Prompt Cast
The Unreliability of Eyewitness Testimony and Its Impact on Wrongful Convictions
TLDR Eyewitness testimony, often considered the gold standard in the American justice system, has been shown to be unreliable and can lead to wrongful convictions. Factors such as memory fallibility, selective attention, and contamination of memory can all contribute to inaccuracies in eyewitness testimony.
Timestamped Summary
00:00
Eyewitness testimony is often unreliable and has led to wrongful convictions, as demonstrated by the numerous cases in the US where people have been found innocent based on DNA evidence.
05:21
Eyewitness testimony is often considered the gold standard in the American justice system, but it is unreliable and can lead to wrongful convictions.
10:46
Psychology began to question the reliability of memory and eyewitness testimony in the early 20th century, and psychologists like Hugo Munsterberg and Elizabeth Loftus conducted experiments that showed that human memory is fallible and can lead to wrongful convictions.
16:01
The Innocence Project, started in 1992, has worked to exonerate people based on faulty evidence and has achieved 365 exonerations so far.
21:38
Eyewitness testimony is often based on our brains filling in the blanks and making educated guesses about sensory information, which can lead to inaccuracies in our perception of reality and memory.
27:17
Our brains have a finite amount of attention and can experience a "tensional blink" where there is a brief interruption in input, causing us to miss vital information, and our attention is very selective, similar to being focused on a smartphone and not noticing things happening around us.
32:32
Eyewitnesses are more likely to focus on a weapon during a scary experience, such as a gun, rather than the perpetrator's face, which can lead to difficulty in accurately recalling the appearance of the perpetrator.
37:55
Eyewitness testimony can be influenced and contaminated by the process of recalling and describing the event multiple times, leading to potential inaccuracies in the memory.
43:21
Eyewitness testimony can be influenced and contaminated by the process of recalling and describing the event multiple times, leading to potential inaccuracies in the memory, and this can be exacerbated by leading questions from law enforcement and the confidence of the witness.
48:20
Courts have historically been reluctant to allow expert testimony on the fallibility of eyewitness testimony, but there has been a shift in recent years towards allowing expert witnesses to educate jurors on the potential problems with human memory and the limitations of eyewitness identification.
53:46
The accuracy of eyewitness testimony is highly debated, with some arguing that confidence is correlated to accuracy while others believe it is unreliable, but everyone agrees that it shouldn't hold much weight in a courtroom.
59:11
The hosts thank a listener named Doug and his daughter Brandy for finding comfort in their podcast during a difficult time in their lives.
Categories:
Society & Culture
