Eyewitness Testimony Analysis

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In the informative essay “The Problem with Eyewitness Testimony,” Laura Englhardet explained the reasoning about why criminals shouldn’t be convicted on eyewitness only. Eyewitness testimony can make a deep impression on a jury, which is often exclusively assigned the role of sorting out credibility issues and making judgments about the truth of witness statements. I believe it is extremely important to be as correct as possible in your testimony considering judges will trust you and you could accidentally frame a person for a crime that will ruin their life.
Elizabeth Loftus conducted a very simple but intelligent experiment in the mid-seventies demonstrating the effect of a third party’s introducing false facts into memory. During the experiments she would just simply show a slide of a car at an intersection with either a yield sign or a stop sign to a subject. Then many experimenters falsely substituted the term "yield sign" in questions directed to participants who had actually seen the stop sign slide. The results indicated that subjects remembered seeing the false image. This experiment is closely related to the actual eyewitness crime testimonies and helps law enforcements understand that people will just jump to conclusions. “Courts, lawyers and police officers are now aware of the …show more content…
I don’t think “the competence of the average person” should be questioned if they make a mistake. The people being questioned had most likely been under a lot of stress, so it would make sense for them to jump to conclusions or make mistakes. But with these aspects in mind you should not depend on an eyewitness but instead you should need physical proof. The entire article is saying how faulty eyewitness testimony is and how many people have been put behind bars for a crime they did not actually

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