When a person hears that someone witnessed a crime, their first instinct is to believe everything they said. They were the ones that witnessed the crime and therefore can be trusted completely. However, as we talked about in class this week and witnessed in “Making a Murderer” episode, this isn’t always completely true.
Generally, witnesses can usually be very trusted and important when building cases and catching guilty parties in crimes. However, as we talked about in class, there is a large problem with mistaken identification. People’s memories are generally very malleable and susceptible to suggestion and as a result, many times witnesses remember the perpetrators incorrectly. There are problems with many people’s cross-racial identification (especially due to many continued racially segregated communities across America due to past housing policies), along with problems with some people being very poor identifiers as we talked about in class, along with new information manipulating people’s memories.
Specifically in the case of the Avery case, the misidentification came as a result of the police. The victim/witness gave the description of the perpetrator and the police stated that that sounded like Steven Avery, then drew a sketch of Avery and gave that to the victim and then had her identify Steven from a lineup. Instead of taking her information to guide them, they took her initial description and used that to point her towards Avery, instead of her really pointing them towards Gegory Allen, the true perpetrator. There was also a lot of corruption from the police who chose to not investigate Gregory Allen despite multiple parties telling the sheriff that he could be a suspect. The police had also been watching Allen during this time knowing that he could be a danger to the community and lost track of him during the time of the crime. Also, many people said that the sheriff said that he was going to get Avery for the crime whether he did it or not. This mistaken identification could have been avoided in a million different ways. If the police didn’t immediately single out Avery and do everything in their power to point Penny Beernsten towards Steven Avery and had actually followed up on multiple suspects and possible leads, they would have avoided the misidentification and caught the real perpetrator quicker.
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I think that generally like you said eyewitnesses can not be trusted. Although they are usually used to solve case, it has become more evident that they often lead to wrong convictions. Just like you mentioned in the Avery case an eyewitness was used to aid the wrongful conviction of someone that the sherif had a grudge against.