Recently in Memory Category

This website goes through the Requirements, Cognitive Interviewing, Critical Incident Debriefing, Real Case Studies, Legal Guidelines Regarding Memory Recovery, and Where to Copmlete Forensic Hypnosis Training.

The other website goes through the forensic application of hypnosis written by Inspector Marx Howell. 

Read these two websites and answer these questions:

1. Is Forensic Hypnosis really credible in court when relying on eye witness material? Try to come up with some more material that supports your opinion.

2. Do you think that forensic hypnosis really works?

This article discusses the positive effects of sleep on memory recollection.  This study focuses on the hippocampus-dependent declarative memory.  The experiment examined high school student's ability to remember vocabulary.  The varied the amount of sleep in which each group received.

To read more about this experiment, click here.

This article was a study that was completed at Iowa State University.  It highlights qualities of identification testimony, feedback to eyewitnesses, On-Line vs. post-computed judgments, and securing false identifications.

This article relates to everything we have previously talked about in class.  I really recommend that you take the time to read through it and post any comments or questions about the study that come to your mind. 

http://www.psychology.iastate.edu/FACULTY/gwells/Wells_articles_pdf/Good,_You_Indetified_the_Suspect.pdf

"April 10, 2010-A letter from 1985 shows Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger -- the future Pope Benedict XVI -- actively delayed in defrocking a priest who had been charged with molesting several young boys. One reason, according to the letter, which is signed by Ratzinger, is that the Vatican needed to "consider the good of the Universal Church."

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=125803561



     Imagine you occupy a high-ranking position within the Roman Catholic church, and it is your duty to address allegations of pedophilia involving Catholic priests.  In recent years, odds are you'd be hard pressed to make time for a vacation.

     In the last few weeks, documents have surfaced that seem to indicate prior to his appointment as the Holy Father, then Cardinal Ratzinger delayed the defrocking of a priest charged with molesting boys.  Should we be outraged?  Doesn't Pope Benedict deserve some sort of reprimand, or owe someone an apology?  I submit no, he does not. 

     Consider what we have been exposed to throughout this course, which I believe can be surmised in one word: DOUBT. 

     I remain in some sort of psychological Purgatory on my position or regard for the criminal justice system.  Things that I thought could be trusted, have been demonstrated to be untrustworthy.  Protocol and procedures I believed to be reliable and valid have been shown to be unreliable and false.  Issues that I previously thought to be "cut and dry" have been observed to be "loosey goosey". 

     In short, the "good guys" don't seem as good, and the "bad guys" don't seem as bad anymore.  There is always more to every story than anyone could ever know. 

     Back to the issue at hand, I submit the following scenarios, and plan to circle back to the Holy See.

SCENARIO #1: 
     Father Kiesle manipulates and endangers 6 young boys, molests them, gets caught, and pleads no contest to the charges.  This scenario is essentially what is presented in the article linked above.  "Bad guy" is caught, justice is served. 

