Are You Sure? Why have more than two-thousand people exonerated for crimes they didn’t commit? Eyewitness misidentification is the leading cause of wrongful convictions in the U.S. Memory can be influenced by anxiety, stress, reconstructive memory and other factors possibly affecting the testimony of the eyewitness and in turn, misleading the jury. I think that when subjects witness a crime they will struggle to remember important details of the event, and their recollection could be easily altered. This is because the reconstructive memory can be influenced by factors such as stress, anxiety, and verbal cues. The Brain Memory is made up of multiple systems that help create, store, and recall your memories. They often work together in unison, but if you are under stress, like during a test, it may be harder to recall. There are many different parts of your brain that help you remember things, these include the amygdala and the hippocampus. The amygdala plays a prominent role in the brain when it processes a memory of emotional reactions or social behavior. The hippocampus is responsible for transferring short term memory to long term memory. It is one of the few parts of the …show more content…
It used to help the jury understand what happened, however, witnesses can easily be wrong. When giving eyewitness testimony, the witness is required to give a description of what they saw, what the perpetrator looked like, and details about the crime, then choose who they think committed the crime out of a lineup. The perpetrator is sometimes not in the lineup, and there are often fillers so the identifier has more to choose from. The lineup is usually what puts the perpetrator on trial, and is an easy place to get something wrong. Overall, it is better to have a lineup done digitally because of possible influence on the witness. Their minds can easily be swayed and cause them to make the wrong