Psychological Limitations Of Eyewitness Testimony And Their Impact On Criminal Justice In India
- IJLLR Journal
- 5 days ago
- 1 min read
Raksha Subba, K.E.S Shri Jayantilal H. Patel Law College
ABSTRACT
In Indian criminal trials, eyewitness testimony remains a cornerstone of the evidentiary process. Judges frequently assign immense weight to what a witness claims to have seen, even to the point of securing a conviction based on a single individual’s account, as permitted by the Indian Evidence Act of 1872. This deep-rooted legal trust relies heavily on the assumption that an individual can perfectly observe and recount the past events. Yet contemporary research in cognitive psychology reveal that this assumption is often fundamentally flawed.
This paper examines the inherent psychological limitations of human memory and how it affects the reliability and accuracy of the eyewitness testimonies. The paper further explores how such limitations of human memory affect the Indian criminal justice system, particularly in relation to wrongful convictions, misidentification and the over reliance on testimonial evidence.
A major focus of this paper is the gap between how courts judge a witness’s credibility and scientific understanding of memory. Currently, the legal system lacks the safeguards needed to identify and evaluate cognitive errors. To address this issue the paper suggests practical reforms to improve reliability of eyewitness testimonies, such as greater reliance on corroborative evidence, and increased awareness of psychological principles among legal professionals. The paper concludes that incorporating cognitive science insights is essential to ensure fairness, accuracy and safeguarding constitutional rights in criminal adjudication.
Keywords: Eyewitness testimony, Indian Evidence Act, 1872, Cognitive psychology, Memory distortion, Encoding, Storage and Retrieval model, Forensic corroboration, Wrongful conviction, Suggestibility, False identification, Legal precedent and cognitive science, Witness reliability.
