shown as well that the brain fills in gaps in stories or puts in things that aren't there just to complete pictures.
ReplyDeleteIt's really up to the jury and the judge to put value over these eyewitness testimony. The jury may hold some biases causing them to believe in the story.
ReplyDeleteThe human brain is easily influenced by articles because more often than not we assume articles given to us in a class or in a study has been checked and is accurate.
ReplyDeleteThere should always be a certain degree of doubt circulating eye witness testimonies. It's true that people have a tendency to have false memories, and a witness reporting such false information could make or break a case.
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