Some things to think about. My opinion only.
The Innocence Project is a nonprofit team of attorneys and law students that re-examines questionable murder convictions with the hope of using DNA evidence to overturn the sentences of defendents who've been wrongfully imprisoned. In the first 130 cases the Innocence Project overturned, eyewitness testimony played a part in 78 percent of those wrongful convictions [source:
Stambor].
Why are eyewitnesses unreliable?
And:
Eyewitness talk
Many factors such as memory decay, poor eyesight and induced stress have already been shown to
have an influence in false testimony. But these factors can only explain a small percentage of false eyewitness statements. There is another factor known as “eyewitnesses talk” which comes into play. This is where witnesses discuss what they saw with each other after the event and then change their mind about what they thought they saw based on the evidence of another witness.
Witnesses talking after an event is a pretty common phenomenon, a
survey found that 86% of real eyewitnesses claim to have discussed the event with other witnesses prior to giving evidence. And this is where the process of “co-witness conformity” occurs – in other words eyewitnesses are influenced into including things they didn’t actually see in their statements.
But while
previous research has proved that such processes can occur, very little is known about why some people are more likely to do this, or what influences people to change their statements in the first place.
New research reveals how little we can trust eyewitnesses