My Homework for Your Reading Pleasure

I know I haven’t had this section in my blog for a while, and I haven’t been including it as much as I used to, but that’s because I haven’t really been writing many good papers lately (or many papers in general at all). Most of my courses this semester are reading- and memorizing-heavy, so I’ve been deprived of doing what I do best when it comes to type of homework.

This is a paper I wrote today for my sociological enterprise course. If you remember a few weeks back, I wrote a paper for this same course about memory malleability and the invalidity of eyewitness testimony. For this assignment, we were supposed to take the topic we had and ask a question about it which can be answered using statistics.

The question I asked was, “How serious is the problem of eyewitness misidentification?”

In a sense, your optical memory is broken. Chances are, you think seeing a particular event with your own eyes is the best way to prove that it happened the way it did, but evidence screams otherwise. Your memory is malleable, which means it can be easily altered by current beliefs (as opposed to the beliefs you possessed at the time the memory was originally created) and en­vi­ron­men­tal factors (like changing societal trends).

How might this happen in everyday life? Say you watched a week-old video of yourself playing football wearing a black sweater. If, the day after you watch the video, someone asks you what sweater you wore last Wednesday, memory malleability states you are more inclined to say you wore a black sweater because the image of you wearing that black sweater is more fresh in your mind, even though in reality, that video from last week was filmed on a Thursday, and on Wednesday, you were actually wearing a gray sweater.

This example makes memory malleability seem unimportant; more often than not, nothing serious will happen if you cannot recall your clothing selection from the previous week. But what if, instead of having to remember what you were wearing during that football game, you had to remember what a suspect was wearing during a murder that happened 100 meters away while you were playing your game?

Clothing is not the only thing that can be mistakenly recalled. Other human traits prone to confusion include hair color, skin tone, height, and estimated weight. Not surprisingly, during criminal trials, juries tend to put as much trust in eyewitnesses as eyewitnesses put in them­selves.

How serious is this problem of eyewitness misidentification? According to the Innocence Project (which, according to their website, is “an organization dedicated to exonerating wrongfully con­victed individuals”), eyewitness misidentification is the leading cause of wrongful convictions.

Based on 225 cases taken on by the Innocence Project, the top four primary contributing causes of wrongful convictions were eyewitness mis­i­den­ti­fi­ca­tion, in­valid/im­proper foren­sics, false confessions, and in­for­mants. In the graph to the right, the y-axis rep­re­sents the percentage of cases in which the cause appears, and the x-axis depicts each in­di­vid­u­al cause as described in the legend. In the research, a primary contributing cause was determined by identifying the leading source(s) of incorrect evidence during the trial that ultimately led to a guilty verdict.

It is clear from this data that eyewitness misidentification is the most serious problem when it comes to wrongful convictions, appearing in more than three-quarters of exonerations as the primary cause or one of the primary causes leading to an invalid verdict. This means that, because of our unjustified trust in eyewitnesses, we are putting innocent people in prison. It is un­ac­cept­a­ble for a single type of problem to be responsible for so many errors, and action should be taken to prevent this from continuing to happen (such as presenting eyewitnesses such that they receive less weight in judgment, or abolishing eyewitness testimonies in general).