Eyewitness Testimony Research Paper

Throughout the history of the United States’ judicial system, eyewitness testimonies — accounts of a crime or accident that involves a witness narrating their firsthand experience of the incident to a court — have been used as primary evidence for courts to indict a defendant since biological evidence may not always be available or easily analyzed (Myers 350). One of the major problems with these testimonies is that it requires perfect recollection of the events so that the courts can piece together the information to determine a verdict. In most cases, although a person’s memory can be unclear at times, it has been theorized that memories of stressful or otherwise life-threatening events are well encoded in the brain, largely indelible, and therefore can be accurately recalled. This idea is based on the …show more content…
However, recent psychological and neuroscientific research claims that eyewitness testimony, which relies on human recollection of memories encoded in the brain, is a “reconstructive process that is susceptible to distortion” (Lacy and Stark 2). According to Dr. Jonah Lehrer, “More than 75,000 prosecutions every year are based entirely on the recollections of others,” which could lead to the introduction of motives these witnesses may have (Lehrer). To analyze this potential bias, we must ask the question: how do psychological phenomena explain the unreliability of eyewitness testimony?
Before diving into the psychological justifications that explain the inaccuracies eyewitness testimonies cause, it