In the second article, Why many ‘Eyewitnesses’ in the Darren Wilson Investigation were Wrong, the author talks about the many problems that arose from the investigation were an unarmed teenager was murder by a Ferguson’s cop. According to this article, many eyewitnesses had claimed that they had witnessed the final moments of Michael Brown. Yet, when it came to their interrogation, all of these witnesses had very different versions of the event. For example, according to one the witnesses, the officer shot the teenager when he was standing right next to his police car. This statement contradicts the declaration of another witness who says that the boy was shot as he was running away from the same police car. Yet, another witness says that when these …show more content…
This variable is very important when a witness is encoding an event such as the murder of a person because the attention that is given to the crime can determine the accuracy of the information that the witness reports. The second variable that is looked at in this process is the amount of time that the witness was exposed to the crime. According to the textbook, this variable goes hand in hand with attention because the longer the witness encodes the event, the stronger the memory will be for later recall (Schwartz, 2016). The third variable that is considered in this process is the distance and lighting in which the witness encodes the event. For example, when a witness finds himself ten feet away from the event, he is more likely to encode more details from the crime than from a witness who is twenty or thirty feet away. The same way happens with lighting. When a crime is committed during the day, the witness is able to encode more details of the event such as the color or plate number of a car or even describe more accurately the suspect in terms of the race, height, and weight. The last variable that