Eyewitness Testimony is Not Completely Accurate

Eye Witness Testimony

In my opinion eye witness testimony is not completely accurate. The human memory is a very complicated system and is not always correct. I feel that eye witness testimony is not a fair way to determine if a person is guilty of a crime or not. The longer time it takes to go on trial the more a person can forget. If you do not practice things over and over you soon forget it, so how can you expect someone to go on trial and use eye witness testimony for a crime that happened months or even years ago? They could not possibly remember every small detail of the crime.

According to the Stanford Journal of Legal Studies, “The bedrock of the American judicial process is the honesty of witnesses in trial.” Memories can be altered by many things, people may not even realize that the memory has been altered because they believe it to be true. “Several studies have been conducted on human memory and on subjects’ propensity to remember erroneously events and details that did not occur. Elizabeth Loftus performed experiments in the mid-seventies demonstrating the effect of a third party’s introducing false facts into memory. 4 Subjects were shown a slide of a car at an intersection with either a yield sign or a stop sign. Experimenters asked participants questions, falsely introducing the term "stop sign" into the question instead of referring to the yield sign participants had actually seen. Similarly, experimenters falsely substituted the term "yield sign" in questions directed to participants who had actually seen the stop sign slide. The results indicated that subjects remembered seeing the false image. In the initial part of the experiment, subjects also viewed a slide showing a car accident. Some subjects were lat...

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...nvironment and by the way his recollection is eventually tested.” Many things affect memory so how can it be accurate enough to convict someone?

I feel that you cannot convict someone on the basis of another person’s testimony. This is unfair and unjust in my opinion. I feel that eyewitness testimony should not be used, thhe only way a person needs to be convicted is if the evidence shows proof, not on the basis of a testimony. If we only used eyewitness testimony its basically just someone’s word against the accused. This just doesn’t seem fair to me. I don’t feel that it is enough, it doesn’t show evidence. You cannot look into someone’s memory so how can this be evidence? How can this be enough to convict someone? I don’t feel it is right and I do not agree with it in any way. I feel that if there is no evidential proof, eyewitness testimony should not be used.