Lies! Lies!! Lies!!! Part 3
Posted on: March 30, 2009 by: admin
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Below are excerpts from Lies! Lies!! Lies!!! The Psychology of Deceit by Carles V. Ford, M.D. So many people are attacked by false accusers that I thought it would benefit to look at false accusers from a psychiatrists standpoint.
Courtroom Testimony
Two sincere witnesses can provide diametrically opposed testimony in a court of law, each believing that he or she is telling the truth and that the other is lying. Tragically, many innocent persons have been falsely convicted, imprisoned, and even sentenced to death on the basis of faulty eyewitness testimony (Loftus and Ketcham 1991). The concepts of the malleability of memory help us to understand how differently people can perceive and remember an event. Furthermore, we have learned how the memory of an event can be manipulated by another person by the use of postevent suggestions.
Leading questions by investigators, police officers, attorneys, or even psychotherapists can also markedly and permanently alter a person’s memory. Loftus and Palmer (1974) demonstrated that by altering the wording of a question, they also could alter a person’s collection of an event. These researchers had subjects view a videotape that showed two cars colliding with each other and asked the subjects to estimate the speed at which the cars were traveling. When the question was phrased, “How fast were the cars going when they crashed into each other?” subjects judged the speed to be significantly higher than when the question was phrased, “How fast were the cars going when they hit each other?” One week later, the same subjects were asked if they had seen broken glass at the scene of the accident (no glass had been present). Subjects who had been asked the “smashed” question were more likely to say “yes” than those who had been asked the “hit” question (Loftus 1975). Thus, there is an elaboration of memory that extended beyond the wording of the initial simple question. Furthermore, a very subtle difference in question could yield different answers. Subjects who were asked, “Did you see the broken headlight?” were more likely to answer “yes” than those who were asked, “Did you see a broken headlight?” Loftus and Zanni 1975).
Loftus has interpreted (and I certainly agree) the findings of her research as indicating that how witnesses are interrogated by the police, prepared by an attorney, and examined on the witness stand can all significantly influence their testimony. Someone else’s ideas can easily become a part of an individual’s memory and testimony under oath.
Note: These kinds of facts would make a recording of the questioning essential. In a criminal case, a failure to preserve this questioning could amount to the suppression of potentially exculpatory evidence. In a civil case, the destruction or failure to preserve the questioning of the witness may give rise to the entitlement of a jury instruction informing a jury that failure to preserve evidence gives rise to the presumption that the evidence would have been against the party that failed to preserve the evidence.
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