Reliability Of Eyewitness Testimony In Court

Should Eyewitness Testimony be accepted as Reliable Evidence in Court?
Students Name
Institutional Affiliation
Course Name
Date

Should Eyewitness Testimony be accepted as Reliable Evidence in Court?
Introduction: Eyewitness testimony has been a critical component of the criminal justice system; throughout historyWhen eyewitnesses confidently identify a suspect and state that the suspect is the individual they saw committing a crime, many jurors tend to believe them.
Thesis: The purpose of this paper is to look at the controversy of eyewitness testimony and state my stance on the controversy.
Body
Paragraph 1
Topic Sentence: Some researchers and legal specialists argue that eyewitness testimony is reliable.
Detail 1: The police must be careful how they extract and respond to eyewitnesses information. Wixted, Mickes & Fisher (2018) performed a study in which they concluded that eyewitnesses could provide reliable evidence immediately after witnessing a crime.
Detail 2: On the other side of the controversy are researchers and law experts who argue that eyewitness testimonies cannot be trusted because of various factors. These factors can influence how a witness remembers an event and how they describe the details when questioned by .
Paragraph 2
Detail 1: According to Liu (2021), the factors that influence a witnesss testimony include memory contamination, and stress can also influence a witnesss ability to recall information about an event accurately.
Detail 2: This is especially the case when a weapon is used in the event. These factors influence how a witness remembers and narrates details of the crime scene.
Paragraph 3
Topic sentence: The legal significance of eyewitness testimony is that it might lead to the conviction of innocent people.
Detail 1: The psychological significance is that a persons memory of an event changes may be inaccurate over time. My stance on this controversy is that eyewitness memory should not be relied upon as evidence in court.
Detail 2: The testimony is not pure since it is influenced by various factors such as how the witness is questioned, the length of time it takes before the witness can testify in court, and the influence of their environment (Nayak & Khajuria, 2019).
Conclusion
.Thus, it is the duty of investigators and law enforcement officials to consider how they handle witnesses and ensure they are not influenced by any internal or external actors.

References
Liu,F. (2021). The reliability of eyewitness testimony.Proceedings of the 2021 International Conference on Public Relations and Social Sciences (ICPRSS 2021). doi:10.2991/assehr.k.211020.222
Nayak,B.P., & Khajuria,H. (2019). Eyewitness testimony: Probative value in the criminal justice system.Egyptian Journal of Forensic Sciences,9(1). doi:10.1186/s41935-018-0109-z
Wixted,J.T., Mickes,L., & Fisher,R.P. (2018). Rethinking the reliability of eyewitness memory.Perspectives on Psychological Science,13(3), 324-335. doi:10.1177/1745691617734878