Many criminal cases have been based on witnesses' testimony of … But increasingly it is being found that this is not the case. How have courts dealt with repressed memories and the risk of false memories? We simply don’t reliably encode everything we see. Many of these studies involve … Our cases, coupled with decades of research into eyewitness memory, have taught us that human memory is fragile. Eventually, the case went to the New York Court of Appeals. In 2012, Adrian’s case caught the attention of Blue Hadaegh and Grover Babcock, filmmakers who chronicled his story in Scenes of a Crime, a documentary about false confessions. Dr. Loftus believes that jurors should be made aware of the function of “false memory” when listening to witness testimony. False Memory In the past 25 years, psychologists have carried out many experiments to demonstrate the fallibility of memory. The criminal cases all resulted in either a guilty verdict or a guilty plea. Elizabeth Loftus, a distinguished professor of Criticism by affiliates of the False Memory Syndrome Foundation. New York-based The Innocence Project, who work to overturn cases of wrongful conviction in the United States, report that eyewitness misidentification plays a role in about 75% of wrongful convictions overturned through DNA testing in … Overall, trends in outcomes of criminal cases are similar to those seen in the civil cases. The FMSF Legal Survey contains records of 103 repressed memory criminal cases that were filed in 25 states. Several thousand case histories have been referred to the British False Memory Society and at least 672 of these are known to have involved the police or higher legal authorities. Full text of the relevant legal documents in response. Hungerford (1997) ___ N.H. ___ [697 A.2d 916], the New Hampshire Supreme Court upheld the exclusion of the sexual assault victims' testimony in the criminal prosecutions against the alleged perpetrators, finding that the victims' recovered repressed memory testimony failed to meet the Daubert standard of reliability. July 2017 In the 1980s and 1990s, allegations of sexual abuse were rising, and alternative practices such as hypnotherapy and psychotherapy were gaining traction. As is true of the civil repressed memory lawsuits, most criminal charges based on "recovered memories" were filed during 1992 and 1993. People undergoing memory visualization techniques and hypnotism believed they were dredging up repressed memories, often of childhood physical and sexual abuse. Courts tend to be all over the map. It can be incomplete and faulty as we perceive an event; it deteriorates and can be contaminated while we store it; and each attempt at recall can lead to further alteration. 28. 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