Eyewitness Testimony

Eyewitness testimony is, at best, evidence of what the witness believes to shit on occurred.  It whitethorn or may not discriminate what re whollyy happened. The familiar problems of perception, of gauging time, speed, height, weight, of unblemished identification of persons accused of shame all contribute to making honest testimony something less(prenominal) than altogether credible (Cramer and Levin, 1968).  Eyewitness testimony, which relies on the accuracy of the army personnel holding, has an vast impact on the outcome of a trial. Aside from the gage gun, nothing carries as more weight with a jury than the testimony of an actual witness. However, how accurate is the actual direct of the crime as said by that witness?  The human memory is far from being perfect and, lets face it, forgetfulness is a fact of life. ace of the most unmistakable reasons for forgetfulness is the nature of the human memory itself. scour the most basic, quotidian items often fail to be encoded into our memory. When reconstructing their memory of the crime, the eyewitness inadvertently fills in the gaps in his or her genuine memory of the crime based on such factors as the eyewitnesss expectations, attitude, beliefs and knowledge of similar events (Wise, Fishman and Safer, 2009).

  This, in turn, produces a testimony that may seem believable and accurate, but does then contain many an new(prenominal)(prenominal) faults and inaccuracies. Another cause of faulty eyewitness testimony is eyewitness bias. Encoding is defined as the point of mental operations that people perform on sensorial information to diversify that information ! into a form that is working(a) in the hotshots storage systems (Ciccarelli and White, 2010 pg 214).  Because encoding likewise involves interference and interpretation, what is stored in memory is not just what the eyewitness had seen, but also the meaning the witness gave to what happened. For example, if a sensory hair stylist witnesses a crime, he or she may taper more on the suspects hair than other features.  Factors present during a crime...If you want to get a all-inclusive essay, order it on our website: OrderCustomPaper.com

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