Being an eyewitness is indeed an extremely difficult and intensely pressuring job. During this scenario, I focused intensely upon the bomber's facial features and attempted to base it on observational learning through an episodic memory. I thought that skin tone would be a prevalent factor in the line-up sequence and took careful note of it as either an European or Arabic Caucasian due to the lightness, yet slight tan that I saw. Then, I realized that I was going to be unable to get a clear glimpse of the bomber's face and decided to focus upon his more upon his "disguisable" features such as hair length and colour. The fact that I was unable to get a clear view of his face dropped my confidence level dramatically and throughout the lineup sequence, I felt that I was pressured to choose one despite my confidence being so low and chose the first suspect as he seemed to fit what I saw more than the others. Then, I realized that none of the people in the lineup was the suspect. Thus, it is apparent that modern-day eyewitness procedures are extremely pressuring and can lead to many mistakes outlying its many flaws.

Eyewitnesses face many damaging problems throughout the mainstream traditional procedure. An essential problem that occurs frequently in the procedure seems to be the constant pressure put on the eyewitness that gives them the thought that the suspect is in the lineup and they must make a choice. For example, in the previous paragraph, the thinking and processing an eyewitness goes through naturally was shown and an innocent person was identified as the suspect when the suspect was not even present in the lineup (Rathus 2015). This clearly outlines the problem of incorrect pressuring that exists in the current lineup procedure. Another essential problem that occurs in the traditional lineup procedure seems to be the potential influence of the officer due to their knowledge of the current suspect. Due their knowledge, their behavior and statements could possibly give an indication towards what they believe is the correct suspect. Thus, the main problems within the traditional procedures is the pressure put on eyewitnesses and the possible biased influence caused by the officer's knowledge ("Eyewitness Misidentification").

Another lesser major problem that occurs in the traditional lineup procedure is the eyewitness's natural inability to focus intensely on just one person at a time due to the entire lineup being presented at once. This disallows most eyewitnesses the ability to tap clearly into their episodic memory and can screw the entire procedure up when combined with other major problems in the traditional procedure (Rathus 2015). Therefore, we can conclude that the current mainstream procedure needs an immediate change to achieve greater accuracy in getting the correct suspect and to prevent innocents from being wrongly accused ("Eyewitness Misidentification").


"Eyewitness Misidentification." Innocence Project. N.p., n.d. Web. 26 Mar. 2017.

Rathus, Spencer A. PSYCH. Boston, MA: Cengage Learning, 2015. Print.