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Witness Reliability:
Is the mind reliable enough to remember a crime? According to Innocence Project, a
public organization that retests trials to exonerate those convicted, out of 225 convictions that
were overturned, 77% were due to witness misidentification. There are many aspects that
contribute to determining authenticity. First of these aspects is the function of the brain being
used. Each lobe of the brain has a different function playing a role in life. Another condition is
whether there is evidence that supports memory reliability. There are some experiments and data
that say witness reliability is faulty. Expert witnesses attest to the validity, correctness, of the
eyewitness, since eyewitnesses are a major part of a conviction. Looking at the brain over time,
scientists have achieved different conclusions about memory and witness reliability, making this
topic very controversial and is still being debated.
The brain’s structure and functions give insight to determine reliability. The region of the
brain that is responsible for long term memory is the hippocampus. The hippocampus is located
in the limbic system, which is in the center of the brain. Short-term memory is located in the
prefrontal cortex, which is the very front of your brain. The sense is perceived, whether it be by
eyes or sound, and is transmitted, called “encoding,” into the section of the brain responsible for
short-term memory. Short-term memory needs to be remembered repeatedly, if not, the
information gets discarded. According to Brain Games, a television show on national Geographic
that focuses on the brain, anything that is not being kept will get lost in about twenty seconds
(“Remember This!”). If it is important or recalled over a longer time period, it will be placed into
the long-term memory storage where it cannot be lost. According to Saundra Ciccarelli, author of
Psychology, “Many other kinds of long-term memories seem to enter permanent storage with
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little or no effort at all, a kind of automatic encoding” (233). Flashbulb memories are a type of
this automatic encoding that take mental pictures. These are detailed images caused by some type
of emotion, either fear, joy, or anger, says Ciccarelli (233). These emotions cause the images to
be vivid. Ciccarelli says that these are vivid because a hormone is released during an emotional
situation that causes better long-term memory. Even though these images are so descriptive, they
are still subjective to alteration, making them unreliable. The images can be altered by any new
information learned after the incident. This is called the misinformation effect. The new
information learned after the fact gets added to the memory; therefore, changing it (Ciccarelli
236).
Many scientists have done experiments showing how eyewitnesses are unreliable for
different reasons. One reason professors think these witnesses are incorrect is a direct result from
