A Witness’s Memory Can Change

You’re facing serious criminal charges, but you maintain your innocence. You say that you weren’t involved, and you weren’t even at the location when the alleged crime took place. You believe it’s just a case of mistaken identity and that your name should be cleared.

But the prosecution has a witness. This person claims that they saw you committing the crime in question. They identify you when compared to other potential suspects.

You don’t know of any reason why this witness would want to lie, and they appear to be serious: They genuinely believe that they remember seeing you there, even though you honestly know that you were not. How could this have happened?

The telephone game

The issue is with human memory itself. Every time you think about a memory, your brain has the chance to change or distort it. These changes can then be stored so that the next time you recall it, you believe the memory is accurate.

This has often been compared to the telephone game, where people whisper a sentence to one another, moving down the line. By the end, the sentence is very different than when it began. The same thing can happen with a memory, leading to an inaccurate identification by the witness.

This is why it is a problem if witnesses talk to other people about the case, read about it or simply spend a lot of time thinking about what happened. Doing so is natural, but they could be inserting details that they get from elsewhere into their own memories.

In complex cases like this—especially if you’re facing serious charges—it’s very important to understand all of your legal defense options.