SCENARIO#2: 
     During one of the "darker" times in the history of Psychology as a discipline, the creation of false memories of previous abuse were not that uncommon.  Dr. Samuel Saint, a young, aspiring, and charismatic school psychologist reads an article in the Times about a Catholic priest facing sexual abuse charges.  Samuel knows that many of the children in his school attend catechism classes at Our Lady of the Rosary parish, where Father Kiesle is a priest.
     Over the next few weeks, Samuel starts to pay close attention to the boys who frequently attend classes at Our Lady of the Rosary parish, and notices one of the boys, Nathan, is very quiet and distant, almost melancholy.  He asks Nathan's teacher, Mrs. Beckett about his performance in classes.  Mrs. Beckett tells Samuel "Nathan used to be one of my best students, always engaged in classwork, very eager to learn" she explained.  "In the last few months though, Nathan's performance has plummeted.  I've sent a few letters to his parents, asking about his situation at home, and offering extra help, but I've never received a response". 
     "Hmmm, something seems wrong here" Samuel thinks to himself, stirring a cup of stale Maxwell House in the teachers lounge.  Samuel writes a quick note to Mrs. Beckett, and drops it in her mailbox, asking her if she would mind sending Nathan to his office for a few minutes Thursday at first recess.
     In the days leading up to his meeting with Nathan, Samuel spends hours investigating pedophilia.  He reads accounts about the ways children are manipulated, and told to keep quiet.  He trudges through transcripts taken from interviews with convicted sex offenders, that reveal in tragic detail how these offenders touched, molested, and abused their victims.  In a phone call to his mother, Samuel remembers saying "If I find out one of my students has EVER been abused like this, I'm going to find the son of a b----- who did it, and make them pay". 
     Thursday morning, Mrs. Beckett peeks through the mini-blinds covering Samuels' office door, and Samuel motions her in.  "Nathan is here to see you Dr. Saint".  Nathan was wearing a red and yellow checkered shirt with what appeared to be a grape jelly stain on the sleeve.
     "Hi Nathan, I'm Sam, thanks for coming to see me" Samuel says in an upbeat voice.  "I've been speaking with Mrs. Beckett, and she tells me you're usually a great student, but lately you haven't been doing as well as she thinks you can.  My job here at the school is to talk to students, find out how they're doing, and see if there is anything we can help with" he explained.  "Has anything out of the ordinary happened that may be affecting your schoolwork?" 
     "No, everything is fine" Nathan replied quickly.  "Oh, well that's good to hear" said Samuel.  "You go to Our Lady of the Rosary right?" he asked Nathan.  "I used to, but I don't go anymore".  Samuel could feel his pulse through his shirt, "Why don't you go anymore Nathan?".  "Can I go to recess now?" Nathan asked.  "Sure, but would you mind meeting with me again next week?  I'd like to get to know you a little better, and if you come back you can have anything you want out of my candy jar" Samuel said quickly.  "Yeah, okay" replied Nathan.
     As Nathan walked to the playground, he wished that his Dad had never lost his job.  He wished that his Mom hadn't run out on them.  He wished that his Dad would start taking him to church again, as he missed his time with the kind and welcoming staff who worked there. 
     As soon as Nathan had left the office, Samuel picked up the phone and dialed.  "Our Lady of the Rosary parish, how can I help you" said the voice on the other end. "Yes, I'd like to talk to Father Kiesle please"....

     Now, I don't claim that this scenario is what happens every time.  I don't mean to exonerate every allegation against a priest.  And I certainly don't mean to negate or lessen or overlook those that have experienced such damaging and hurtful things as abuse. 
     But its possible that SCENARIO#2 could happen.  Maybe Father Kiesle was counseled by his superior, and was told "Hey, this is a ticking time bomb Father Kiesle.  If you plead guilty, we'll relocate you somewhere, and this will be behind you forever.  This guy, Dr. Samuel Saint is on some sort of crusade against us.  You just need to sign here and...."
    
     Now you're Pope Benedict, and you get a report about this situation on your desk.  You see the predicament?  As we have seen in the case with Michael Peterson, things may not always be what they seem.  So what do you do?  Maybe you will "consider the good of the Universal Church", while also considering the good of Father Kiesle. 

I remain, in "psychological purgatory" uncertain of who's right, who's wrong, who to believe, who to disregard, and looking for effective ways to address a science that shall ever be imperfect.   

http://faculty.washington.edu/eloftus/Articles/2003Nature.pdf

I found this article by Elizabeth Loftus, a professor of psychology and professor of law at the University of Washington. Loftus has written many articles about memory, and its vulnerability to manipulation. This article discussed a few studies Loftus and some colleagues conducted to prove the malleability of our memories. She emphasized the importance of memory when it comes to crime and legal issues. Loftus thinks there should be new approaches implemented to reduce and eventually eliminate witness misidentification. America has a much higher rate of wrongful convictions than Canada and Great Britain because they have less faith in witness identification and are more strict on their reviews of cases involving eye witness testimonies.

The article summarizes a few of the studies Loftus and her colleagues have performed concerning the power of false memories, and the ease of misleading a person to believe they saw or did something  that never happened. Memory is vulnerable and it should be treated with care to avoid tampering with real memories.

I was interested after talking about mock witnessing in class and other forms of eyewitness accounts, about what to do if you do witness a crime. I researched some websites to see what they might say about what someone should do if they do see and know that a crime is being committed.

We all might think now that if a crime was going on then, yeah, we know exactly what to do, but when an actual crime is happening in front of our eyes the question is what would we really do in that situation. In example, I thought the first time I was going to get pulled over by the police I would be calm and not panic, but the truth was I cried, and this wasn't how I pictured myself reacting to that situation. I know that people give tips on doing things, and that is what the websites are for below, tips, and whether they are helpful tips to any situation, they are better than not having anything at all. I just thought that it would be interesting to know what the tips were to witnessing a crime, and even though they are common sense it always nice to be reminded just in case something happens in front of your eyes that was extremely quick. So here are some websites with tips for if you ever witness a crime of any kind happening in front of you! Plus they are kinda interesting!!

