Eyewitness Testimony

11 Pages 2784 Words

Introduction

Eyewitness testimony can be defined as the evidence given by an individual in court about people and events of a crime. Eyewitnesses testify about many things, for example, the identification of a perpetrator, which hand a gunman used, the colour of a car, or even recollections of a conversation (Wells & Olsen, 2003).

Comprehensive psychological research into eyewitness testimony has been compiled all over the world and findings have mainly been united in finding eyewitness testimony vulnerable unreliability. Despite these findings, the criminal justice system still relies heavily on eyewitness testimonies (EWT) for the investigating and prosecuting of crimes. Wells & Loftus (2002) state that mistaken eyewitnesses account for more convictions of innocent people than all other causes combined. In a recent publication, Wells & Olson (2003) provided a comprehensive review of psychological research into eyewitness testimony since the 1970's. In their publication, they provided a user-friendly framework that assists in determining the reliability/unreliability of an eyewitness testimony. The framework includes firstly investigating, the characteristics of the witness, secondly, the characteristics of the event, thirdly, the characteristics of the testimony and fourthly, the ability of testimony evaluators to discriminate between an accurate and inaccurate eyewitness testimony (Wells & Olson, 2003). In this essay, the four elements will be discussed, some in more detail than others, in conjunction with relevant research to provide a critical review of eyewitness reliability in both children and adults.

Before discussing the four elements determining eyewitness reliability, it is important to discuss some basic concepts of human memory. People often do not have total recall for events and they fill in the gaps in their memory on the basis of what they think might have happened. This is called reconstructive memory and r...