Description
See transcrpit about a case in which a person was wrongly convicted and imprisoned based on an eyewitness misidentification and then later freed. Describe the facts of the case. How did the eyewitness identify them? What factor(s) contributed to the misidentification? What evidence freed them from prison? How does the mind fill in gaps of information that involve false memories and the veracity of identification of suspects? Include the link to the news article in your post. Your initial post should cite at least one credible resource
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SCRIPT: INSIGHTS94
Psychology, Law, Lies and False Memories |Duration 16:50
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ANIMATED TITLES:
|INSIGHTS AND
|STRATEGIES
|Psychology, Law,
|Lies and False Memories
|Eve Ash
|Psychologist
|Founder, Seven Dimensions
&
|Dr Elizabeth LOFTUS
|Distinguished Professor
|University of California
ELIZABETH: I’m Elizabeth Loftus and I teach at the University of California Irvine. I
have positions in a psychology department, a criminology law
department and also the School of Law.
EVE:
So it’s psychology and law, how does that intersect?
ELIZABETH: Well, there’s a big intersection of psychology and law. And people
interested in psychology and law might be interested in how juries
make decisions or how, how judges make decisions or how
psychologists decide that somebody is competent to stand trial or not.
And in my case, it’s how eyewitness testimony works or doesn’t work.
01:10
TITLE:
|Eye Witness Memory Problems
ELIZABETH (Sydney lecture, Elizabeth addressing audience) So I spend a lot of
time thinking, about the people who have been convicted of crimes
that they didn’t do. There’s just one project in New York, that has
gathered evidence on over 300 cases of wrongful conviction. These
Psychology, Law, Lies and False Memories © 2020 SEVEN DIMENSIONS
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are people who spent 10, 15, 20, 25 years in prison for crimes that we
now know they didn’t do because DNA testing has proven that they
were actually innocent. And it’s been discovered that close to 3/4 of
them are due to faulty human memory.
EVE:
What are you seeing is happening in courtrooms with regards to
memory?
ELIZABETH: There are a couple of kinds of situations where memory is critical and
one of these are eyewitness cases. (SUPER: Eyewitness cases) So
you have a witness to a crime or an accident or some other legally
relevant event, who is testifying about what he or she thinks
happened, “That’s the person I saw at the scene of the crime”. And
this eyewitness testimony gets offered in court cases, and generally, if
witnesses are confident,
SUPERS BUILD:
If witnesses are confident, give details, people believe them
Even when testimony is mistaken
if they give a lot of detail, people believe them, even when the
testimony is mistaken. So eyewitness testimony is very powerful. It’s
hard to cross-examine when somebody is confident and detailed. So
that’s partly why some lawyers have looked to expert testimony to
come in and try to educate the jury or judge about how memory really
works, what factors really do affect memory, to try to correct some of
the misconceptions that people have about the workings of memory.
ELIZABETH: (Sydney lecture, Elizabeth addressing audience) Just because
somebody tells you something and they describe it with a lot of
confidence, and they describe it in a lot of detail, and they are
emotional when they tell you about it, it doesn’t mean that it really
happened. And such a realization may, may have made a little bit of
difference for the ¾ of those over 300 people who were wrongfully
convicted, and the cause of that wrongful conviction was faulty human
memory.
3:40
TITLE:
|The Wrongful Conviction of Steve Titus 1981
ELIZABETH: One of the cases that was very meaningful in my past was the case of
Steve Titus. And he was just a kind of an ordinary guy and one day
he’s out to dinner with his fiancée and he gets accused of a rape. And
he insisted that he didn’t do it, but he went to trial and he was
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convicted. And he was absolutely shocked. Eventually, it was shown,
actually by a journalist who took an interest in his case, and found the
real rapist. So eventually, Titus was freed. He then filed a lawsuit
because he was so traumatized by what had happened to him. He’d
lost his job, he lost his fiancée, his life was in shambles, so he sued
the people responsible for this wrongful conviction and during that
lawsuit he died of a heart attack, and he was just 35 years old.
EVE:
Can you explain what happened in terms of witness identification and
what went wrong?
ELIZABETH: A genuine rape had occurred, there was a genuine victim. When she
first looked at this photo spread that had Steve Titus’ photo in it, his
photo was put in it because he was in a car that was stopped and he,
it resembled the car that she had described. She said, “That one’s the
closest.” So she, some kind of tentative response. But by the time the
trial occurred, she’s now absolutely positive that’s the guy. So
something happened in between, or something fishy went on there,
and I think that something that happened in between was a detective
who was so convinced it was Titus, may have persuaded this rape
victim that she had the right person, and (SUPER: Artificially
increasing witness confidence) artificially increased her
confidence, that then was compelling to the jury.
EVE:
It’s interesting how confidence grows, over the court case.
