How eyewitness reports can go spectacularly wrong.

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Eyewitness memory is visual, but the images involved must be conveyed verbally. This transition can result in significant errors in investigation and court.

reportMany visual details are lost relatively quickly from any given memory, resulting in our reporting only the brief gist of whatever we saw. For nearly a century, it has been known that even our personal beliefs can alter our memories .

A picture is supposedly worth a thousand words, but it's possible that those thousand words can result in a wildly inaccurate description of a given picture. One of the best historical examples of this may derive from one of the most infamous historical crimes in America, the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.

Now, this so-called “magic bullet” has become infamous. In movies and books, we hear repeatedly about the fact that this bullet would have had to move laterally in its course, after traversing the president’s body, to have resulted in the wounds seen on the governor. Such a lateral course is impossible; bullets do not suddenly pause in their flight, move one way or another, and then continue in a new direction.

In laboratory exercises, we have replicated this effect using a laser sight mounted on a stand and a couple of volunteers sitting in chairs, their backs to the stand . If one of the volunteers satin front of the other, the course of the “magic bullet,” as simulated by the laser sight, resulted in a complete impossibility; the volunteer representing Governor Connally could not have been wounded by that bullet in the manner that occurred.

 

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