Eyewitness Testimony: Pros and Cons - Essay Sample

Introduction

In a court of law, eyewitnesses present their evidence from what they visualized. However, there is an increased debate on eyewitness testimony, not only in the field of criminal justice but also in the psychology field. There are contrasting opinions on the reliability of eyewitness testimony. The proponents of eyewitness testimony argue that this type of evidence is most reliable in a court of law because these witnesses give precise insights ion what had happened. On the other hand, those that object to eyewitness testimony argues that such evidence is much unreliable for any court of law because it contributes to punishing wrong persons for crimes that they did not even commit. It usually happens due to various reasons, particularly false memories among witnesses which contribute to severe consequences including punishing the innocent and this generally leads to miscarriages of justice. Therefore, eyewitness testimony should not always be used in a courtroom because eyewitnesses often experience false memories that contribute to miscarriages of justice.

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Literature Analysis

Carpenter & Krendl (2016), conducted a study investigating whether eyewitness accounts are biased, evaluating false memories for crimes. The authors acknowledge that eyewitness testimonies have been known to be unreliable and subject to false memories, even though juries rely heavily on eyewitness accounts. The researchers conducted two experiments. In the first experiment, they examined where crime victims and perpetrators' membership relative to witness influence false memories and this study involved 53 participants from Indiana University. The experiment suggested that participants became more susceptible to false memories in cases where there was an intragroup conflict. In the second experiment, the researchers manipulated the group of the perpetrator to be an in-group member, and at the same time, the victim was also an in-group member. This experiment had a sample of 42 participants. The results of this experiment showed that the susceptibility of eyewitnesses to false witnesses increased in crimes that depicted intragroup conflict. It was prevalent that the susceptibility of false memories was more where the perpetrator and the victim were in-group members. In specificity, there were more false memories reported by eyewitnesses where crime involved perpetrators and victims who are from groups that are relative to each other. In case of conflict between these two groups, an eyewitness had increased false memories. Carpenter and Krendl concluded that intragroup conflict's social salience was responsible for making eyewitnesses more susceptible to false memories.

Morgan, Southwick, Steffian, Hazlett & Loftus (2013) conducted a study to investigate whether misinformation, given to eyewitnesses who have experienced a stressful event, would lead to false memories. These researchers acknowledged that existing research showed that misinformation could lead to distortions in human memory. In their experiment, the researchers used 861 participants and all these participants were in active duty military. Six hundred forty-nine participants were male and 192 were female who was recruited in U.S. Navy Survival School training. The authors assigned the 861 participants in one random group out of the four groups and they were required to complete a memory assessment questionnaire. These researchers then made sure that the participants are confined in a stressful environment as they were in the survival phase of their training. Afterward, Morgan, Southwick, Steffian, Hazlett and Loftus introduced misinformation to the stressed participants and results showed that the memories of the participants were distorted because they could not remember incidences such as the presence of weapons. Additionally, more than half of the participants falsely identified an aggressive interrogator. The authors concluded that in a stressful event, an eye witness subjected to misinformation was vulnerable to memory distortions and subsequent false memories.

Palma, Neufeld, Brust-Renck, Rossetto & Crippa (2017) conducted a study to investigate whether social anxiety disorder has any impact in influencing false memories. According to these authors, false memories encompass explaining an event that never occurred or that occurred but not as precisely as an individual recalls. The objective of the study was to assess emotion affected memory performance in an activity witnessed by individuals who do not have a social anxiety disorder and those that have this condition. The researchers selected 137 participants where 61 had the condition and 76 did not have a social anxiety disorder. The two groups were randomly selected to watch stories that had emotional arousal and those that did not have such arousal. Results showed that the participants who had the disorder recalled more true memories of stories that did not have emotional arousal. On the other hand, they recovered more false memories of stories that aroused them emotionally, concluding that social anxiety had a profound impact on emotional memory accuracy.

False memories occur when memory differs from reality or when an event never occurred (Rosa & Gutchess, 2013). The researchers conducted a study, acknowledging that older people are prone to false memories compared to their young counterparts. According to them, self-referencing is documented as a method that enhances accurate memory. However, they were concerned by the fact that less information is available that concerns how self-referencing affects false memories. The objective of this study was to investigate whether false memories were affected by self-referencing and if age was a contributing factor in this case. In the study, the participants were required to rate adjectives for self-descriptiveness before the researchers introduce commonness judgments as a control condition. The participants then completed a test for adjectives for self-descriptiveness. Results showed that among the older people, false alarms increased when information became more self-descriptive. It highlighted an increased prevalence of false memory among older adults, especially when information related to the self.

