Eyewitness Misidentification

I am completely appalled by the fact that we are still giving so much credit to the accounts of eyewitnesses. As we have learned in our studies, our memories easily become contaminated by things like, post-event misinformation, retroactive interference, errors in source monitoring, not to mention things like the stress of the event, which can also influence our memories (Matlin, 2012). If fact the act of recalling an event is more like trying to put together a puzzle with missing pieces, than simple reviewing a video. And when we take into account that “eyewitness misidentification is the greatest contributing factor to wrongful convictions proven by DNA testing, playing a role in more than 70% of convictions overturned through DNA testing