Originally Posted by TheSquealer

I dont know really how police investigators do this. What always surprises me is seeing a witnesses account torn apart, particularly in a high stress event.

Here is something I deal with 5 days a week usually. 4 guys in a racquetball court. One guy serves. There is an intense volley for 10-20 seconds. The ball dies. Everyone stops. Everyone then looks at each other.... wondering.... who served, what the score is, who got the point etc. Basically, everyone's short term memory was wiped out completely to the point that 4 grown, professional adults have a hard time reconstructing what happened only 40 seconds before. Basically, your brain is focused on a fight or flight response and "what happened" isn't an important detail. In a neurological sense, its very similar to date rape drugs, I believe.

This is also true of fighting. Anyone that's done any amount of fighting knows very well that you will have almost no meaningful recollection of what happened apart from whatever the initial event is. Then if you start asking people around, you get conflicting stories. In that time, your brain is slowly remembering bits and pieces and filling in the rest with imagined content as your brain does. What is left in the end is a reconstruction of a reconstruction of a reconstruction of a reconstruction of a poorly recalled event.

Ultimately a memory is usually little more than the lie you've been telling yourself and it continues to evolve and change with time.

Anyone in intelligence will tell you right away as well that human intelligence is the most unreliable form of intelligence.

I don't know to what extent investigators rely on the account of the person in the event itself. Zimmerman did 3 interviews and the purpose of that is to keep getting more details as they are recalled before the whole memory is corrupted. A comment was made during the trial that his statement went from 4 pages, to 20, to 50.

I don't really know what the answer is to this in the legal system. I am just often blown away when someone is using the statements of a women that just shot her husband in self defense after being beaten and raped as evidence against her or pointing out inconsistencies when its literally impossible for the brain to recall anything from such an event with any real and accurate detail, and even when trauma induced amnesia directly following the event is very common and normal. It's normal in a fist fight. Its perfectly normal in 30 seconds of racquetball for 4 people in the 800 sq ft room to have no clue what just happened.

My understanding is that investigators try use any and all accounts to build a composite of events when they are trying to solve a crime... as no single account is very reliable. I have no clue why a prosecutor can take a single account by someone who faced extreme stress or trauma, before, during and after the event and tear it apart as if there will be no inconsistencies and then use those inconsistencies as evidence of guilt.