Witness Testimony from Legal History to Contemporary Criminal Justice: Reliability, Bias, and the Prevention of Wrongful Convictions

Abstract

Abstract

Witness testimony has remained a central component of adjudication despite persistent concerns regarding its reliability. This article examines the historical regulation of witness testimony and its relevance to contemporary criminology and criminal justice. Rather than presenting legal history as a linear development, the article adopts a comparative approach focused on recurring safeguards against unreliable testimony, including corroboration, witness qualification, oath-taking, questioning, and sanctions for false evidence. Selected examples from ancient, medieval, and early modern legal traditions demonstrate that legal systems have long confronted problems involving deliberate fabrication, conflicting testimony, social status, coercion, and unequal allocation of testimonial credibility. The article then connects these historical concerns with contemporary research in law and psychology concerning memory distortion, suggestive questioning, weapon focus, cross-racial identification, eyewitness misidentification, expert evidence, and wrongful convictions. Particular attention is given to the distinction between deliberately false testimony and sincerely held but inaccurate recollection. The article further considers emerging evidentiary technologies, including blockchain-based evidentiary systems and facial recognition, with emphasis on reliability, bias, transparency, privacy, provenance, and accountability. The article argues that the historical evolution of witness testimony reveals a persistent tension between the necessity of testimony as a source of proof and the risks inherent in its production and interpretation. Historical legal systems developed procedural mechanisms to control those risks; contemporary criminology and psychology provide empirical explanations for why such risks arise and why traditional safeguards may sometimes be insufficient. Understanding this historical continuity can therefore strengthen contemporary criminal justice by encouraging critical assessment of evidence, appropriate corroboration, scientifically informed identification procedures, and greater attention to the prevention of wrongful convictions.