John Wixted

Findings like these seem to confirm our worst fears.

Memories are not like video recordings.

They're more like evidence from a crime scene collected by people without gloves, distorting and contaminating it with every touch.

This message from science reinforced the message from the wrongful convictions, and the conventional wisdom was set in stone for decades.

The legal system should not trust eyewitness memory.

It's just too unreliable.

But here's where the story takes an unexpected turn.

What if the problem is not so much about how unreliable eyewitness memory is because of how easily contamination can create false memories,

and more about how and when we test the witness's memory.

Think about forensic evidence like DNA or fingerprints.

Everybody knows that forensic evidence can be contaminated and end up implicating an innocent person, much like contaminated memory can.

But we don't just dismiss forensic evidence for that reason.

Instead, we collect it as early as possible in the police investigation, before it's contaminated.

Why do we do that?

It's because reliable information comes from analyzing uncontaminated evidence, not contaminated evidence, and the exact same principle applies to memory evidence.

Collect it early, before it's contaminated.

An eyewitness's memory of whether or not the police suspect is the person who they saw commit the crime can be highly reliable.

but only if the witness's memory is uncontaminated, not after it's been contaminated.

And scientists now agree that even the first test contaminates the witness's memory for a given suspect.

If the suspect's innocent, for example, it's the first time the witness is seeing his face.