eyewitness

Issues Surrounding Eyewitness Testimonies

Have you ever played the telephone game? One person starts with a simple phrase and passes it along to the next person in line. Eventually, the words are misheard or misremembered, leaving the last person in line with a completely new phrase, rather than the original sentence.

This happens with our personal memories as well. As time progresses, memories can become slightly altered. After repeated story tellings, the 12 inch fish you caught on your first fishing trip becomes an 18 inch fish. Maybe you embellished the story a few times, but eventually you don’t remember doing so at all.

It’s uncomfortable knowing that our memory is not as reliable as we’d like to believe. In the past, eyewitness testimonies were crucial for convictions. While they still play a large part in courtroom trials today, more evidence should be provided before providing a verdict.

The Invisible Gorilla Experiment

One of the notable memory experiments conducted on humans was the invisible gorilla test. The premise was simple; participants were asked to watch a video and identify how many times a basketball was passed to players wearing white.

But unbeknownst to the participants, there was a twist. At some point, an individual dressed as a gorilla enters the scene, beats their chest, and leaves. When the researchers probed the participants, more than half indicated they did not see the gorilla.

questioning eyewitness testimonies

This phenomenon is called inattentional blindness. Since the participants were focused on counting the ball passes, they missed the gorilla entirely.

Now think about the gorilla experiment in the context of a crime. If someone was in the vicinity of an active crime scene, would they notice anything out of the ordinary based on sight alone? Could they accurately identify a suspect in the crime?

Buckhout’s Witness Study

In his paper “Nearly 2,000 Witnesses Can Be Wrong,” Robert Buckhout staged a televised crime scene to collect data on the accuracy of eyewitness accounts. Unfortunately, this research study only further illuminates the problem behind using eyewitness identification.

The staged crime featured a young woman holding her purse and a perpetrator with a mustache, hat, and leather jacket. The perpetrator pushes the woman down, nabs her purse, and runs towards the camera face first. The whole interaction is thirteen seconds long and the audience sees the man’s face for three and a half seconds.

young woman with purse

Two minutes after the staged crime, the viewers are shown a line-up of six possible perpetrators. A number is provided for viewers to call in and identify the perpetrator out of the line-up (or express their belief that the perpetrator is not featured in the line-up).

The perpetrator is in the line-up, but investigators had the man remove his mustache and change his clothes. Logically, this makes sense because many individuals on the run from the law will alter their appearance in some way, hoping they won’t be recognized in public.

So how did the study participants perform? Not well. After crunching the data, Buckhout found that only 19% of people answered correctly. To make matters worse, eyewitness accounts were only slightly better than chance — meaning if all the participants guessed a perpetrator randomly without viewing the film, the findings would look similar.

We Look Beyond The Smoking Gun

Years ago, the legal system considered eyewitness testimonies as the smoking gun for convicting defendants. But continued memory research has shown that the human brain isn’t as reliable as we’d like to think.

That’s why it’s important to have an attorney on your side. A legal team can encourage the judge and jury to explore additional evidence (outside of eyewitness accounts) before making their final decision.

If you are in need of legal representation for criminal cases, family court, business law, or personal injury cases, Hickey & Hull is available for an initial consultation. Schedule with one of our law firms today and discover how we can help you.