Han En Chai

How do false eyewitness testimonies affect the victim’s testimony and memory of the details and process of the crime?

Started May 26, 2022

Abstract or project description

False eyewitness testimony is a well-known phenomenon that was published a few years ago. False eyewitness testimony is when the eyewitness of a legal case wrongly encodes information about the details of a crime. This phenomenon is caused by physiological reasons, such as witness’s health conditions, age, and cross- race bias. According to past research, this phenomenon occured in about 69% of 395 cases evaluated. With a high percent rate of the false memory formed, the question leads to whether or not the victims will have a false memory based on the information that was given out through a false eyewitness testimony. Thus, this paper will be focused on investigating the victims’ false memory with several informative research papers. This paper will analyze three relevant research articles identified through Google Scholar. The first paper talks about how time might change the accuracy of eyewitness memory. The second paper reviewed focuses on the impact of trauma on memories of abuse which can specifically relate to the victim’s testimony. The last paper uses college students to better understand how the construction of narrative occurs when a story is told through a perpetrator or victims point of view. These papers will be reviewed to help answer the question of how different factors affect eyewitness and victim’s testimonies. This paper will also outline gaps in the literature relating to this topic and identify areas where future research should focus. These findings could be insightful when assessing the reliability of the victim’s testimony in courtroom cases.