Eye Witness Testimony

The Psychology of Eyewitness Accounts The human memory, while in many ways an amazing tool, is highly flawed. Although we have the power to remember a vast amount of information, our mind can use our memory to essentially “trick” us, sometimes even to the extent of remembering in detail events that never transpired. Despite these limitations, the testimony of eyewitnesses has become the most crucial evidence towards conviction in criminal cases (Loftus 9). In this way, …

…principles involved in and factors influencing eyewitness testimony. Without this testimony, the jurors remain unaware that their focus should be on how and why the criminal was obtained rather than the fact that he/she was. When eyewitnesses to actual crimes make mistakes, the results are devastating. In more than a thousand cases in which innocent people were convicted of crimes, errors made by eyewitnesses were the single most decisive element to false conviction (Loftus 12).