http://www.direct.gov.uk/en/YoungPeople/CrimeAndJustice/GoingToThePolice/DG_10027687

http://www.dummies.com/how-to/content/what-to-do-if-you-witness-a-crime.html

http://crime.suite101.com/article.cfm/witnessing_a_crime

http://www.keysso.net/commrelations/crimepreprograms/suspect_id.pdf

Monroe County Sheriff's Office in the Florida Keys has a big population with few Sheriff's to cover all of the people. On their web page it states, "the Sheriff's Office employs 578 people. 187 of those are road patrol officers and detectives, 144 are Corrections Officers, 182 serve as support 65 people are employed by the Sheriff's Office-managed HIDTA Group (High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area)."  They have this many people for as many as 150,000 people in their population and that does not count the tourists that can reach as many as 2,000,000 people.  With so many people in their population, and a high turn-over rate the department needs something to help catch suspects.

To help identify a suspect of a crime, the Monroe County Sheriff's Office has a document that allows the witness to fill in details of the perpetrator they saw. The document has the witness fill out the physical appearance of the suspect (with a drawing of a blank suspect to the right), the clothing they were wearing, what weapon was used and there is a drawing of weapons at the bottom of the drawing of the person, and anything about the vehicle used in the crime (if one was used).  It is a very detailed outline asking anything from the scar marks, speech, or physical defects of the perpetrator,  to the license plate number of the vehicle used. 

I believe this would really help local law enforcement agencies around Iowa to catch the correct people, instead of mistakenly persecuting innocent people.  This document can come in very handy if someone gets victimized and needs to write down anything they can remember of the perpetrator, the weapon, or the vehicle used in the crime.  I believe having this handy will allow anyone to keep their memory less contaminated if they write all of these facts down right away before talking to anyone.

image from: http://www.jaydeehypnotist.com/wp-content/gallery/misc/hypnosis.jpg

 

I always thought it was interesting how some people used the concept of hypnosis to get unknown information out of people. Hypnosis relaxes your mind, and makes you more at ease with your surroundings.  But there is a problem with using hypnosis within the medical field.

Hypnosis can create false repressed memories. The courts have decided to refrain from using hypnosis as a possible way to convict people of certain crimes, because of it's high rate of inaccuracy.  Below is an article from WebMD that talks about the process of hypnosis and hypnotherapy.  Sometimes hypnosis CAN be helpful in getting people to stop smoking, stop drinking, and can also treat phobias.  But hypnosis can also be bad, as suggested in it can create false memories. I have always been interested in the concept of hypnosis, and find it an interesting topic.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/dna/photos/eye/text_06.html

I found this article by Dr. Elizabeth Loftus and Katherine Ketcham in their book "Witness For the Defense: The Accused, the Eyewitness, and the Expert Who Puts Memory On Trial." It discusses everything we have been talking about in class the last 2 weeks: memory as evidence, witness misidentification, and wrongful conviction. It's kind of long, but it covers a lot of information, and provides cases and examples of the different topics discussed. The authors discuss how memory works, and how studies have shown that people have a hard time identifying objects they would see on a regular basis, such as: pennies, the letters that correspond to the numbers on a telephone, etc.

They also discuss how people can create memories from stories/information they are told.

 "...Child psychologist Jean Piaget, in his Plays, Dreams, and Imitation in Childhood, related a personal story about the malleability of memory:

'...one of my first memories would date, if it were true, from my second year. I can still see, most clearly, the following scene, in which I believed until I was about fifteen. I was sitting in my pram, which my nurse was pushing in the Champs Elysees, when a men tried to kidnap me. I was held in by the strap fastened around me while my nurse bravely tried to stand between me and the thief. She received various scratches, and I can still see vaguely those on her face. Then a crowd gathered, a policeman with a short cloak and a white baton came up, and the man took to his heels. I can still see the whole scene, and can even place it near the tube station. When I was about fifteen, my parents received a letter from my former nurse saying that she had been converted to the Salvation Army. She wanted to confess her past faults, and in particular to return the watch she had been given as a reward on occasion. She had made up the whole story, faking the scratches. I, therefore, must have heard, as a child, the account of this story, which my parents believed, and projected into the past in the form of a visual memory.'..."

Another topic they discuss is what psychologists refer to as "event factors,"  defined as 'those factors inherent within a specific event that can alter perception and distort memory.' The case used as an example of this follows.

