Eyewitness identification error is a major contributor to wrongful convictions. Eyewitness evidence can be unreliable for many reasons such as stress, emotions, lighting and distance issues, and memory recall. Memory is also subject to manipulation and can be distorted by leading questions, suggestive wording, and post-event information that gets incorporated into the original memory.
Despite these fallibilities, people know very little about the dangers of relying on this type of evidence and tend to place a lot of confidence in it. This creates issues in trials because eyewitnesses can be very convincing in their testimony, leading juries to rely heavily on their evidence.
Although we can never control all factors that influence a person’s memory, there are some techniques police can use to reduce the potential for manipulations such as double-blind procedures for lineups, asking eyewitnesses not to speak with one another about the event, showing multiple images of suspects as a sequence, and collecting and recording information from eyewitnesses as soon as possible.