For the Defense - Volume 2, Issue 2 - 2017 - 37

Witness
Interviewing
Lessons from
Eyewitness
Error Cases
Jules Epstein

T

hat eyewitnesses make errors - errors of a catastrophic
nature that can send an innocent person to jail for
decades or even face a sentence of death - cannot be
doubted. As confirmed by the Innocence Project, "[e]yewitness misidentification is the greatest contributing factor to
wrongful convictions proven by DNA testing, playing a role
in more than 70% of convictions overturned through DNA
testing nationwide."1
But are lessons from these exonerations of more general
applicability, of use in civil as well as in criminal cases? The
simple answer is "certainly."
The single most important lesson for anyone preparing
to interview a fact witness is that the mind is not a video
recorder that captures events and information; maintains
that information without modification; and then recalls it
accurately. To the contrary, "[m]emory is much more than
a simple retrieval system...Rather, the nature of memory
is constructive and influenced by a person's current state
as well as intervening emotions, beliefs, events and other
factors since a recalled event."2
Memory scientists teach that this is a three-stage process - encoding, the time of initial input of information;
storage, the time during which the memory is retained;
and retrieval, the telling/interview/interrogation process.
At each stage errors may occur.
Vol. 2, Issue 2 | For The Defense

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Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of For the Defense - Volume 2, Issue 2 - 2017

For the Defense - Volume 2, Issue 2 - 2017 - 1
For the Defense - Volume 2, Issue 2 - 2017 - 2
For the Defense - Volume 2, Issue 2 - 2017 - 3
For the Defense - Volume 2, Issue 2 - 2017 - 4
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For the Defense - Volume 2, Issue 2 - 2017 - 52
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