Witness for the Defense: The Accused, the Eyewitness, and the Expert Who Puts Memory on Trial

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Macmillan, 1991 - Law - 288 pages

"The study of memory had become my specialty, my passion. In the next few years I wrote dozens of papers about how memory works and how it fails, but unlike most researchers studying memory, my work kept reaching out into the real world. To what extent, I wondered, could a person's memory be shaped by suggestion? When people witness a serious automobile accident, how accurate is their recollection of the facts? If a witness is questioned by a police officer, will the manner of questioning alter the representation of the memory? Can memories be supplemented with additional, false information?"

The "passion" Loftus describes in the lines above led her to a teaching career at the University of Washington and, perhaps more importantly, into hundreds of courtrooms as an expert witness on the fallibility of eyewitness accounts. As she has explained in numerous trials, and as she convincingly argues in this absorbing book, eyewitness accounts can be and often are so distorted that they no longer resemble the truth.

 

Selected pages

Contents

Trials of a Psychologist
3
The Magic of the Mind
14
The Cases
31
Dark Justice Steve Titus
33
The AllAmerican Boy Ted Bundy
61
A Knock in the Door Timothy Hennis
92
Out of the Mouths of Babes Tony Herrerez
127
I Couldnt Do This to a Child Howard Haupt
156
Sheer Stark Terror Clarence Von Briggs
185
Ivan the Terrible John Demjanjuk
210
A Mole and a Stutter Tyrone Briggs
241
Selected References
285
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About the author (1991)

Katherine Ketcham is the author of many books, including "Chinese Medicine for Maximum Immunity" & "The Five Elements of Self-Healing". She lives in Washington.

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