Feb. 13, 2015

“Psychologists terminated a study (of 70 students at a Canadian university) that showed the ease of implanting false memories of committing terrible, violent crimes in the recent past – because some subjects couldn’t be convinced that they hadn’t committed the crime after they were told the truth.”

– From “Police interrogation techniques generate false memories of committing crimes” by Cory Doctorow at Boing Boing (Feb. 9)

More on this recent study from Sarah Barmak at the Toronto Star:

“If subjects said they couldn’t remember the false event, questioners reassured them they would be able to retrieve their ‘lost memories’ if they tried hard enough. If they began to ‘remember,’ experimenters asked for more detail. Do you recall any images? How did you feel? Visualize what it might have been like, they said, and the memory will come back to you….”

“Lost memories,” of course, were the fool’s gold mined so relentlessly by the prosecution therapists in the Little Rascals Day Care case. Remarkably, it took only three 40-minute sessions for the Canadian researchers to corrupt the memories of fully 70 percent of their college-age subjects – the Little Rascals children required months of implantation!

Feb. 20, 2013

“Don’t focus on the question, focus on the answer.”

– District Attorney H. P. Williams, urging jurors to ignore the leading questions that therapists asked child-witnesses to elicit accusations against Bob Kelly

“Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain.”

– The Wizard of Oz

Aug. 20, 2012

Endlessly fascinating – and baffling – is how some experts fell headlong for “satanic ritual abuse,” while others managed to keep their wits. This is from an April 25, 1989, Associated Press story:

“David G. Bromley, a sociologist at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, Va., sees not an increase in satanic crime, but a ‘cult scare’ that has more to do with urban legends and modern psychology than with criminology.

“‘I think it’s all a hoax,’ says Bromley, who investigated allegations of cult ‘brainwashing’ in the 1970s that were never proven.

“Bromley says rumors about rings of adults who start day care centers to find children to abuse in satanic rituals are ‘sheer fantasy’ – but fantasy fed by reports of real child abuse and by today’s parents’ guilt and fears of entrusting their children to strangers.

“‘It is not coincidental that allegations of satanic conspiracies are centered on day care centers,’ he says.”

April 25, 1989! Bob Kelly was attending his probable cause hearing. The first McMartin trial was still ongoing. Stephen Ceci and Maggie Bruck were six years from publishing their landmark “Jeopardy in the Courtroom: A Scientific Analysis of Children’s Testimony.” So how was David Bromley able to see through the fog?

“This kind of ‘subversion episode’ is not new,” he told me recently. “There has been one every few decades in American history. The focus has changed but not the phenomenon. Indian captivity tales, Salem witch trials, drug scares, communist scares, immigrant scares, UFO scares.

“There has always been some group or coalition that has found social insecurities a way of advancing its own status. In this case police and therapists made careers out of the episode.

“The story was only plausible for a limited period, and these kinds of events tend to implode eventually. But there are a lot of casualties in the meantime.

“It will happen again, I am sorry to say.”

And when it does…?

April 20, 2016

“‘If prosecutors have an ethical duty to avoid wrongful convictions, then they should have some sort of ethical duty to remedy wrongful convictions,’ said attorney Brad Bannon of the North Carolina Bar’s ethics committee.

“He wants North Carolina to adopt a rule recommended by the American Bar Association, requiring prosecutors to come forward if they find ‘new, credible and material evidence’ that an innocent person is serving time. Thirteen states have adopted the post-conviction rule. North Carolina isn’t among them.

“The State Bar rejected the rule several years ago but recently appointed a committee to reconsider….”

– From “Rule targets prosecutors who don’t reveal innocence evidence” by Martha Waggoner of the Associated Press (April 16)

Given prosecutors’ disproportionate influence on the state bar, to even “reconsider” the disclosure rule suggests the recent stream of unbecoming publicity  hasn’t gone unnoticed.