"Two men in their mid-twenties were hunting for bears in a rural area of Montana. They had been out all day and were exhausted, hungry, and ready to go home. Walking along a dirt trail in the middle of the woods, with the night falling fast, they were talking about bears and thinking about bears. They rounded a bend in the trail and approximately twenty-five yards ahead of them, just off the trail in the woods, was a large object that was moving and making noise. Both men thought it was a bear, and they lifted their rifles and fired. But the "bear" turned out to be a yellow tent, with a man and a woman making love inside. One of the bullets hit the woman and killed her. When the case was tried before a jury, the jurors had difficulty understanding the perceptual problems inherent in the event; they simply couldn't imagine how someone would look at a yellow tent and see a growling bear. The young man whose bullet killed the woman was convicted of negligent homicide. Two years later he committed suicide." 

The two hunters were in the woods all day, looking for bears, thinking about bears, wanting to see a bear. In the low light, they saw a large object moving and heard noises, they assumed it was a bear, and shot.

Loftus and Ketcham also discuss witness misidentification and wrongful conviction. They use the case of Jimmy Landano, an ex-convict who spent time in prison, who was wrongfully convicted by four eyewitnesses and three accomplices as the man that killed a police officer in 1976. Despite overwhelming evidence and an alibi proving his innocence, he is still in prison writing letters to lawyers and other wrongfully convicted people trying to prove his innocence.

 

 

 

During the past two weeks of class, we've been discussing both the power of eyewitness testimonies, but also how unreliable memories can be. People do not realize how difficult it is to accurately identify someone even when a witness may be paying close attention to their surroundings.

This activity allows you to play the part of an eyewitness and accurately "describe" the person. Although incredibly over simplified, it illustrates that it's not as easy as it may seem. I did the exercise a few times, varying the amount of time I looked at the top picture to mimic a situation in which I only saw the perp for a few seconds. I may have a horrible memory, but I didn't do well at all. To have this kind of evidence be taken as absolute truth in a court of law with no other supporting evidence would be tragic and unfair.

http://www.quickflashgames.com/games/eye-witness/

I personally wanted to find out more about the topic of repressed memory when we discussed the topic in class. I wanted to know generally more about it. I found this website that tells what a repressed memory is also, the history of where it really started to be studied and the debate over the topic as well. It's a pretty easy website to follow and read.

http://www.guidetopsychology.com/repressn.htm

 

I found this article that I thought was pretty good. It explains repressed memory or as the clinical term dissociative amnesia. This article explains the controversy over the topic and how it is used in court cases especially in child abuse cases where the child remembers years later. This article is from the Harvard Magazine by one of the writers there. It was pretty interesting. It also discusses what some researchers have found on the topic as well.

http://harvardmagazine.com/2008/01/repressed-memory.html

 

 

In class we have been talking a lot about the different procedures that law officials go through from the first 911 call to the end of the trial. Recently, we have talked about the importance of memory and eyewitness identification and all the implications these two forms of evidence can have. Below is a link to an article written by Gary Wells, Mark Small, Steven Penrod, Roy Malpass, Soloman Fulero and C. A. E. Brimacombe, (1998). This article is often times referred to as the "white paper". This article is meant to be an eye opener to people, and for them to realize the many implications in conducting lineups. Also, it goes into great detail explaining the many ways our legal system can avoid contaminating memory evidence and limit the amount of false witness identifications. (This is kind of long, but is worth your read if you are interested in this sort of topic).

http://www.law.northwestern.edu/academics/colloquium/Gary%20Wells/Gary%20Wells%202.pdf

Wells, G., Small, M., Penrod, S. Malpass, R., Fulero, S., & Brimacombe, C. (1998).       Eyewitness identification procedures: Recommendations for lineups and photospreads. Law and Human Behavior, 22

After our discussion in class on Tuesday about how the brain can fabricate false memories, I decided to look up more about this topic.  I came across an interesting website from pbs.org that showcases the show "Don't Forget!"  This series covers such topics as short term memory loss, the role of the hippocampus in remembering and identifying faces, new potential treatments for Alzheimer's and how to evade memory loss, why emotional memories are more easily recalled, and how our memories are sometimes subject to suggestions.

I watched a short clip about how memory lies.  In this clip, researcher Elizabeth Loftus from the University of California, Irvine is trying to get Alan to believe that a certain event happened in his childhood that he does not recall.  It turns out she was just making up the event; however, Alan's mind was partially influenced by her suggestive memory.  Loftus is trying show that there is an increased confidence in a memory that is suggested to a person but was completely made up.  Sometimes you can get people to change how they behave based on those false memories.  I thought that this clip related to the story that Dr. Maclin told in class about the two girls who accused their grandfather of taking pornographic videos of them when they were younger because of leading questions by interviewers. 

Just as this clip and Dr. Maclin's story suggest, misleading and misguided suggestions can often lead witnesses to wrongfully accuse and prosecute innocent people because of their false memories.  I think the clip of Loftus trying to trick Alan gives us a good perspective on how are brains can create AND believe false memories.  Something as little as a suggestive or persuasive comment from even a stranger can cause us to second guess ourselves.  We saw this example between adults, imagine the effects of implementing a false memory could have on a young child whose brain is still developing and maturing.  If our own brain lacks confidence in little scenarios such as turning off the stove before leaving or using a blinker at that last turn, it is only plausible that other people who are persistent and persuasive in their suggestions could have a profound impact on our "memory." 

"Ex-Priest Questions Repressed Memories"

http://abcnews.go.com/Health/MindMoodNews/priest-challenges-repressed-memory-assault-victim/story?id=8552686&page=1

 (from abcnews.com) 

The article above is about a 27 year old man, who sues his ex-priest after coming into contact with a repressed memory from when he was 6. The memory was said to come about after the 27 year old say reports on the news of other men accusing the priest of sexually assaulting them. The main point of this article is in the question of this memory being real or not. That then leads to questioning if repressed memories in general are real.

I have somewhat of an interesting experience that I always thought may have fallen along the lines of a "repressed memory". When I was 7 I first tried waterskiing. I used beginner skies that were connected to the boat by a rope, because my arms weren't big enough to pull myself up. So basically I was attached to the boat. My mom was in the boat holding on to the rope connected to my feet. After I got up on the water, I wiped out. My mom, not realizing that I was connected to the boat, kept holding on to the rope and looking for me to pop up somewhere as my grandpa kept driving. I was drug under water for quite a while and when my mom finally realized they were dragging me underwater behind the boat, I was hardly breathing when they fished me out of the water. My mom tells me I was okay once they got me back to the lake house but I continued to bawl the rest of the day. She said she was worried how upset I was. It wasn't until I was 12 when my family took my brothers and I out to learn to water ski that I remembered anything about it. I was out on the water putting on my skies when I remembered being drug underwater behind a boat before. I asked my mom if I'd ever skiied before and she told me how she had nearly drowned me when I was 7. (I still give her crap about it today for being a "bad mom" haha). I feel like I was old enough to remember something like this happening, but still only remember faintly being dragged behind a boat. Nothing really about that whole day of getting ready to ski, or bawling afterwards. I might be way off in saying that I may have repressed that memory, but I feel like it makes me more of a believer that repressed memories are indeed real.

 

http://www.stumbleupon.com/su/1h3Ypm/www.brainmysteries.com/research/Recognition_of_facial_expressions_is_not_universal.asp

While we were talking about memory and recalling memories from a crime I began thinking about how people tend to remember facial features differently.  This lead me to the question of how do different races affect the recognition of facial expressions?  Do people of different races really notice different facial features on a perpetrator that may lead them to the conviction of an innocent person? 

 I stumbled upon this article that discusses the recognition of facial expressions between Caucasians and Asians. Research showed that both races looked at different facial features when examining facial expressions.  Caucasians tend to look at the shape of the eyes and mouth, while Asians tend to focus only on the shape of the nose. This article gives an insight on what features people focus on when looking at a person.  I believe this will definitely impact their judgment on who committed a crime when looking at a lineup of suspects. 

While on the topic of eyewitness identification and memory in general I want to show this video that I saw quite some time ago that Elizabeth Loftus did on 60 minutes about false memories involving Disney World and Bugs Bunny.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_RLvSGYxDIs 

This other clip is also about being able to suggest memories that never happened.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PQr_IJvYzbA

I believe because of cases like this that it is very hard for me to believe memories that have been brought up in therapy to be used as evidence in court.  It just goes to show that with memory anything is possible and if it never happened that's not a problem because one can suggest a picture so vivid that in your mind you can see it happen even though it never did.

 

 

With all the talk about eyewitness in class last Tuesday, it reminded me perfectly of a Dr. Phil episode I watched a couple of weeks ago.  Dr. Phil talked about how often false eyewitness identifications are made, and he made his audience participate in an eyewitness account.  He showed them a short clip of a crime, I can't remember exactly what it was, and then he put a lineup of possible offenders, and had the audience key in which person they thought committed the crime.  Results showed that a high percentage was towards one of the suspects, when in reality, the offender wasn't even in that line up.  He went into more detail of explaining how often this happens. 

After this brief introduction, he brings in a woman, Loretta, who was brutally raped at age 15.  The man convicted was Dean, who was 29 at the time.  He was in prison for 14 years, until DNA evidence proved he was not Loretta's rapist.

To this day, Loretta still believes than Dean is the man who raped her.  She can't believe that they let him out of prison, and despite all the DNA evidence proving it wasn't him, she still believes it was.  Dr. Phil has an emotional interview with her, explaining all the DNA evidence is correct, and that Dean is innocent.  In turn, Dr. Phil also has Dean come on the show, and he interviews him as well.  He feels horrible for this woman, but at the same time, he lost 14 years of his life in prison for being falsely accused.

I couldn't find the full episodes for this anywhere, so I put a clip of Dean and Loretta's meeting for the first time. It's the link entitled "See Loretta and Dean's first encounter since she helped put him in prison in 1994."

Also, you can click around on this website as well and watch other little clips from the show.  It's a really interesting story.

 

 

 

In class, we have been talking about memory and how witness identification is a key role in many cases. I came across this website, which has a couple face recognition tests. It was really interesting to see that my memory isn't as good as I thought it was. Memory, as defined in class is the ability to recover information and keep it stored safely. These tests mostly focus on short term memory. Try one of the three tests, its shocking to see how good, or bad your memory is!

http://www.faceblind.org/facetests/index.php

 

Today in class we were talking about eyewitness testimonies and how we need to keep them from being contaminated.  I found this very interesting along with the various ways our memories work.  So, I looked up eyewitness testimonies and the effects of contamination and came upon this video.

I found this video of an experiment at Brooklyn Law School.  This experiment is a blind experiment, the perpetrator and teacher are in on the experiment, the students on the other hand do not know anything. 

The video starts out with a Professor teaching in front of her students on a normal day of class, so they thought.  Everything is going well until a guy walks into the room and steals the Professors' purse.  Once this happens all of the students become witnesses to this experimental crime. The Professor plants evidence by stating that the perpetrator had a weird nose, and she could not remember anything else.

The next day, 29 students were interviewed to see if anyone could help with identifying the perpetrator.  All of the students said something about the perpetrator having a weird looking nose while everything else varies.

So, contamination of an eyewitness testimony can happen within seconds.  These seconds can make an innocent person into a criminal and in real life there are people serving time in prison because of from this contamination.

When you watch this video just ask yourself these questions:
  1.  What impact did the professor have on her students?
  2.  How credible are eyewitness testimonies after all?
  3.  How does this experiment relate to real life crimes?
  4.  What can we do to decrease the impact of false information on eyewitnesses?

Click here to watch the video

This is a very interesting article about how the point of a finger gave a man a 50 year prison sentence on a rape charge.

Three days after the rape, Detective Gauldin called the rape victim Jennifer Thompson in to do a photo lineup. He lay six pictures down on the table, said the perpetrator may or may not be one of them, and told her to take her time.

Thompson did not immediately identify a photo, taking her time to study each picture.

"I can remember almost feeling like I was at an SAT test. You know, where you start narrowing down your choices. You can discount A and B," Thompson said.
.

I find it so interesting that the flaws of eyewitness identification can be so obvious. When taking a multiple choice test you being narrowing down the answers. When you come down to the bottom two you seem to make an educated guess. When dealing with 50 years in prison, I would hope the question only has one obvious answer, and isn't multiple choice.

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2009/03/06/60minutes/main4848039_page2.shtml?tag=contentMain;contentBody

Throughout this class we have dealt with many aspect of witness identification. Through the construct a line up project I was amazed at how many people actually guessed the suspect right. So not only is this whole process biased in that a person basically picks as a multiple choice guess sometimes, but also that a line up can be very biased. Many line ups are made with an obvious answer to be picked. Many of think us probably think, so what! That person is probably guilty. However, in this above case we see that a man was wrongly picked from a line up and the consequence was major jail time. When picking out of a line up the person is basically choosing the course for the person. We also learned in class that eye witnesses are of HUGE impact to a jury. This can also lead to false testifying which can easily sway a jury. It starts to make you really reflect upon our justice system and the ways that eye witnesses, juries, and even line ups can be extremely biased.

Bernhard Schlink's novel, The Reader, is one of my all favorite novels because it not only deals with law and psychology but it also is a piece of Holocaust literature. The novel follows narrator, Michael Berg, as he retells his past in three epic parts. The novel begins in West Germany in 1958, almost 13 years after WWII. When Michael was a teenager, he had an affair with a 36 year old train conductress named Hanna. Their relationship was mostly sexual but Michael began to grow strong feelings for Hanna. Hanna was very "down to business" with Michael and very closed off about her past. One of her favorite things to do with Michael was to have him read to her after they had made love. There affair lasts several months until one day Hanna disappeared. Part II of the novel opens several years later with Michael beginning law school. As one of his assignments for law school, Michael observes a war crime trial that attempts to interrogate and punish those who committed war crimes in the Holocaust. On trial is a group of middle-aged women who were active SS officers during WWII and helped guard one of the concentration camps. Michael is shocked and surprised to find out that Hanna was amongst those who were accused.

