eyewitnesses are confident, vivid, sincere, and wrong with alarming regularity.
means a firsthand report of an event as remembered by someone who saw it, which is not the same thing as what actually happened.
from legal systems built entire evidentiary hierarchies on eyewitness testimony for centuries, until 20th-century psychology started testing memory under lab conditions and found it edits itself like a bad rough draft.
innocence project cases — eyewitness misidentification factor in 375+ us dna exonerations
jennifer thompson case — 1984 rape id was wrong, correct man served 11 years
loftus car crash study — 1974 experiment showed leading words changed speed estimates and memories
challenger disaster reports — 1986 witnesses gave wildly differing accounts of the explosion sequence