An Eye For A Life - questioning eye witnesses and testimonies

Opinion Analysis by Tala Al Otaibi and Albert Geokgeuzian, Staff Writers

November 7th, 2020

Eyewitness testimonies have been used as part of law enforcement for centuries. Legally speaking, it refers to a testimony given by people who witnessed a specific event. This entails that the witnesses are required to provide a detailed description of what they saw. In the case of crime, witnesses are required to identify perpetrators and details of the crime scene itself. 

For decades, juries, lawyers, and law enforcement officers have paid very close attention to eyewitness testimony as a reliable source of information to convict criminals, as witnesses are assumed to be doing their best to report what they saw as accurately as possible.  However, as eyewitness testimony has to do with memory, research in cognitive psychology has paid even closer attention to its reliability and credibility. The question that cognitive psychologists tend to ask is as follows: given what is known about memory, how accurate is eyewitness testimony?

The short answer to this question is that it’s not very accurate. Eyewitness testimony is often more reliable under ideal conditions, which, unfortunately, rarely occur. As a result, there exist numerous cases that have led innocent people to be convicted based on a false eyewitness identification. 

Let us take the following example. You witnessed a robbery that happened near your house very late at night. You managed to be standing in a spot that gave you a clear vision of the robbed store from across the street. The perpetrator ran away from the scene, but you managed to catch a glimpse of his features as he was not wearing a mask. Two days later, the police call you in to identify the robber from a lineup of potential suspects. You chose the one on the far left because you were “pretty sure” it was the one. 

Two decades later, you found out that the man you identified as the robber turned out to be innocent - because DNA evidence proved he couldn’t have done it -  and that he was released from jail. The man you “identified” was a father to two young children who grew up without him. He lost all chances of having a great career. But most importantly, he lost 20 years of his life. This type of mistake, unfortunately, is not impossible when it comes to relying on eyewitness testimonies and has occurred before. 

So, why is eyewitness unreliable? What happens in our brains when we retain such information? 

While many people believe that our memory operates like a videotape that can just be recorded and replayed on command, according to research, we know that that is, in fact, not the case. The way we actually store information in our memory depends on our cultural values and norms. This means that we tend to store information depending on how it makes sense to us individually, and not necessarily how it actually is. Cognitive psychology refers to this as the reconstructive memory. Such a phenomenon makes our memory largely prone to errors. 

According to chapter 8 in Cognitive Psychology, research in the field has sought to find out ways to improve eyewitness testimonies. For example, lineup procedures are very well known for producing mistakes in criminal identification. Hence, a few recommendations were put into place to tackle that. One suggestion was to simply inform the witness that the perpetrator may not even be in that lineup in order to avoid the pressure of having to choose a person from the lineup. Another one was to have the person administering the lineup not know who the suspect is as to avoid an unintentional bias. Lastly, it was recommended that witnesses rate their confidence after identifying the perpetrator. The more confident the witness is, the more accurate the identification is. Think of it this way. In the example above, you were only “pretty sure” that the man you identified was the store robber. Another suggestion made to interview betterment was the implementation of what cognitive psychologists call a “cognitive interview”. This interview is meant to avoid interrupting the witness from speaking as to not induce an expected answer, as well as using certain techniques in order to help put the witness back in the scene in order to provide a more accurate recollection. 

All of these are important to know but it’s even more important to realise that no matter how much eye witness testimonies improve, they will never be perfect, and thus should never be relied upon to put a man behind bars.

The Innocence Project is an organization that “exonerates the innocent through DNA testing and reform the criminal justice system to prevent further injustice” they have helped over 200 people be exonerated. 

In total there have been 375 DNA exonerations and %69 of them Involved eyewitness misidentification. Malcolm Alexandre spent 38 years in jail because the victim had selected him out of a lineup, this happened despite the fact that blood type testing was available at the time but wasn’t sought.

This case perfectly highlights the problem with trusting eye witnesses as the sole piece of evidence in a criminal case. We can’t expect people to remember every detail of everything that happened during a crime because our brains are just not wired to remember everything like a camera. We are bound to miss on certain features, fill in gaps of our memory and all of these could end up ruining someone’s life.