False Memories on Eyewitness Testimonies

   After exploring Loftus and Palmer's study on leading questions producing false memories in relation to eyewitness testimonies, I wanted to find some other explorations of the idea. This greatly feeds into how false memories corrupt the bigger picture of the world round us as the judicial system is greatly affected if the conclusion is made that eyewitness testimonies are unreliable.  

   Eyewitness testimonies refer to what happens when a person witnesses a crime, accident, or any other event that has legal implications. The witness may be interviewed by a number of police and lawyers and the process is more complex than one presumes. They are often very compelling and can, if done correctly, be incredibly influential on the process of a trial. The source I read even claimed that studies have been done which show that over decades, eyewitness testimonies are one of the most influential forms of evidence presented in court.

Here's what I learnt from this source about the unreliability of eyewitness testimonies:

  "Faulty eyewitness testimony has been implicated in at least 75% of DNA exoneration cases-more than any other cause (Garrett, 2011)."

This shows that one could argue that eyewitness testimonies may be given too much weight in court when their mistakes can be so detrimental- placing innocent people in prison more than any other cause. 

   Loftus and Palmer found that leading questions greatly influences the curation of false memories (findings and conclusions written about in a previous blog post) which means that this is one of the influences that must be controlled- without leading questions, we may be able to prevent the effects that unreliable and misleading eyewitness testimonies may have. 

   Aditional, supporting mention for the George Franklin case is the similar case of Ronald Cotton who was identified, via an eyewitness testimony, as Jennifer Thompson's rapist which landed him with life in prison after being found guilty. After over 10 years, he was exonerated and the true criminal found based on DNA evidence.

   Seemingly generic information about the event in which witnesses are being questioned on could in fact be very important. However, due to the fact that schema-consistent factors of memory may not have been taken in during the encoding of the memory, they could be recalled during a testimony in a generic way as oppose to how it really was. 

Source used:

https://nobaproject.com/modules/eyewitness-testimony-and-memory-biases#:~:text=Discussion%20Questions%20Imagine%20that%20you%20are%20a%20juror,brought%20to%20a%20suspect%20%28who%20may%20be%20standing