SEE IT, BELIEVE IT. Did you know that 71 percent of the 358 individuals that were convicted through eyewitness misidentification had served an average of 15 years in prison before exoneration? In Mrs. Yungeberg's Psychology class this year, students have been learning about the brain and how it can change the way you remember things.
After performing an experiment in Mrs. Steinfort's seminar where a fight was staged between Violet Slifer and Paige Miller, both in the psychology class, a survey was handed out. Each person was asked to recall the events, what the “intruder” was wearing, what she had in her hands, and what she said during the fight. After reviewing the results, no one in the room had the same answer, let alone the right answer.
One of the participants, Paige Miller, says, “I did not realize how unreliable eyewitnesses are until this experiment. Everyone's response was very different from each other and no one had exactly what happened right. This just shows that people perceive memories in all different ways.” Caden Weaver, a bystander in this experiment says, “Filling out that form was harder than I thought because I wasn’t paying attention to what she was wearing.” This quote applies to this situation and many other eyewitness accounts because faces, clothing, and words can easily get mixed up.
How good do you think your memory is? Could you identify or remember a situation based on what someone said or what they were wearing? 75 percent of innocent people incarcerated by eyewitness misidentifications were convicted for rape and murder. A number of people being scheduled for execution were convicted based only on eyewitness testimony. You can not always trust an eyewitness even though they may have been there. It is clear that eyewitness testimony should no longer dictate who is convicted or not.
Article by Paige Miller and Jaqui Sandoval