I do not want to spoil what happens for those who wish to read this book and/or watch the movie, but Part III deals with Michael's life after the trial and what has became of him and Hanna. In Part III several questions are raised that have to do with both the legal world and psychology. One of the main questions that are raised is what are the second generation suppose to do with their Nazi past. In an interview, Schlink has said that one of his favorite professors in school had a visible swastika tattoo. How are the children of the perpetrators suppose to deal with the guilt of their parents as the events of the Holocaust become common knowledge in the 1950s and 1960s? And who can we persecute legally for those who were involved with what had happened in the Holocaust? Surely those who committed murders, but weren't those who committed the murders in fact just following the governments orders? Who can we hold responsible for their actions and where the perpetrators just victims themselves? These are all the things that the book deals with. I would strongly recommend this book to anyone who has an interest in the Holocaust, history, or international law.

 

http://www.amazon.com/Reader-Bernhard-Schlink/dp/0753801728/ref=sr_1_6?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1265914414&sr=8-6 

 

After reading the post Ashley mad on "the Kehoe Case: Iowa Mother Guilty of Murdering her 2 Year old" it got me thinking. In the article it talked about how Michelle Kehoe had undergone 44 electric shock therapies (ECT). I'm sure if you have taken any Abnormal Psychology courses you have heard something about an ECT. ECT are usually associated with Major Depressive disorder. Some people think that it is against humanity to use this type of procedure on people and other see it as a great therapy. I do have my own opinions about whether or not it should be used but I would like for everyone else to see material about it and make their own judgment on whether or not is should be a form to treat people with depression and mood disorders.

 I found a website that someone who has had ECT personally has put up. This website give background information on the early years of the therapy.  It also gives the risk factors that are associated with the ECT.  Though this website is a little out of date I believe that the information is helpful and fairly accurate.

Here is the link to the website to look at the information http://www.electroboy.com/electroshocktherapy.htm

Now to relate it back to psychology and law; can the ECT cause enough brain damage or sudden loss of memory to make a person commit a crime that they normally wouldn't have done? Is it possible that the effects are great enough to alter someone's mind to where they are unable to know right from wrong? I think these are some questions that may need to be researched to see if this could become a key factor in some trials.

In a program series called Discovering Psychology, Philip Zimbardo narrates a particular program called Applying Psychology in Life.
 In the program, Research Psychologist Stephen Ceci is interviewed about child witness testimony. He discusses how investigators can inadvertently alter a child's memory by asking leading questions. His research has also laid down groundwork for interviewing children in many jurisdictions.
 This segment was extremely interesting to me and I encourage you all to watch it. It's roughly 7 minutes long but it is filled with a lot of  useful and interesting information.

http://www.learner.org/vod/vod_window.html?pid=1521
*Please note, this video link is for the entire show. You may need to download Media Player 11 to watch it. To get to Ceci's segment, pull the video's progress bar to 12 minutes and 40 seconds into the video. Also, directly following the segment is a different segment about conflict management that begins with images from the Columbine incident (this begins around 19 minutes and 20 seconds). Please note that this segment is entirely different and strictly pertaining to conflict management among youth and not the judicial system. 

This article discusses the Loftus experiment which was conducted to measure the accuracy of eyewitness testimony and memory after viewing a car accident. Since Psychology is "in the people" it only makes sense that lawyers, law enforcement agencies, and district attorneys would be interested in obtaining the information that this experiment provides. Accuracy of witness testimony is crucial and could sway a jury one way or another. This study exemplifies why people sometimes remember/explain past events, (that they had witnessed), inaccurately. 

This is a facial memory test that shows how well you can remember faces.  This test starts out by showing you a face and you have to guess from three faces which one was the original face.  The test then starts to get harder and harder by showing you six faces for 20 seconds and you have to pick which face was in the lineup of six.  It tn gets harder by putting colors into the faces so you cannot see the details very well.

