How reliable is eyewitness testimony?

Considering how much of the evidence introduced in trial courts is testimony based on memory, it's worth pondering how much one's memory in fact corresponds to what in fact actually happened.

Here a neuroscientist discusses how the brain restructures itself when memories are called up:

Neuroscience now knows that every time we remember
our memories they are "reconsolidated," slyly remade
and reconfigured. The act of remembering requires protein
synthesis because we are literally remaking our past,
altering the cellular connections that define the
original memory trace.

We don't remember what happened, we remember what we want to have happened.

Maybe this is good news. You can have that happy childhood after all.