How can multiple witnesses to the same scene see different things?
On the night Jamar Clark was fatally shot by police, some witnesses saw Clark handcuffed; others weren't sure. Whether Clark was cuffed became a key factor in the decision not to charge the two Minneapolis officers involved in the shooting.
Hennepin County Attorney Mike Freeman determined Clark was not handcuffed, based on forensic DNA evidence rather than eyewitnesses — in part, he said, because eyewitnesses contradicted one another.
It's not unusual to get conflicting eyewitness reports of a crime scene, especially such a traumatic and high-profile one.
Everything from sightlines and lighting conditions to whether witnesses spoke to one another or had access to media can affect how memories are formed, stored and recalled. Even the words investigators use when talking to witnesses may affect how memories solidify. The witnesses' personal biases also could weigh heavily on how they remember what they saw. And the more those memories are recalled, the more they can change.
"Memory is not a perfect video recording of one's reality," said Joe Vitriol, a University of Minnesota doctoral candidate whose research focuses on perception and judgment. "It's a reconstruction of information, of events, and it's subject to the kinds of information that we perceive and attend to."
It's not that witnesses are lying, said Elizabeth Loftus, a leading human memory researcher based at the University of California, Irvine. It's that memory is malleable.
The Clark case is "one in a long string of traumatic events involving police shootings where people have memories that are contradicted by physical evidence or inconsistent with other witnesses' recollections," she said. "Once you have an appreciation for the flexibility of memory, it's an explanation for how that kind of thing can happen in people who are being honest."