cognitive key question

• is eye witness testimony too unreliable to trust
• EWT - information given by someone who happened to be in a place where an event has occured
• scenario

  • august 6th 2014 - michael brown, 18yrs old from american town of ferguson
  • he was with his friend dorian johnson when they were both confronted by police officer - darren wilson
  • after confrontation, brown and johnson ran from officer wilson which was when he fired 6 shots to the front of brown which killed him
  • prosecutors relied on EWT as officer wilson did not wear body cam footage and no cctv footage
• issues of EWT

  • unreliable statements can be given - 2 witnesses
  • faulty EWT can send innocent people to jail or non-innocent people being free
  • innocence project which works to exonerete people it believes have been wrong convicted of capital crimes said: 73% out of 249 convictions overturned through DNA testing were due to faulty eye witnesses
• statements:

  • "there were 2 police vehicles and 4 officers present but only 1 fired shots"
  • "officer wilson fired shots at brown through the window whilst he was running"
• reconstructive memory - theory linked to EWT

  • schemas are preconceived conceptions a person has as a result of events experienced or witnesses' - many eye witnesses out of their own conceptions believed brown was shot likely because they've watched movies or shows with a similar scenario leading to a shooting
  • confabulate event - details are changed so they align with someones schema - eye witnesses could have seen brown charging towards the officer instead of away based on past experiences seen in movies or something they have read in the news
• multistore model of memory - theory linked to eye witness testimony

  • states if you pay attention to something it goes from SM to STM but what you remember depends on what you paid attention to and how long for.
  • retrieval failure occurs as they have only paid attention to sensory memory - not being able to recall memories as witnesses have experienced trauma from gunshot sounds, blood so impaired their memory on how many officers there were or vehicles
• • STM - duration of 30s and can be forgotten if witnesses have not done maintenance rehearsal - led to parts of the killing being forgotten such as: if brown was running away from the officer or the other way round