Eye Witness Testimony essays

Eye Witness Testimony essays The Psychology of Eyewitness Accounts The human memory, while in many ways an amazing tool, is highly flawed. Although we have the power to remember a vast amount of information, our mind can use our memory to essentially trick us, sometimes even to the extent of remembering in detail events that never transpired. Despite these limitations, the testimony of eyewitnesses has become the most crucial evidence towards conviction in criminal cases (Loftus 9). In this way, our legal system depends on the reliability of an exceptionally faulty source. Jurors in court cases tend to believe eyewitnesses (Gorenststein 616). Faced with conflicting or ambiguous testimony, they are tempted to put their faith in people who actually saw an event. This faith in eyewitnesses maybe misplaced, however. Although eyewitness accounts are essential to courtroom testimony, studies clearly show people who say; I know what I saw, often mean, I know what I think I saw. And these people may be wrong (Migueles 259). Psychologists have attempted t o measure the ability of witnesses to recall specific facts surrounding an emotional event, as in the article Recall, Recognition, and Confidence Patterns in Eyewitness Testimony, by Malen Migueles and Elvira Garcia-Bajos. In other pertaining articles, information processing is reviewed by stages; from the time it is received to the time it is retrieved, and all of the faults, problems, and decay information goes through before is it regenerated. Essentially, Migueles and Garcia-Bajos endeavored to find what type of stimuli witnesses will attend to during a crime. Stimuli were broken down into two broad categories: central and peripheral. Central information coincides with and is both essential to and proximal to the crime, while peripheral information is unrelated to the crime. These categories are further divided into actions and d...