Eyewitness Testimony

Eyewitness testimony is, at best, evidence of what the witness believes to show on occurred.  It whitethorn or may not notify what re whollyy happened. The familiar problems of perception, of gauging time, speed, height, weight, of surgical identification of persons accused of immorality all contribute to making honest testimony something less(prenominal) than altogether credible (Cramer and Levin, 1968).  Eyewitness testimony, which relies on the accuracy of the phalanx personnel repositing, has an vast impact on the outcome of a trial. Aside from the gage gun, nothing carries as a great deal weight with a jury than the testimony of an actual witness. However, how accurate is the actual direct of the crime as said by that witness?  The human memory is far from being meliorate and, lets face it, forgetfulness is a fact of life. wholeness of the most unmistakable reasons for forgetfulness is the nature of the human memory itself. all the same the most basic, quoti dian items often fail to be encoded into our memory. When reconstructing their memory of the crime, the eyewitness inadvertently fills in the gaps in his or her literal memory of the crime based on such factors as the eyewitnesss expectations, attitude, beliefs and knowledge of similar events (Wise, Fishman and Safer, 2009).

  This, in turn, produces a testimony that may seem believable and accurate, but does and then contain many an different(prenominal) faults and inaccuracies. Another cause of faulty eyewitness testimony is eyewitness bias. Encoding is defined as the hardened of mental operations that peo ple perform on arresting information to di! versify that information into a form that is uncommitted in the hotshots storage systems (Ciccarelli and White, 2010 pg 214).  Because encoding besides involves interference and interpretation, what is stored in memory is not just what the eyewitness had seen, but also the meaning the witness gave to what happened. For example, if a sensory hair stylist witnesses a crime, he or she may focalize more on the suspects hair than other features.  Factors present during a crime...If you want to get a bounteous essay, order it on our website: OrderCustomPaper.com

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