ELIZABETH: (SUPER: Confidence, like memory, is malleable) Like memory,
confidence is malleable. So there is actual scientific work showing that
if somebody gives you a report, they say, “That’s the guy”, or they
say, “The light was red”, and you give them feedback, something like,
“Well, another witness said the same thing”, or, “Good job, we have
reason to think you’re right”, some kind of (SUPER: Positive
feedback can artificially inflate confidence) positive feedback,
it’s going to artificially inflate the confidence of the witness. They’re
going to be even more positive in what they’re telling you, and more
persuasive to a judge or a jury. That’s one of the reasons why
psychologists have been recommending that when police conduct
lineups or photo lineups, that the
SUPERS BUILD:
Person conducting photo lineups
should not know who suspect is
à Avoids inadvertently cuing witness
à They can’t give feedback
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person conducting it should not know who the suspect is, so they
can’t inadvertently cue the witness, which they sometimes do, even if
they’re not aware of it. But also they can’t give feedback they can’t
say, “Good job.” They can’t say, “Another witness said the same
thing,” because they don’t know who the suspect is.
6:45
TITLE:
|False Memories
EVE:
What is a false memory?
ELIZABETH: False memory can be a distortion about a detail of an event that
SUPER BUILDS:
False Memory
– Distortion of a detail in an event that happened
may actually happened. So if the people think the car went through a
red light, when it really went through a green light, one could call that
a false memory. Or a false memory can be
SUPER BUILDS:
False Memory
– An entire event that didn’t happen
an entire event that a person believes he or she remembers that
didn’t happen. It’s when we remember things that are different from
the way they really were, or remember things that didn’t happen.
(Vision of Elizabeth at work) I’ve been studying false memories for
maybe 40 years now. I do experiments, primarily, where we actually
distort somebody’s memory or we plant an entire memory in the mind
of otherwise healthy people.
ELIZABETH: (Sydney lecture, Elizabeth addressing audience) Our first effort to do
that was to plant a false memory that when you were five or six years
old, you were lost in a shopping mall. (Vision of shopping mall) You
were frightened, crying, ultimately rescued by an elderly person, and
reunited with the family. And we developed a (Vision of Elizabeth at
work) suggestive interviewing process, where we were able to plant
this either complete or partial, false memory.
(Interview) And I find that (SUPER: False memories and distorted
memories can be planted in ordinary people) you can plant
these false memories or distort memories in a large number of
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ordinary people. How often do we have false memories out there in
the real world? It’s really hard to know but I think that there is
probably a whole lot of fiction that is sprinkled in with the facts that
make up the collection of our memories. We actually did a (SUPER:
Study asked people where they were three weeks ago) study
in which we asked people where they were three weeks ago on a
particular afternoon. And they wrote out their memories of where they
were, this would have been like an alibi, and then we had our subjects
(SUPER: Subjects had to find evidence to prove their ‘alibi’) go
out and try to find evidence that would prove or disprove their alibi.
And these subjects came back and (SUPER: Subjects found
evidence they were mistaken) found all kinds of evidence that
their alibi had been completely mistaken.
EVE:
Our memories are not video recordings or audio recordings, and
people think they are.
ELIZABETH: Yes, we know people think they are because we’ve actually done
(SUPER: Surveys on beliefs about memory) surveys on what it is
that people think is true about memory, what beliefs do they have.
And you can show many examples of where (SUPER: People believe
things to be true contradicted by the scientific evidence)
ordinary people believe things to be true that are contradicted by the
scientific evidence. But sometimes the memory report is so compelling
that people still cling to it and believe it, and reject the scientific
evidence.
9:27
TITLE:
EVE:
|Sue Neill-Fraser
|Convicted of Murder
|Tasmania, Australia 2010
(Images of Sue with newspaper headlines superimposed) This was a
really interesting case because there were no eyewitnesses that
actually saw her at the crime scene and there’s no body. So the jury
relied heavily on the fact that she had lied. I’ve been so troubled by
her memory, that I started to wonder about a disorder where you fill
gaps with what you think you might have done or how things should
be.
ELIZABETH: We do fill in the gaps in our memory with plausible inferences trying
to figure out what might have happened, what possibly happened,
what probably happened. (SUPER BUILDS: Inferences à Act like
external suggestions à Memories) And those inferences can act
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like external suggestion. You’re essentially suggesting things to
yourself that can then solidify and you begin to feel them as
memories. That’s not a disorder, that’s kind of normal memory at
work.
EVE:
They also had an eyewitness who said she saw Bob and Sue arguing
the day before, but it turned out when she got to court and she saw
another woman, Bob’s sister, (Photo of Bob’s sister, juxtaposed with
Sue’s photo) she realized she had the wrong woman, and in fact, the
wrong day. (SUPER: Witness misidentification) So that was a
perfect example of misidentification.
ELIZABETH: Yes. When you have these high publicity cases, people do come out of
the woodwork and say they saw things, or even confess. (SUPER:
False confessions) We had 200 people confessing to having
kidnapped the Lindbergh baby.
EVE:
She had left her partner the afternoon before. He wanted to work on
their new yacht. (Image Bob on of yacht) So she left him there, she
got a dinghy, back to shore. At first she said she went to Bunnings
(Photo of Bunnings store) but she in fact went home.
ELIZABETH: Well, the problem is that she could have been mistaken. Presumably,
if she’s extremely stressed, having experienced a (SUPER: Traumatic
experience can interfere with memory) traumatic experience,
that can interfere with her processing as well.
EVE:
(Images) Not only did she lie about, or have a false memory about
where she was the day before, they said, “Were you at home last
night?” And she said, “Yes”. But in fact, she wasn’t at home, she’d
actually walked down to the shoreline, but she had a whole reason for
not telling them.
ELIZABETH: This would not be the first case where someone gives, we’ll call it an
alibi for where they were at a critical time, and the alibi ends up being
wrong or the person is inconsistent.
EVE:
And later she told the police, “Well, actually, I did go down there”.
ELIZABETH: It’s one thing to not be sure when somebody reports something that’s
wrong whether they’re deliberately lying or whether they have a false
memory. But here, you have a situation where she’s admitted she lied,
so I guess you can see why people would be suspicious of her stories.
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EVE:
Then there was another lie where the police found a red jacket in a
nearby street, and they said, “Is this your jacket?” And she said, “No,
it’s not.” She didn’t recognize the jacket. Later, it turned out that that
jacket had her DNA on it and it looks like it was a jacket off the yacht,
but she didn’t remember it. But I found out she gets lots of
secondhand clothes, so people don’t get cold.
ELIZABETH: I have a huge pile of clothes that my childhood friend gave me after
she lost weight. In fact, I have them so that people can sit on the
patio, in case they get cold. But I might not recognize them as my
jacket.
EVE:
If you look at the lie spectrum, there’s almost every sort of lie.
Photo of Sue Neill-Fraser (SUPER: Sue Neill-Fraser, convicted or
murder) People think, “Well, she lied, so if she lied, she probably
killed the guy”.
ELIZABETH: The only way I can really understand how she could have messed up
is that possibly the stress and arousal at the time she’s trying to
process this trauma, was just interfering with her ability to retrieve
information while still in a state of shock.
EVE:
The family then got a script for Valium, she was quite heavily sedated.
And then I think the police interviewed her. There was a lot of
confusion and a lot of shock.
ELIZABETH: Well, that’s the Valium explanation, because the Valium can affect the
formation of new memories, and make you less accurate.
EVE:
14:07
TITLE:
EVE:
Because of the lack of other evidence, so therefore the lies gained far
more importance, to the point that the lies have even overridden DNA
evidence of somebody else being on the yacht. There’s certainly, now,
a lot of evidence of alternate suspects.
|Memory impacted by stress and trauma
I’ve just tried to understand more about the impact of terrible shock. I
went into shock when I came to my office many years ago. The door
was wide open and I realized there was potentially a robber inside.
ELIZABETH: Mm-hmm.
EVE:
And I forgot my own phone number.
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ELIZABETH: Mm-hmm.
EVE:
So I’m aware that things happen when you’re stressed. I’ve seen
people completely forget all their passwords or their login details for
their bank which they’ve used every day, day in, day out.
ELIZABETH: I experienced this for myself when I went out to get into my car to go
to work and somebody had bashed the whole windshield in and stolen
the radio. So I see my car and there’s glass all over, and I rush inside,
pick up the phone, and call 911. They asked me questions, and one of
them was, “Do you live in a house or in an apartment?” I said an
apartment. And then I said, “No, no, no, it’s not an apartment. I live
in a house, this house, I’ve been living in this house for a number of
years!” So you know, I experienced for myself in this way how
(SUPER: Shock can interfere with your retrieval) just a shock can
interfere with your retrieval. There hasn’t been a great deal of
research on exactly that. When you experience something traumatic
and upsetting, yes, you can remember the gist of the event, but a lot
of the (SUPER: Details suffer in memory) details suffer in memory.
We know a lot more about how people, later, when they are in a calm
state remember a traumatic experience that they might have had a
week ago, or a month ago, or years ago, where the trauma and the
shock is at the time of the event itself.
EVE:
Is hypnosis a way to retrieve lost memories?
ELIZABETH: I wouldn’t trust it. Sometimes can, with hypnosis, get some additional
information that wasn’t being produced before. But you also can get
false information (SUPER: False memories can come out under
hypnosis).
EVE:
So false memories can come out under hypnosis?
ELIZABETH: Oh, absolutely.
EVE:
There’s been a lot of work done on lie detection tests, but they’re not
admissible in court.
ELIZABETH: In the US, they’re mostly not admissible as well, but they get used
anyhow, and they often get used for sort of a nefarious purpose. You
can give somebody a lie detector test, tell them they flunked it as a
way of trying to elicit a confession out of them, and that often works
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with people. That’s kind of one lesson, if the police tell you, you
flunked the lie detector, don’t confess just because of that!
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