Kloft et al. (2020) conducted a study to investigate the role played by cannabis in influencing false memories. According to the authors, there is growing acceptance of cannabis across the world which has increased its widespread use by eyewitnesses in courts of law. The authors acknowledge that cannabis is the most widely used illicit substance in the world and therefore raises the concern of investigating the impact of this substance on human memory, particularly in the context of eyewitnesses. The writers conducted a randomized trial to investigate the effect of cannabis intoxication on susceptibility to false memory. Sixty-four healthy volunteers agreed to act as test subjects. They tested the memory immediately after intoxication and tested the memory after one week using the methods of associative word lists and two misinformation tasks using virtual reality. Results showed that there were enhanced false memory effects on those patients that were intoxicated with cannabis, concluding that the substance increases false-memory proneness.

Findings

The above studies show that it is wrong to always use eyewitness testimony in a courtroom. First, eyewitnesses' accounts are biased. Eyewitnesses become more susceptible to false memories in cases where there is an intragroup conflict (Carpenter & Krendl, 2016). Therefore, when there is a crime involving two related groups, an eye witness may have false memory on the perpetrator if he/she is from the other group. It is a reflection that the said perpetrator may be punished even when they are not the actual perpetrators. Apart from bias, it is also evident that eyewitnesses' information can easily be distorted in case they are stressed. From the above research, misinformation given to eyewitnesses who have experienced a stressful event would lead to false memories (Morgan, Southwick, Steffian, Hazlett & Loftus, 2013). It, therefore, means that for stressed eyewitnesses, their memory accounts in a court of law might be wrong which would mean that the information they give would contribute to miscarriages of justice.

It is also evident that eyewitness accounts should not be used in courts because it could result in a miscarriage of justice in case the witness suffers from a social anxiety disorder. From the above study, accounts that involve emotional arousal result to recall more false memories by those with a social anxiety disorder (Palma, Neufeld, Brust-Renck, Rossetto & Crippa, 2017). Therefore, among those with these conditions, cases that arouse emotions would mean that they give false accounts that would replicate to lack of justice. Also, in the case of eyewitnesses using cannabis, they have enhanced false memory effects (Kloft et al., 2020). It means that justice might not prevail in case such witnesses are used. It is clear that among older eyewitnesses, there is increased false memory prevalence in case information related to the self is required in the court (Rosa & Gutchess, 2013). When such occurs, justice fails to prevail.

Conclusion

Eyewitness testimony should not always be used in a courtroom because eyewitnesses often experience false memories that contribute to miscarriages of justice. Eyewitness crime accounts are biased which leads to false memories, stressed eyewitnesses are prone to memory distortions, social anxiety disorder distorts emotional memories, cannabis increase false memory effects, and there is increased false memory prevalence among older eyewitnesses in case information related to the self. These findings examine why eyewitness accounts are wrong using the basis of false memories. It opens up the debate on why such accounts should not be relied upon, through the examination of other bases, including the effect of stress, cross-race issues and facial recognition issues.

References

Carpenter, A., & Krendl, A. (2016). Are eyewitness accounts biased? Evaluating false memories for crimes involving in-group or out-group conflict. Social Neuroscience, 13(1), 74-93. doi: 10.1080/17470919.2016.1253610

Kloft, L., Otgaar, H., Blokland, A., Monds, L., Toennes, S., Loftus, E., & Ramaekers, J. (2020). Cannabis increases susceptibility to false memory. Proceedings Of The National Academy Of Sciences, 201920162. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1920162117

Morgan, C., Southwick, S., Steffian, G., Hazlett, G., & Loftus, E. (2013). Misinformation can influence memory for recently experienced, highly stressful events. International Journal Of Law And Psychiatry, 36(1), 11-17. doi: 10.1016/j.ijlp.2012.11.002

Palma, P., Neufeld, C., Brust-Renck, P., Rossetto, C., & Crippa, J. (2017). False memories in social anxiety disorder. Archives Of Clinical Psychiatry (Sao Paulo), 44(5), 113-116. doi: 10.1590/0101-60830000000133

Rosa, N., & Gutchess, A. (2013). False Memory in Aging Resulting From Self-Referential Processing. The Journals Of Gerontology Series B: Psychological Sciences And Social Sciences, 68(6), 882-892. doi: 10.1093/geronb/gbt018

Abstracts

(Carpenter & Krendl, 2016)

Eyewitness testimony has been shown to be unreliable and susceptible to false memories. Whether eyewitness memory errors are influenced by the victim's group membership (relative to both the eyewitness and perpetrator) is underexplored. The current study used complementary behavioral and neuroimaging approaches to test the hypothesis that intragroup conflict heightens participants' susceptibility to subsequent false memories. Healthy young adults witnessed and later answered questions a...