Innocence Imprisoned: The Impact of False Memories

False Memories: Addressing the Malleability of the Human Mind
Each day, an estimated 200 people are accused of criminal activity in the United States alone. In the course of a year, that adds up to roughly 75,000 individuals who have no choice but to take their chances against America’s judicial system. Although the greater majority of that mass could very well be guilty of the alleged crimes, it is important to recognize that thousands of innocent individuals are wrongly accused. The reality of these false accusations is harsh; each year, an unfortunate number of people are imprisoned for crimes that they never committed. In the most inequitable of these cases, innocence becomes subject to incarceration for a crime that never even occurred in the first place. Unless a brain can recall a memory each day with clarity, it relies on confidence as a signal of accuracy to fill in the remaining pieces to create a false testimony.

In her article, “Crimes of Memory: False Memories and Societal Justice,” Dr.

Elizabeth Loftus puts the malleability of memory into perspective, and describes the plausible causes of false memory as well as the toll it can take on the innocent. Memories come and go with time, fading away when left untouched just to be penciled in again when revisited days, weeks or even years later – until the next recall. Often times, the details of a memory tend to change and the story can even transform one completely unlike the original. In the 1970’s, Loftus performed a study to analyze the effect that introducing false details about a specific memory to people would have on their recall of that event. Loftus found that when erroneous details about an event were presented to people, their personal recollections of that event became distorted. From these findings, Loftus was able to conclude that human memory is susceptible to manipulation by

others.
In a separate group of studies, Loftus proved that not only could the details of an event be changed, but also the memory for individuals who were present during an event. In one such experiment, researchers successfully convinced many that they had met Bugs Bunny at Disney Resort as children, though in reality, the occurrence would have been impossible because Bugs Bunny is not a Disney character. In many instances, people even claimed to recall specific details about their “real encounters” with Bugs. From these findings, Loftus was able to portray that “just because a memory is expressed with confidence, just because it contains detail, just because it is expressed with emotion, doesn’t mean it really happened.”
Although judges, police officers and mental health professionals cannot determine a memory’s validity for certain, the findings of Loftus’ studies indicate how to reduce the amount innocent people incarcerated for made up incidents resulting from false memories. As a result of Loftus’ collaborative research, today’s legal systems have adapted to minimize the chances of instilling false memory in criminal witnesses by changing the way they are questioned for details and changing the protocol of suspect lineups. All things considered, it is important to not discount the details of a witnesses’ allegation, but to also recognize that false memory exists in society.