Texas is one of 13 states that allow hypnotically induced testimony, as long as the hypnosis is carried out according to certain guidelines a further four states permit it unconditionally. Since 1987, the supreme court has held that information and testimony from hypnotised witnesses cannot automatically be thrown out of court. His case, along with another, similar case from Texas, could determine the future of forensic hypnosis in the state and across the country. He is now waiting for his final appeal to be heard by Texas’s highest criminal court. In October 2018, that court affirmed the original conviction, which means Flores is still on death row. On, six days before he was supposed to be put to death, the court granted Flores a stay of execution and sent the case back to a lower court for review. At trial, the witness had said she was “over 100% positive” that she saw Flores at the crime scene. In an affidavit included with Flores’s appeal, Lynn wrote that “a significant development in the study of psychology over the past two decades or so has been the decline and fall of the idea that memory is a vast, permanent and potentially accessible storehouse of information.” In a subsequent hearing, Lynn testified that the hypnosis in the Flores case had relied on this faulty concept of memory and that it may have contributed to the witness’s confidence in her testimony. “It felt like we were at the casino and pushing all the chips in,” Flores said. It was the first law of its kind in the US and a major step forward for fighting wrongful convictions – but it had not yet been tested in a forensic hypnosis case. Among other things, the statute held that convictions could be thrown out if it was shown that they relied on discredited or misused scientific evidence. He based the appeal on a law passed in Texas three years earlier, in May 2013, known as the junk science statute. “Maybe they’re having a very vivid experience during hypnosis, but that experience is not necessarily a truthful experience,” Lynn told the court.Īfter contacting Lynn, Gardner filed an appeal before the highest criminal court in Texas. It led them to “recover” at least as many false memories as accurate ones, while increasing their confidence in the memories’ accuracy. But when Lynn began to test this assumption, he found that in study after study, hypnosis actually harmed subjects’ recall. As a young psychologist in the 1970s, Lynn was a “true believer” in the power of hypnosis to retrieve memories, he later testified in a hearing in Flores’s case. “The breadth of scientific error in forensic disciplines is breathtaking,” Ben Wolff, an attorney for Flores, told me.Īfter reading about Flores’s case, Gardner got in touch with a hypnosis expert named Dr Steven Lynn. It is one example of a growing number of forensic practices – including the analysis of blood spatter patterns and the study of what distinguishes arson from accidental fires – that prosecutors once relied on to secure convictions, but which are now considered to be unreliable. In recent decades, the scientific validity of forensic hypnosis has been called into question by experts who study how memory operates, especially in police interviews and courtrooms. (All 27 captives survived the ordeal, after they dug themselves out of the trailer with a piece of wood.) In the case that led police departments across the country to begin using forensic hypnosis, a school bus driver in California, who had been abducted and buried alive with 26 students in an underground trailer, later accurately recalled most of the licence plate of his abductors while under hypnosis. Proponents argue that it allows victims and witnesses to recall traumatic events with greater clarity by detaching them from emotions that muddy the memory. Hypnosis has been used as a forensic tool by US law enforcement and intelligence agencies since the second world war. No physical evidence had been presented to tie him to the murder, his defence had failed him in multiple ways and, perhaps most troublingly, the only eye witness who claimed to have seen him at the scene of the crime had been hypnotised by police during questioning. Flores wrote to Gardner, telling him about the troubling course his trial had taken. Gardner specialised in fighting capital punishment convictions and had helped this man take his case to the US supreme court. Flores’s new neighbour on death watch, who was due to die in two weeks, gave him the name of his attorney, Gregory Gardner.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |