Key Question

Is eyewitness testimony too unreliable to trust?

What is your cognitive psychology key question?

Is eyewitness testimony too unreliable to trust?

What are eyewitness testimonies?

Eyewitness testimonies are incident reports by people present at the time of the events. If eyewitnesses are unreliable, people may be wrongfully imprisoned.

Evidence of wrongful eyewitness convictions

• 69% of DNA evidence-linked exonerations between 1989 and 2020 were convictions made by eyewitness misidentification.

• On average 9.1years of a person’s life is lost per wrongful conviction

Example of a wrongful eyewitness conviction

Ronald Cotton was wrongfully convicted for two counts of rape and burglary based on an eyewitness testimony. 11 years later he was found not guilty due to DNA evidence but while he was in prison, the real perpetrator Poole was still committing crimes.

How can weapons focus lead to unreliable testimonies?

Research into weapons focus has shown when a weapon such as a gun is used during a crime, witnesses may be less accurate in their suspect identification as they may pay more attention to it than the suspect especially if the weapon is foreign in their culture. E.g. if someone has a gun pointed on them, they may be more focussed on the threat of the gun rather than the suspects features leading to limited recall and ability to identify them.

The inverted U theory also suggests when a weapon is presented causing high stress on victims e.g. being held at gun point, victims will focus on the weapon and pay less attention to the suspect meaning they may not be identified later.

How can reconstructive memory lead to unreliable testimonies?

Witnesses may be more accurate in their identification of suspects of their own race compared to those who are not.

E.g. Eye witnesses may find it difficult to identify difference between people who look nothing like them so they may use schemas to incorrectly fill in the gaps leading to unreliable testimonies.

If we have stored knowledge about a race and a criminal is from that background, we may attribute features from our schema to identify them.