Blurred Vision: The Fallibility Of Eyewitness Testimony

Blurred Vision: The Fallibility of Eyewitness Testimony On an early, foggy morning in April 1981, a Dallas, Texas woman awoke to find a man with a knife on top of her in her bed. After trying to get the knife from her attacker, she was cut on her hand, neck, and back, and then raped before the attacker fled the scene. According to the Innocence Project, in the report “Reevaluating Lineups: Why Witnesses Make Mistakes and How to Reduce the Chance of a Misidentification,” the victim originally told the police she could not describe her assailant because at the time of the attack, 45 minutes before sunrise, the room was too dark (7). Two days after the attack, the victim was shown an array of six photographs. From the photos, she could not positively

One way the brain attempts to create whole memories is through the use of schemas. Schemas are sets of information about certain topics that have been attained though previous experience. For example, if one were to imagine a classroom, a person’s internal “classroom schema” would help him or her picture things that one would expect to see in a classroom: desks, chairs, a lectern, et cetera. For eyewitnesses, when they recall the criminal event, schemas will help fill in incomplete memories, at times with erroneous information, creating false memories. This could include things such as remembering seeing a weapon during a crime when there was none or hearing an aggressive comment before a fight that was never uttered. False memories can also be created during police interviews through the use of leading questions and memory work techniques. Police investigators often use such practices to extract specific details from a witness that are needed for an investigation but are nowhere to be found (Simon 111). These techniques attempt prompt eyewitnesses into remember certain facts they have not previously disclosed. Instead of helping an eyewitness remember something they had forgotten, however, they can cause an eyewitness to create a false memory. Decades of research by cognitive psychologist Elizabeth Loftus has shown that the brain will create false memories when prompted with leading information. Participants in her studies asked to watch videos of simulated car crashes have falsely remembered and seeing a yield sign where there was a stop sign and broken glass at a car accident where there was none. In criminal cases that hinge on specific eyewitness details, such as broken glass at the scene of an accident, improper leading questions, intentional or not, can create false memories that can lead to