Expert Witnesses, Dissociative Amnesia, and Extraordinary Remembering (original) (raw)
Related papers
Memory for murder: A psychological perspective on dissociative amnesia in legal contexts
2001
Mental health professionals and legal decision-makers often hear reports of memory impairment from both perpetrators of extreme violence such as homicide (eg, Kopelman, 1995; Roesch & Golding, 1986; Schacter, 1986a), and from complainants and eyewitnesses (eg, Loftus, 1993). Adult complainants, for example, have testified about their recovery of repressed memories for a violent incident (s) following a lengthy period of amnesia (eg, Loftus, 1997; Porter, Yuille, & Lehman, 1999).
Psychological Injury and Law
Forensic psychologists are sometimes faced with the task of educating triers of fact about the evidential weight of dissociative experiences reported by claimants in litigation procedures. In their two-part essay, Brand et al. (2017a,b) provide advice to experts who find themselves in such situation. We argue that the Brand et al. approach is problematic and might induce confirmation bias in experts. Their approach is not well connected to the extant literature on recovered memories, dissociative amnesia, memory distortions, and symptom validity testing. In some instances, Brand et al. (2017a,b) simplify the current body of knowledge about dissociation; in other instances, they ignore relevant empirical studies to an extent that is worrisome.
Foibles of Witness Memory for Traumatic/High Profile Events
Journal of Air Law and Commerce, 2001
in Atlanta. Currently, she teaches psychology at the University of Nevada, Reno. Dr. Davis is also president of Sierra Trial and Opinion Consultants, a firm offering jury selection services, mock jury research, graphic design and production, among others. Dr. Davis serves as an expert witness on memory, and on issues of consent in sexual assault cases. ** Dr. William C. Folette received his Ph.D. in psychology from the University of Washington in 1984 with special training in clinical quantitative, and physiological psychology. He is currently an associate professor in the Department of Psychology and research associate professor in Family and Community Medicine at the University of Nevada. Dr. Follette conducts research in psychotherapy development, research design and methodology, clinical and functional assessment, and clinical behavior analysis.
Impact of expert testimony on the believability of repressed memories
Violence and victims, 1997
Research suggests that people question the believability of trial testimony based on an alleged victim's previously repressed memories. Participants read one of six scenarios depicting the trial of a man accused of sexually assaulting a young girl. The alleged victim either reported the assault immediately (child witness) or waited 20 years to report it (adult witness). In the adult witness condition, the woman's memory for the event had either been repressed until recently or had always been available, and expert testimony was offered on behalf of the defense, the prosecution, both, or neither. Regression analyses revealed that women perceived the accuser's testimony as more believable and the defendant's testimony as less believable than men did. Similarly, the belief in the accuser's testimony decreased and the belief in the defendant's testimony increased when the accuser was an adult in contrast to a child, and when the defense offered expert testimony i...
Trusting Traumatic Memory: Considerations from Memory Science
Philosophy of Science
Court cases involving sexual assault and police violence rely heavily on victim testimony. We consider what we call the “Traumatic Untrustworthiness Argument (TUA)” according to which we should be skeptical about victim testimony because people are particularly liable to misremember traumatic events. The TUA is not obviously based in mere distrust of women, people of color, disabled people, poor people, etc. Rather, it seeks to justify skepticism on epistemic and empirical grounds. We consider how the TUA might appeal to the psychology and neuroscience of memory for empirical support. However, we argue that neither support the TUA.
Myths of trauma memory: on the oversimplification of e ects of attention narrowing under stress
Frontiers in Psychology, 2024
The present article addresses claims commonly made by prosecution witnesses in sexual assault trials: that attention narrows under stress, and that these attended aspects of the event are encoded in a way that ensures accuracy and resistance to fading and distortion. We provide evidence to contradict such claims. Given that what is encoded is largely the gist of one's interpretation of experience, we discuss the way in which attention and emotion can bias the interpretation of experience. We illustrate with issues of memory reports in cases of acquaintance rape, where the primary issue is the presence or absence of consent. We provide some specific illustrations concerning e ects of emotion on interpretation of sexual consent. Finally, based on what is known regarding priming e ects on memory retrieval and judgment, we conclude with discussion of the potential of some "trauma-informed" interviewing strategies to promote false memories (such as FETI: Forensic Experiential Trauma Interview).
Psychology, Crime & Law, 2014
Expert witnesses have various tasks that frequently include issues of memory. We tested if expert witnesses outperform other practitioners on memory issues of high relevance to clinical practice. We surveyed psychiatrists and psychologists who reported serving as expert witnesses in court (n = 117) about their knowledge and beliefs about human memory. The results were compared to a sample of psychiatrists and psychologists who had never served as expert witnesses (n = 819). Contrary to our expectations, the professionals serving as expert witnesses did not outperform the practitioners who never served. A substantial minority of the respondents harbored scientifically unproven ideas of human memory on issues such as the memory of small children, repression of adult traumatic memories, and recovered traumatic childhood memories. We conclude that the expert witnesses are at risk of offering bad recommendations to the court in trials where reliability of eyewitness memory is at stake.
Scientific study of witness memory: Implications for public and legal policy
Psychology, Public Policy, and Law, 1995
The legal system relies heavily on human memory. Crime investigations, criminal trials, and many civil trials depend on memory to reconstruct critical events from the past. Getting at the "truth" is often synonymous with establishing the who, what, when, and how of some prior episode. Past events tend to leave traces, and the process of reconstructing events from the past is aided by various types of trace evidence. These traces can be physical, such as a footprint, a blood stain, or a fingerprint. An event can also leave traces of a somewhat different type, namely memory traces. Although these traces can also be said to have a physical property, in the sense that there exists a biological residue for the event somewhere in the brain, they cannot be observed directly by crime investigators or triers of fact. Instead, the memory trace that resides within the human brain is manifested for investigators and triers of fact through verbal testimony. It is probably safe to conclude that courts of law could not function without relying on human memory. Even physical evidence, such as a bloody glove, requires someone to take the witness stand and recall where it was found, by whom, at what time, in what condition, and so on. The scientific study of human memory was initiated over 100 years ago by Hermann Ebbinghouse (1885/1913), and the scientific study of human memory today remains almost exclusively the province of psychology and related cognitive and neurological sciences. The scientific study of memory is so fundamental to psychology that no general textbook in psychology could fail to devote a chapter or its equivalent to memory. Over the last 20 years or so, psychologists have developed a specific research literature on witness testimony. This research has been directed primarily at eyewitnesses, such as victims or bystanders to a criminal event. This issue of Psychology, Public Policy, and Law is devoted to the potential contributions of the scientific study of witness testimony to public policy and legal issues. Making policy or procedure recommendations to the criminal justice system on eyewitness reliability issues is not new for psychologists. Nearly 90 years ago, Hugo Munsterberg (1908) argued that "Nearly every chapter and sub-chapter of sense psychology may help to clear up the chaos and confusion which prevail in the observation of witnesses" (p. 33), and he bemoaned the fact that juries and judges are not obliged to know and understand these things. Following a long period of near dormancy on the issue, research programs in psychology arose again in the mid-1970s, and there has been a renewal of the argument that scientific psychology has something important to offer the legal system. Unlike Munsterberg, who tried to rely almost exclusively on basic findings and theories of sensation and perception, modern researchers on eyewitness issues have made heavy use of complex stimulus