I got a 76 percent on the test.  It said that a normal person would be able to get around 80 percent.  I think this is a good way of showing how difficult remembering faces can actually be.

http://www.faceblind.org/facetests/fgcfmt/fgcfmt_intro.php 

 

I found this article.  Researchers found that eye movements can show when a person can't remember something.  For example, if a person is shown a picture of someone they recognize but don't recall their name, their eyes move more than if they're shown a picture of someone they don't know at all. 

http://www.stumbleupon.com/su/6UQAPL/blogs.discovermagazine.com/80beats/2009/09/11/your-eyes-reveal-memories-that-your-conscious-brain-forgot/

This is an article about a man that was falsely identified in a lineup and spent 22 years in prison for a crime he did not commit. I couldnt imagine the amount of frustration and agony that he experienced during the 22 years that he served! DNA finally exonerated him of the crime but only after he served his sentence. The article shows how not only a witness can falsely identify the perpetrators but also how the victim themselves can also be mislead or mistaken of the actual criminal. I thought this article was very interesting because of the amount of time it took to exonerate the accused and also that the victim was in a way unknowingly persuaded to pick the wrong person in the lineup. Its pretty scary to think that this actually occurs and the amount of actually innocent people in prison is higher them we probably assume.

http://www.psychology.iastate.edu/faculty/gwells/The_Misidentification_of_John_White.pdf

 

This article reports on research of digitally altering lineup photographs to add or remove distinctive facial features. The reason behind this is that if the witness or victim recalls a distinctive facial feature such as a scar, there is a tendency for them to focus just on that feature. So, if the police pick up an innocent person who has a similar feature, the eyewitness is likely to mistakenly identify the innocent person on the basis of this feature. This technique would either remove the scar from all of the photos in the lineup or add a scar to all of the photos in the lineup.  It turns out that adding the same distinctive feature to each of the faces led to more accurate performance than removing the distinctive feature. People correctly identified the face they had seen about 50% of the time when all of the faces had the distinctive feature, but they identified it correctly only about 30% of the time when the distinctive feature was removed from the target face.

He had a big scar

I found this article and it is about a string of rapes and murders in the mid 1970's and again in the mid 80's. It is an interesting read. I just found it but it happened back in April of 2009. A 72 year old man, John Floyd Thomas Jr., was found and tried for the murders and rape of 5 cases but is suspected to be linked to more. Although 20 victims survived they all had conflicting description of the man that raped them.

This goes back to the eye witnesses memory or the victims memory. All of his victims had no only different discriptions of their rapist but conflicting descriptions. So this threw off the investigation to finding the actual man that raped them. It wasn't until recently that he was caught and only then did he get charged because of DNA matching to him from some of the rapes and murders that he committed a few decades sooner. What is more interesting about the case is that the detectives where searching for another serial rapist at the time they went and received Thomas' DNA for being on the sexual offenders' list. They connected him a series of other rapes of older, white women, and the detectives were searching for someone who rapes young, black women. The detectives discovered one serial rapist while trying to solve another case!

Here are several articles I thought were interesting:

http://articles.latimes.com/2009/apr/30/local/me-serial-killer30

and

http://articles.latimes.com/2009/may/30/local/me-serial30

 

 

This is a test to see how well we actually pay attention to what is going on in front of us. Go to the YouTube clip bellow and watch the video. The first time you watch the video, follow the directions of the narrator and carefully pay attention to the number of passes the team in the white makes. 

This article is about the misconceptions of eyewitness testimony and some cases exemplifying its inaccuracy.  False eyewitness testimonies have put innocent people behind bars, but with the growth of DNA testing and its use as evidence in criminal cases, eyewitness testimony has been found to be highly inaccurate.  This article also describes a few cases and studies researching the accuracy of eyewitness testimony.  According to a study published earlier this year in the journal Law and Human Behavior, false eyewitness testimony contributed to 77 percent of the 230 wrongful convictions exposed by DNA evidence over the last decade (the number of exonerations has grown since the study was conducted). These of course are only those cases for which DNA testing was available, which are usually murder and rape cases. In crimes where investigators are more likely to rely only on eyewitnesses, robberies or muggings, for example, it's likely that the problem is even more pronounced. Studies have also found that subtle, unintentional feedback from police or prosecutors can lead to false identifications.

Psychologists suggest some ways of improving the validity of eyewitness testimony, which include making witness and photo lineups double-blind, where neither the officer conducting the lineup nor the witness knows which person is the suspect. Lineups should also include people that the police know are innocent. If a witness selects a known innocent, police and prosecutors will then know that particular witness's memory isn't reliable enough to be used as evidence.  However, it seems as though the police and prosecutors have yet to change their procedures.   

 

http://reason.com/archives/2009/04/08/eyewitness-testimony-on-trial 

 

I think this article is beneficial in increasing awareness about the inaccuracy of eyewitness testimonies.  The suggestions that were offered should be implicated to see their effect as opposed to traditional methods.  I think we have come a long way by discovering techniques to obtain DNA and use them to exonerate wrongfully convicted prisoners, however, I still feel that we have a long way to go in increasing awareness about the epidemic of putting innocent people behind bars and how to curb that trend.