Table of contents:
1. Introduction
2. Eyewitness testimony and its weaknesses
3. The accuracy of eyewitness memory
4. Eyewitness stereotype
5. Conclusion
"The case in which you really need to worry about eyewitnesses’
memory is the case in which it’s the only evidence you‘ve got,"
Steven M. Smith
1. Introduction
Eyewitness memory has always been a subject of constant arguments throughout
the whole history of its existence. People’s words have always been valued
and having a witness of a crime was he worst thing hat could happen to the criminal.
The phrase “Eyewitnesses do not live long” so commonly spread among
people, reveals the importance of the fact of eye-witnessing for the majority
of people in general and especially for the jury. The eyewitness memory as any
other source of evidence has to be carefully checked and evaluated. And what
is even more important – the objectivity of the recollections have to
be very at a very high rate. Criminal justice requires special attention to
the phenomenon of the eyewitness memory as it is known that sometimes memory
plays tricks on its carriers. This is primarily due to the peculiarities of
the perception of human mind and the character of the reproduction of the information.
I is common knowledge that memory is a process of perception, storage and reproduction
of any information. So it is very important to be sure that all of these processes
are undamaged. This emphasises the importance of the information about the eyewitness
health and mental abilities. The eyewitness memory can be of any value only
in case of its correspondence to the major court demands and its 100% objectivity
which is especially hard due to the subjectivity of the human perception.
2. Eyewitness testimony and its weaknesses
Eyewitness testimony is an oral informing about the circumstances that are important
to the criminal case. During the process of checking and evaluation of the eyewitness
testimony the main difficulty is to determine if the eyewitness has certain
reasons for concealing information or giving false testimony. The main weakness
of the eyewitness testimony is the analysis of the process of its formation,
taking into account all the subjective and objective factors, which could have
influenced the accuracy, veracity and objective reliability.
There are four factors that question the trustworthiness of the eyewitness testimony.
They are: the characteristics of human perception, the conditions under which
the perception takes place, the specific character of the memorization and the
memory peculiarities, and the character and he conditions under which the reproduction
of the perceived information takes place. All these four conditions can without
any doubt be called the weaknesses of the process of the eyewitness testimony.
The characteristics of human perception implies the physiological limitations
of he persons, any defects of the perception organs and the orientation of the
perception, susceptibility to different irritants, the psychological setting
on perception of the person and he understanding of his own attitude towards
the perceived facts. The conditions under which the perception takes place emphasize
the importance of the psychological state of a person at the moment of perception,
the duration and the atmosphere of the process of perception, the operation
factors of the perceived object, physical conditions of the perception such
as the specificity of illumination, distance, audibility and any others. The
specific character of the memorization and the peculiarities of memory of the
eyewitness create a separate group which is vital in the evaluation of the reliability
of the eyewitness testimony. This is especially actual in terms of the novelty
of the events for the eyewitness, their recurrence, the continuance of the storage
of information, the particular qualities of the witness’s memory and its
defects and a last the possibilities of distortion or substitution of the information.
The character and the conditions under which the reproduction of the perceived
information takes place intends to reveal the value of the interpretation of
the setting, unwillingness to give reliable testimony according to personal
motives or because of the dread of revenge from the side of defendant and the
conformity of the given testimony and its record.
All these conditions under which the eyewitness testimony is “insolvent”
make it very hard to trust the eyewitness testimony or rely only on it during
the case investigation. For that reason no eyewitness testimony should be taken
in into consideration if the witness depositions contradict other irrefutable
evidence. Another questionable situation is the contradiction of the testimonies
of two eyewitnesses which rather often happens in court. Basically saying eyewitness
testimony remains too objective for the court and for that reason it can not
be a subject of complete confidence until it is not supported by any objective
details. The major problem is the contradiction and sometimes the discrepancy
of the subjective and objective evidence. This puts the necessity of eyewitness
testimony under a big question!
3. The accuracy of eyewitness memory
The biggest task of the evaluation of the eyewitness testimony is the selection
of the correct information and the release from all the subjective “blast”.
According to Marc Green:”Memory can change the shape of a room. It can
change the colour of a car. And memories can be distorted. They are just an
interpretation. They are not a record” [1]. This is what makes the eyewitness
memory primarily unreliable for the court. It goes without saying that there
are both accurate and inaccurate eyewitnesses. Nevertheless, the probability
of getting inaccurate eyewitness testimony may is still rather high and this
is extremely dangerous due to the fact that the wrong person can be put in jail
only because someone gave “inaccurate” information concerning the
case. The jurisdiction system is not the place for might guesses and human beings
can very seldom be objective towards what they have observed in the past. Individuals
tend to add and to modify what they saw and they do it unconsciously. It happens
due to the peculiar probabilities of the memory. The brain subconsciously “fills
in the gaps” of memory and through this creates new case-details. These
details ordinarily are not correct at all.
