Modern Salem Witch Trials

For years I've followed Elizabeth Loftus' work on false memories and the horrors of the 1980s/early 1990s when people began claiming to have "recovered memories" of sexual abuse, satanic torture, etc. leading into the horrible trials of daycare providers charged with child abuse.

Here is a video of Elizabeth Loftus talking about her work investigating the ability to plant false memories. Go to 1:12:30 to see the start of her talk and 1:16:10 for her talk on false memories:



At 1:23:00 Elizabeth Loftus shows a video of Alan Alda's PBS show Scientific American Frontiers where she plants a false memory into Alan Alda.

Here is an article in Slate magazine discussing Elizabeth Loftus' work.

She was exactly what defense lawyers needed. The chief threat to their clients was incriminating witness testimony. Loftus could shake the jury's faith in such recollections without attacking the witness personally. Memory errors were natural. The witness, like the defendant, was innocent. Even police, who caused misidentifications by contaminating witnesses' memories with mug shots and lineups, often didn't realize what they were doing.

Over the next 35 years, Loftus testified as a memory expert in more than 250 hearings and trials. She worked dozens of famous cases: Ted Bundy, O.J. Simpson, Rodney King, Oliver North, Martha Stewart, Lewis Libby, Michael Jackson, the Menendez brothers, the Oklahoma City bombing, and many more.



... Then there were prosecutions based on coached child testimony, such as the McMartin Preschool sex-abuse case. To measure children's suggestibility, Loftus and a colleague showed them several one-minute films, followed by leading questions. "Did you see a boat?" they asked one child. Afterward, the child remembered "some boats in the water." "Did you see some candles start the fire?" they asked another. "The candle made the fire," the child said later. Other kids, after being asked about bees and bears, recalled bees and bears. None of these things—bees, bears, boats, candles—were in the films.





... Critics protested that Loftus still hadn't proved the memories were fake. So she raised the ante. She persuaded 16 percent of a study population that they had met Bugs Bunny at Disneyland. In a follow-up experiment, researchers sold the same memory to 36 percent of subjects. This was impossible, since Bugs belonged to Warner Bros., not Disney. When critics complained that the Bugs memory wasn't abusive, Loftus obliged them again. Her team convinced 30 percent of another group of subjects that on a visit to Disneyland, a drug-addled Pluto character had licked their ears.

With each escalation and success, Loftus turned the tide of the cultural and legal war over repressed memories. Her experiments became potent evidence in court. Around her rose a flourishing field of research in the malleability of recollection. (For a selection of recent studies, read Memory Editing: Best of the Web.) Psychologists, judges, and initially credulous news organizations became skeptical of repressed memories. Many women retracted allegations of abuse. Lawsuits and regulators began to punish reckless therapists. The frenzy subsided.

For her courage in confronting this menace, Loftus was ostracized by clinical psychologists, denounced as an enemy of women, and accused of molesting her own children, though she had none. Armed guards accompanied her at lectures. And when she dared to reinvestigate a particularly compelling allegation of sexual abuse—the "Jane Doe" case—her university seized her files and barred her from publishing or discussing her findings. (Read Memory and Truth: The Mystery of Jane Doe.) She persisted in the face of these ordeals because she refused to live in a world of lies.

... In 1989, when the Chinese government tried to alter memories of the Tiananmen Square massacre, Loftus used her knowledge of brainwashing to expose the deception. (For more on this episode and her writings on politics, see George Orwell's 1989.)

I was horrified back in the 1980s/early 1990s when there were trials based on bizarre claims of "Satanic child abuse" in daycare centres. Here is a short list of the worst cases:
McMartin preschool
Wee Care nursery school
Read the above links to understand the destruction of innocent people's lives by false testimony based on implanted "memories".

Even today this kind of insanity of false accusations continues. A recent case was that of Tonya Craft. Read here, here.

Over the long stretch of history, the number of "eye witness identifications' of innocent people in trials. There is a long history showing how poor eye witness testimony is. But many, many innocent people have spent years, decades, and even been executed based on this kind of false memory. Worst of all, study of false memory illuminates how the police can manipulate witnesses into giving "honest" false eye witness testimony. Elizabeth Loftus' work is very important. Read the 8 part series in Slate magazine to get a taste of her impact of the judicial system.

The sad fact is that far too many people's lives are ruined by false memories. Science helps illuminate this problem. But most people are unaware of the science. I can excuse ordinary people of not being aware of this phenomenon, but I can't excuse or understand why lawyer, judges, and the legal system has failed to learn the necessary lessons from this centuries long injustice (from medieval witch trials to modern "witch" trials).