Ideal Eyewitnesses In The Judicial System

The first thing we need to discuss is what the ideal eyewitness should be and how they are in the judicial system. The eyewitness’ testimony is taken as the fundamental criterion, and the person should be able to perceive all that transpired during the event, accurately encode these perceptions, exhaustively store the encoded perceptions in memory, and accurately retrieve the encodings from memory in the form of later reports (Penrod, 121). I personally feel that eyewitnesses should be honest no matter what, even if they committed the crime. The trial would not be a long investigation if people owned their mistakes. Also when there are lots of witnesses the investigation can change multiple times and feel like the whole thing is starting back at square one.

Eyewitnesses in the judicial system have lots of roles. They are called upon to make identifications at two points in the legal process. First during the investigation of suspects, they may be called upon to help compose a facial composite using a “photo-kit,” examine mug shots, pick a suspect out of a photo-spread, or make an identification from a live lineup. Second thing is the eyewitness may be called upon during the prosecution of defendants to make an identification in a courtroom trial (Penrod, 149). Characteristics of the eyewitness may profoundly affect the performance (Penrod, 157). We cannot define everybody to have the same characteristics or personality. Everybody is unique in their own way, and due to that, we have to carefully rely on eyewitness testimonies and their reliability. Overall, we need the eyewitness to be truthful and not making the investigation much harder to determine the person who committed the