The Benefits Of Eyewitness Testimony

We are very fortunate to live in a country where democracy is how we conduct our way of life. One of the great advantages of living here is that if someone is convicted of a crime that innocent until proven guilty. The hope and mission of our judicial system is to correctly convict the people who actually committed the crime. To prove their guilt while also making sure we are not convicting an innocent person. However, our system is not perfect and there are some chinks in our armor. Unfortunately, since jurors are just people and not computers or machines mistakes can be made. When putting your life in another person’s hands such as a juror you hope for the best, but that is not always enough. Sometimes there are certain variables, which

According to Myers (2008), personal testimonies are very persuasive and significantly more compelling than abstract information. Most of the jurors took what the witnesses said as being facts without taking the time to question what they recounted. That was not the case for juror 8. Juror 8 was a reasonable, intelligent and thoughtful man who since the very beginning was never convinced that the boy was guilty. One explanation he gave was that in the woman’s testimony she stated that she saw the boy kill his father from across the street while a train was passing her window was questionable. Wouldn’t a train passing through her line of vision compromise what she saw? In addition, there was an old man who was also a key witness and he stated that he heard the boy scream, “I am going to kill you”. However, as juror 8 pointed out the el train was passing at that same moment so he would not have been able to hear the boy screaming if it was passing at the same time. Another point that juror 8 made is that it would not have been possible for the old man to walk through his apartment with a cane in just 15 seconds to see the boy kill his father as he had stated, indicating that he had lied. Another issue with the eyewitness testimony is that the woman was wearing glasses while giving her account of what happened however according to juror 8 she most likely was not wearing them when she awoke to see what was happening at night from across the street. His conclusion is that her vision was impaired making her testimony faulty. If it wasn’t for juror 8 the other jurors would never have questioned what either witness had stated. Both witnesses were confident that they were correct in their recollection of their memory however false memories often feel and look like real memories (Myers, 2008). It was up to the jurors