Essay On Eyewitness Inaccuracies

What are the main factors of eyewitness inaccuracies? Eyewitness accounts are one way that police, judges, and many authorities in power use in order to find perpetrators and convict them. However many of the times people are wrongly convicted because the victim or witness was positive that they had seen the suspect there or that they were the one’s committing the crime. Of course there are many ways such as DNA, video proof, finger prints in order to determine if a person truly is guilty and should be convicted but many of the times those types of proofs are not there and the law relays heavy on them. Should the law be considering eyewitnesses as evidence and are they accurate? Many psychologists, theorists and case studies have disagreed and have proven that there are many inaccuracies to eyewitness. The main factor as to why eyewitnesses are inaccurate is because of memory. Memory is terms of inaccuracies of eyewitness accounts means a person’s retention, recall and schemas. The following six literature review and case studies will attempt to support the thesis.
Literature Review …show more content…
(Walker, 2013, p. 248). A critical analysis of this study is that this journal article was able to help understand the concept of “schema” and how it came about its five main features of being transformative, irreversible, integrated, bounded and troublesome knowledge. (Walker, 2013, p. 251). The only limitation of this journal article is that the study that it conducted did not have anything to do with memory. The study relates to the essay is that it was able to assist in understanding of schema theory and then lead to different case study’s such as Bartlett’s