Eyewitness Testimony

If there were a camera around every corner then I would say, no, Eyewitnesses should not be allowed to Testify in Criminal Cases. But there are not cameras around every corner. Yet, I would still say, no, because the information given is not always correct. My past experience with people falsely accusing me has made me come to the conclusion that not everything people say is the truth. People lie about things, some things they probably should not lie about. I believe that eyewitness testimonies should not be allowed in Criminal Cases because people lie or they do not see the crime 100%.

Information gets passed along through many people. When the information is passed it gets distorted. Telephone is a great example of eyewitness testimonies. When a person whispers something, for example “the dog has a bath”, as it goes around the circle the other people might not understand the information and it could end up, “the dog is a ball”. In my past experiences people have told lies about me and my friends. It would start off small and then get bigger and bigger as more and more people began to believe the lies. That is what people call a rumor. A rumor starts off small and as it escalates it becomes twisted and sooner or later it becomes a mess.

In a Criminal Case, the “rumor” is not always intended to be false. “Eyewitness identification is wrong almost 50% of the time. This is not because the witnesses are lying or being deceptive. Rather, more often than not, they are simply mistaken” (Merritt). The eyewitnesses are just trying to do the right thing and tell the court or police that the accused is really the criminal. From the Washington Post, a team of psychologists from Iowa Sate University ran an experiment about eyewitnesses. They created a 60 second tape of a bomber and asked 253 volunteers to watch and pick the suspect out of a line up, even though the actor was not even in the line up,

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