3 Reasons Why You Should Not Trust Eyewitness Testimony

Greg Taylor was recently released from prison after serving a 16-year sentence for a crime he didn’t commit according to News Observer. Taylor was sentenced to life in prison in 1993 for murdering prostitute Jacquetta Thomas. During the trial, another prostitute claimed she saw Thomas with Taylor, although she wouldn’t bet her life on her recollection. A different witness testified she saw the victim with Taylor, although she described a scenario that would have been physically impossible. These eyewitness testimonies supported the police’s suspicion that Taylor was the murderer based on his truck being found near the crime of the scene. An estimated 77,000 people per year are charged with crimes solely on the basis of eyewitness testimony according to a 1989 study by A.G. Goldstien. Would you want eyewitness testimony to be the only reliable evidence against you?

Over the years, hundreds of psychology studies have been conducted to test eyewitness testimony reliability, and the results show the following according to Kassin, Fein, and Markus’ Social Psychology book.

1. People Are Biased

After observing an event, people integrate later information about the event, even if false, into their memories. Researcher Elizabeth Loftus asked participant to view a video of a traffic accident and answered the question “About how fast were the cars going when they hit each other?” The word hit was replaced with either smashed, collided, bumped, or contacted for different participants. Participants who were given the word smashed estimated the highest average speed, and those given the word contacted estimated the lowest speed. Furthermore, when asked a week later whether they had seen broken glass at the accident (when none was actually present), 32 percent of participants who were given the word smashed said they had.

The above study is only one example of numerous psychology studies that demonstrate how our memories are not perfect and are influenced by numerous factors.

2. Personal And Situational Factors Influence Eyewitnesses

Witnesses are less likely to identify a criminal if he pulls out a gun. Psychologists Elizabeth Loftus tracked the eye movements of research participants as they watched a slide of a customer walking up to a bank teller with either a gun or a checkbook. Loftus found participants spend more time looking at the gun than at the checkbook, and were, as a result, less likely to identify the criminal in a lineup.

It is difficult for people to recognize members of a race other than their own. In one study, for example, researchers asked convenience store clerks to identify a white, an African American, a Mexican American customer who purchased something at the store earlier in the day. The results showed that the clerks were most likely to identify customers belonging to their own racial or ethnic group.

Personal and situational factors play a large role in how eyewitness process information.

2. Judges, Juries, and Lawyers Are Not Informed About Eyewitness Testimony

Researchers Gary Wells and Rod Lindsay conducted a series of experiments in which they staged the theft of a calculator in the presence of unsuspecting research participants. A mock jury of other participants observed and judged the questioning of witnesses. Wells and Lindsay found that jurors overestimated how accurate eyewitnesses were, and could not distinguish between witnesses who were correct and those who were not.

Have you ever been wrong about what you’ve seen?

Article image by the Liberty Voice.