What Is False Eyewitness Testimony

The unreliability of memory for an eyewitness in a testimony can become a consequential problem for any victim. According to Joel N. Shurkin with the news service “Inside Science,” the statistic from the organization Innocence Project represented how serious the unreliability of memory becomes in court testimonies: “Eyewitness testimony played a role in 75 percent of guilty verdicts eventually overturned by DNA testing after people spent years in prison. Some prisoners may have even been executed due to false eyewitness testimony. It was not because the witnesses were lying” (Fleck 9). In fact, witness testimony relies entirely on a person’s ability to remember events and the witnesses may be wrong without even realizing it. Once scientist