When you hear stories about people who were misidentified and spent years in prison for a crime they didn’t commit, did you ever wonder how that could that happen?
How is it possible for a witness to develop a false memory for the culprit’s face, so that when they close their eyes and remember the crime, it’s the suspect’s face who they falsely identified that they now see, while their original memory for the actual perpetrator fades into obscurity? How can this happen?
Eyewitness testimony presents special challenges to the criminal justice system. Although, eyewitnesses can often play a crucial role in prosecuting dangerous criminals, human memory is fallible and vulnerable to influence; and when errors do occur, false identifications and mistaken recollections can shatter the lives of the wrongfully accused while the guilty go free.
If you are interested these sorts of issues, you will love True Crime False Memory, a podcast designed to bring you true stories of actual cases of innocent people who were mistakenly identified, wrongfully accused, and put on trial for crime they didn’t commit. These are also the stories of the victims and witnesses, who, through a variety of circumstances came to sincerely believe, that they had identified the actual culprit, leading up to that dramatic moment in the trial when the witness points across the courtroom, and testifies that they could never forget that face as long as they live; when in reality they were dead wrong.
My name is Dr. Mitchell Eisen. I am a research psychologist who studies issues related to eyewitness memory and suggestibility. Over the past 20+ years I have consulted on, and testified in, many hundreds of eyewitness cases. In many of these cases, the accused suspect was obviously guilty. However, in other cases, the eyewitness evidence was weak and unreliable; and sometimes the accused person was clearly innocent- falsely accused of a crime that they did not commit.
This podcast is designed to bring you the true stories of these cases. In each episode, will take a careful look at the crime with special attention to the experience of the victims and witnesses, and examine the nuts and bolts of the investigation that introduced elements of suggestion and forever altered their memory for the event and the perpetrator.
For each case we will shed light on how the science of eyewitness memory was used to explain how the false memories developed, and how the defense used this science to explain to the jury how an honest witness could come to mistakenly identify an innocent suspect, and come to believe in these mistakes to the point that when they imagined the event to themselves, it was the face of the innocent suspect they saw, while their memory for the actual culprit faded into the vagaries of memory.