Are eyewitnesses completely useless?

A lecture by Dr Graham Hole illustrates to us why eyewitnesses fail to correctly identify individuals and how this is due to our inability to recognise faces. In America over 70% of convictions were wrong… this means there was 70% who were innocent, in jail! How can this be that so many eyewitnesses incorrectly recognise voluminous people?

Some say that many eyewitnesses can store memories inaccurately due to the stress of the event, whereas others think that it is merely just hard to translate ones image from within their head on to paper; correspondingly as description of a person could generalise to a wide range of the population who have similar features. Hole said himself “all the information you have of that person is contained in a single snap-shot”. Psychological research has been done to investigate why it is so hard for us to recognise faces. Bindmann and Bandford conducted a study where results show that 38% identified all photos correctly but when they were told that the man was the same then this exponentially increased to 85%. This research shows that through an unfamiliar face it is hard to recognise that the individual was the same but just in different settings.

Hole says “If you don’t know a face you pay more attention to the external features” however this is a immense factor to why we struggle to recognise faces, because when we look at somebody we do recognise we look at their internal features; for example on their face, their nose, eyes and mouth.

Eyewitnesses are extremely unreliable, as well as CCTV footage is also very inaccurate; most of which is in low definition so the face of the criminal or victim is hazy. This means that the only factual strength to identify if someone has committed a crime is by forensic evidence.

By Isabella Edwards- Coloma Convent Girl’s School