Structural flaws in eyewitness testimony fuel mass incarceration: How feedback loops distort justice globally

Indigenous legal systems, such as the Māori *tīkanga*-based courts in New Zealand or the Haudenosaunee *Great Law of Peace* model, reject the individualistic premise of eyewitness testimony. Instead, they rely on communal verification, oral history cross-checking, and symbolic truth-seeking (e.g., *whakapapa* lineage validation) to reduce reliance on fallible memory. For example, the *Gwich’in* people of Alaska use consensus-based storytelling circles to reconstruct events, where multiple narrators’ accounts are woven together—an approach that could drastically reduce false identifications. The omission of these frameworks in the study reflects a colonial erasure of justice models that prioritise relational truth over procedural technicality.