Witness Testimony Analysis

Witness testimonies are often unreliable due to the nature of human memory. For this discussion, 'testimony ' will be used loosely to represent a statement, written or spoken, made by any person claiming to have seen or experienced anything relating to their respective case. The chosen scope for this discussion is cases of sexual assault because very often in such cases the only evidence presented is a testimony, either by the victim or a witness. Aside from the aforementioned, DNA evidence has been used very frequently in sexual assault cases, however, the only fact that DNA evidence can prove is that some sort of sexual activity took place. In cases where the act itself is not illegal, for instance when both parties are fully capable legal adults, the issue of consent can only be settled with witness or victim testimonies. That is, of course, provided that video evidence is not presented, which it often is not and will therefore not be …show more content…
In their experiment, Loftus and Palmer asked their participants to watch a video of a car collision and answer a few questions about what they had seen. The questions had a varied vocabulary, describing the cars as having "smashed" and "bumped" into each other among other things (Loftus and Palmer, 1974). The results of the study suggested that the difference in the phrasing of the questions greatly affected the participants recollection of the video. The more violent vocabulary such as "smashed" and "hit" yielded higher speed estimates and reports of having seen shattered glass when in fact the video did not feature any shattered glass (Loftus and Palmer, 1974). This study is a textbook example of the suggestible nature of memory and shows exactly how simple it would be for a witness testimony to be influenced by selective phrasing by the lawyers in a court, and is therefore often unreliable as proof of guilt or