Free eyewitness testimony Essays and Papers.
In theory, an eyewitness testimony could be discredited in a court of law if it could be established that an eyewitness is not competent by showing that his or her memory and perception are impaired, he or she has certain biases or prejudices against the accused, or that he or she is a reputed liar.Loftus, Elizabeth F. Eyewitness Testimony. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996. This example Eyewitness Testimony Essay is published for educational and informational purposes only. If you need a custom essay or research paper on this topic please use our writing services.Eyewitness testimony needs to be reliable as it can have serious implications to the perceived guilt or innocence of a defendant. Unfortunately, the reliability of eyewitness testimony is questionable because there is a high number of eyewitness misidentification.
The reliability if an eyewitness testimony is questionable. The witness may be so certain that the person that thy are pointing out is one hundred per cent the suspect or they could be so certain when it comes to retelling the incident, although these people are so sure on what it is they are doing, their testimony cannot always accurate.Iowa State University experimental social psychologist Gary Wells, PhD, a member of a 1999 U.S. Department of Justice panel that published the first-ever national guidelines on gathering eyewitness testimony, says Loftus's model suggests that crime investigators need to think about eyewitness evidence in the same way that they think about trace.
Eyewitness testimony can play a beneficial part in the criminal justice system. However, the tendency of convicting innocent individuals through eyewitness evidence is estimated at a staggering 45 percent (Sycamnias, 1999).