Actual perception and memory do not have much in common, as many facts a blurred,
forgotten or replaced by other facts. Any reconstruction of a given even is
often accompanied by slight changes in the testimony which can become indicators
of the unreliability of the eyewitness’s event and fact memory. The accuracy
of the eyewitness’s statements is not stable and subjectivism reduces
the precision of the facts to zero. The brightest practical example is any childhood
event that people usually like to reproduce. It is common knowledge that all
of them are distorted sometimes completely. But what happens to the perception
when a person finds himself in a situation of high stress when for instance
becomes an eyewitness of a murder?
According to the studies of the Yale University:”…the ability to
recognize persons encountered during highly threatening and a stressful event
is poor in the majority of individuals…” [2]. So the only situation
when the eyewitness testimony should be considered is when that even took place
in a very familiar environment for he individual and did not cause any extreme
stress condition.
The problem of accuracy of the eyewitness testimony is closely related to the
inability to provide correct “peripheral details” and the tendency
to provide changed details of the event. The majority of people have stereotyped
thinking when certain events are connected to certain objects and other events.
For instance, a person that has a settled opinion that all robbers have knives
will claim that he saw a knife in the hands or in the pocket of the robber.
Individuals confuse memory information sources and sometimes also combine two
different events. Or they might have heard a story related o their case and
impose this “borrowed memories” over the actual situation. So the
accuracy is no any means a characteristic of the eyewitness testimony.
5. Eyewitness stereotype
Very often eyewitness testimony contradicts the real forensic evidence of the
case. This contradiction creates a serious problem for the jury. Juries are
people and are also subjective, and it is obvious that their personal.
The research in the field of eyewitness memory is of a great significance to
the jurisdiction system. And that is very important not to underestimate the
meaning of the temperament, physical properties and other moments when analyzing
the eyewitness testimony.
Psychological questions concerning the eyewitness testimonies were the main
priority of a French scientist Laplas. Laplas analyzes the probability of the
eyewitness statements along with the probability of he outcome of court verdict.
He constructed a list of elements that may imply that the testimony complies
with the reality. This list consists of the next elements:
? The probability of the event that the eyewitness is telling about.
? The likelihood of the next four hypotheses in terms of the eyewitness’s
statements.
o The eyewitness is not mistaken and is not lying.
o The eyewitness is lying, but not mistaken.
o The eyewitness is not mistaken, but is lying.
o The eyewitness is both lying and mistaken.
In this hypotheses “mistaken” means that the eyewitness is confusing
facts that of the described event.
Laplas perfectly understood the difficulty of evaluation of the veracity or
falsity of the eyewitness testimonies through this method because of the large
amount of circumstances, accompanying the facts that the eyewitness makes statements
about. He considered his theory to be just a probability and not a certainty.
That is the reason he also considered that the court does the same thing –
it bases on the probability and not reliability. Nevertheless Laplas’s
scheme is very interesting as a scientific attempt to evaluate the reliability
of the eyewitness testimonies.
5. Conclusion
Human memory there fore is something very personal and comparative. It cannot
be a base for any important decisions such as the court verdicts. The eyewitness
puts all his believes, settings and attitudes to the testimony he makes.
It is vital to keep in mind that memory changes with time and every subsequent
attempt to retell what has happened will be jus another subjective interpretation
of the event. Eyewitnesses can support or refute general facts about the case,
but never the details and their testimony should never be put above the actual
evidence presented to the court. The only exception are the cases when eyewitness
testimony is the only available evidence, but these cases should by analyzed
on a very specific model, as they do not coincide with what people call “justice”.
If to act like this it is possible to accuse any innocent person and put him
behind the bars. How just is this? Should eyewitness testimony be taken into
account at all? It goes without saying that the information got from the witnesses
can be important, but only general information in the first place and its verity
will be considered rather relative in the second.
The following words by Norretranders and Sydenham perfectly describe the whole
situation around the eyewitness memory reliability:”We do not see what
we sense. We see what we think we sense. Our consciousness is presented with
an interpretation, not the raw data. Long after presentation, an unconscious
information processing has discarded information, so that we see a simulation,
a hypothesis, an interpretation; and we are not free to choose”[7].
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