The Risk Of Eyewitness Testimony

Eyewitness testimony, which depends on the precision of human recollection, has an extensive influence on the result of a trial. Apart from a smoking gun, nothing sustains as much value with a jury as the testimony of an existing witness. The recollection of witnesses is pivotal not only in criminal cases but in civil cases as well. For example, in auto mishap instances an eyewitness’s testimony sustains considerable significance in deciding who is responsible. Absolute in the welcoming of this testimony as hard proof is the belief that the human brain is an accurate recorder of occurrences. Human beings clutch monstrously to the reliance that our remembrances are maintained unimpaired, our thoughts are essentially timeless and our intuitions are never really gone. Sigmund Freud thought that long-term reminiscences rest profoundly in the subconscious brain, too profound to be interrupted by current matters and encounters. Most people today continue to believe Freud’s perspective of recollection but in reality, human remembrance is far from flawless or everlasting, and abstraction is an actuality of existence. 

One of the most evident causes for neglect is that the knowledge was never saved in remembrance initially even the most ordinary everyday things often fail to obtain a slot in our recollection. Even if we are cautious viewers and take in a reasonably detailed image of some article or experience it does not stay whole in remembrance, other forces start to consume the authentic recollection. With the progression of time, with correct ambition, or with the foundation of obstruction or antithetical certainty, the evocation detects a change or becomes altered, frequently without our conscious apprehension. We can literally come to trust in memories of occurrences that never even transpired. As time goes by and the recollections slowly change, we become assured that we saw or said or did what we recall. We distinguish the merging of reality and illusion that represents a recollection as totally sincere. We are faultless casualties of our brain's influence. A pointing finger of accountability has a substantial grip on even the most knowledgeable and insightful of juries. 

The risk of eyewitness testimony is completely apparent, anyone on earth can be sentenced with an offense they did not execute, grounded entirely on the corroboration of a witness who satisfies a jury that their recollection about what they saw is precise. Eyewitness testimony is so forceful and persuasive because people overall and jurors specifically assume that our remembrances imprint the certainty of experiences on an enduring, non-erasable tape, like a computer disk or videotape that is write-protected.