Eyewitness testimony plays a large role in convictions, however, it is not all that reliable. In the United States around 200 people become criminal defendants daily, based on eyewitness testimony (Goldstein, 1989). An organization called the Innocence Project, has exonerated 341 people by using DNA evidence as of 2012. On average, these people served 13 years in prison before being exonerated for crimes they did not commit (Innocence Project, 2012).
In my very first psychology class that I have taken during my college career, my classmates and I were able to experience how inaccurate eyewitness testimony can be. As class was just about to begin one day, a student came into our room, started screaming at our professor about a bad grade she had given him, and actually threw something at her before he ran back out of the room. This entire incident only lasted a couple seconds and because we were not expecting that to happen, we weren’t paying full attention. Our professor was shaken up and wanted to call security but did not know his name, so she asked us to describe his appearance. She said she thought he was wearing a white sweatshirt, and we couldn’t remember that small detail so we agreed with her. She then drew a picture of what she thought he looked like and asked for our input. We changed some minor details but overall, we stuck with her suggestion. Finally, the student came back into our room and our professor let us know that she set the whole thing up. He was not wearing a sweatshirt, he was wearing a white shirt with a company name on it, and his face did not match our description. This was a perfect example of “errors due to suggestion” because we just went along with her answers, thinking she remembered more than we did.
References:
Gruman, J. A., Schneider, F. W., & Coutts, L. (2017). Applied social psychology: understanding and addressing social and practical problems. SAGE.
Help us put an end to wrongful convictions! (n.d.). Retrieved from https://www.innocenceproject.org/.