Eyewitness Identification/ Testimony. Law Essay Paper

Eyewitness Identification/ Testimony
Name
Institution
Eyewitness Identification/ Testimony
Eyewitnesses have been used for decades in the identification of offenders in the U.S. and their testimonies have been used in convicting identified offenders. However, in some cases, it has been proved that eyewitnesses were wrong, raising questions on the reliability of eyewitnesses. However, eyewitnesses are usually not the problem, as indicated by Wixted, Mickes, and Fisher (2018) but rather, other actors in the justice system are the problem because they have the ability to influence the eyewitness's testimony. As such, while eyewitness identification has led to wrongful convictions, it should not be excluded from the United States criminal justice system.
First, eyewitnesses provide evidence to an investigator, just like DNA and other forensic evidence. Any evidence is prone to contamination, including eyewitness memory and as such, it should be treated the same way any other contaminated evidence is treated. Wixted and Mickes (2017) reveal that the memory of an eyewitness can be interfered with when elements of an innocent person are embedded in the memory of the eyewitness by someone else. In this case, if the contaminated memory is not treated as any other contaminated evidence, it can lead to a wrongful identification of the innocent person. According to Lindsay, Ross, Read, and Toglia (2014), the ability of an eyewitness to identify an offender depends on three stages of their memory. These stages include encoding, storage, and retrieval. The first stage of encoding is highly accurate as the witness registers information in their memory as they see them. However, the second stage, storage, is what affects a person's memory because it can be easily interfered with. Thus, what affects eyewitness is not their memory but rather, the surrounding factors that influence how their memory is stored and retrieved. Most of those factors include how the questioning is handled by the investigating officer while interviewing the eyewitness. This basically entails contamination of evidence and excluding eyewitnesses from testifying would be unfair. This is because even other evidence of a crime, such as DNA, can be contaminated, yet there have been no propositions of entirely excluding DNA evidence from the criminal justice system. Instead of excluding eyewitness identification and testimony, proper protocols should be followed during the line-up and/or interview of the eyewitness to avoid such contamination. Further, any contaminated eyewitness identification/testimony should be thrown out of evidence, rather than the entire exclusion of eyewitnesses.
Second, wrongful convictions mostly occur because the confidence of eyewitnesses is confused with accuracy. According to Bohannon (2014), the confidence portrayed by an eyewitness does not translate into the accuracy of their account of events. However, jurors have time and again been convinced by the confidence of an eyewitness, leading to a wrongful conviction. However, this should not be used as a basis for excluding eyewitness testimony. The problem and questioning of the reliability of eyewitness identification arises because the U.S. legal system has more than often dismissed the...