"Memory, like liberty, is a fragile thing"

An eminent panel of speakers, including Professor Elizabeth Loftus, were among those invited to the launch of the new Forensic Unit at Goldsmiths, University of London. Its director, Professor Fiona Gabbert, said the unit would aim to be an international hub for research, teaching, and consultancy on the relationship between psychological science and the criminal justice system.

One of the first to speak was Goldsmiths' own Professor Tim Valentine, who presented a fascinating evaluation of the eyewitness identification of Lockerbie bomber Abdelbaset al-Megrahi – casting this crucial evidence into doubt. Following an initial unsuccessful appeal against his conviction al-Megrahi applied to the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission to investigate the safety of his conviction. Professor Valentine was asked by the commission to give an expert report on the eyewitness testimony in the case.

A suitcase bomb on Pan Am Flight 103 exploded on 21 December 1988, killing all 243 passengers on board and 11 on the ground in the Scottish town of Lockerbie. An investigation found fragments of clothing, thought to come from the same suitcase, which were manufactured in Malta. Tony Gauci, who worked at the clothes shop Mary's House and became a key prosecution witness, was found to have sold the clothes to an unidentified Libyan customer. Valentine pointed out that Gauci was first interviewed by police nine months after the attack, did not identify al-Megrahi until 1991 in a photo array, and picked him out of an identity parade eight years later. Valentine said that as well as a delay in identification, other factors may affect witness memory. For example, repeated questioning could increase a person's confidence in the answers they give, even if these answers include misremembered events. Gauci was interviewed by police at least 20 times.

Valentine moved on to looking at inconsistencies in Gauci's various statements. Evidence given during the trial, in 2000, did not expose that changes in Gauci's testimony made his later description more consistent with information he had acquired from the police about the clothing found in the suitcase. Valentine said it was possible that information provided through the police questions may have distorted his memory for the items he sold.

It is also difficult to recall specifics of mundane or repeated events, and Valentine pointed out that Gauci would have had many Libyan customers. He did also note that the Libyan man's odd behaviour - he seemed disinterested in exactly what items he wanted - may have made the event more memorable. Valentine concluded that thanks to the public availability of many of the investigation documents it was possible to see where information became available to the witness, and consequently where his testimony changed. He concluded that although we can never say for certain which of Gauci's statements was most accurate, his identification of the Libyan customer he saw was always tentative.

A disproportionate percentage of the prison population have a brain injury, yet the effects of these injuries on behaviour and reoffending are rarely considered. Next up, Dr Ashok Jansari (Goldsmiths) described how he is hoping to take his work with brain-injured patients to the prison population to see if better rehabilitation from head injuries could have an impact on reoffending. His virtual reality tool, the Jansari Test of Executive Functions, assesses eight factors of executive function in people with pre-frontal cortex injuries. These types of injuries are well established in causing issues with planning, problem solving and reasoning.

In Jansari's task patients with injuries to the region are in a virtual reality office and are asked to prepare a cluttered room for a meeting later in the day. Compared to controls, patients with pre-frontal cortex injuries are significantly worse at this task. Jansari added that many infamous criminals, including Fred West, sustained head injuries at a young age, which may have predisposed them to criminal behaviour. Jansari hopes that when a person leaves prison they may undergo an assessment using this test, followed by rehabilitation focusing on the areas they have deficits in.

As well as talks from Dr James Ost (University of Portsmouth) and Goldsmiths' Professor Chris French on the misconceptions of memory and false memories, the audience was also treated to an appearance by the charismatic Forensic Psychologist and criminal profiler Professor Julian Boon. Pamela Attwell, Clinical Psychologist at HMP Swaleside, and Supervisory Officer Darren Sofley, spoke about a wing in the prison designed for helping prisoners who have personality disorders.

To the surprise of the gathered audience world-renowned atheist and evolutionary biologist Professor Richard Dawkins then took to the stage to introduce Professor Elizabeth Loftus (University of California, Irvine). He opened his introduction by explaining that he himself had experienced a false memory from a debate he took part in with Christopher Hitchens. He had misremembered that Hitchens had shouted 'How dare you?' at a religious member of the debating panel, but after watching a YouTube video of the debate realised this occurred later and was aimed at an audience member. He later discovered this false memory was shared by his fellow debater A.C. Grayling.  

The USA's Innocence Project has helped exonerate more than 300 people from wrongful convictions using DNA evidence. Professor Loftus made the startling revelation that in around three quarters of these cases faulty human memory was to blame for these convictions. Inaccuracies in human memory are not confined to the courtroom, however. Loftus pointed out that if people are given misinformation following an event, they are prone to incorporating this into their own recollections. She added that misinformation is everywhere: it is given during interrogations, in speaking to other witnesses and in the media.

Cases involving memories of childhood abuse being 'recovered', often during psychotherapy, spurred Loftus to find out how false memories could be planted inside people's heads. She found it was possible to plant false childhood memories in participants' heads, including a memory of being lost in a shopping mall. Loftus has found that these false memories can be just as emotionally textured as genuine memories, they show similar neural signals as real memories, and even people who have incredibly rich and accurate autobiographical memories show similar levels of susceptibility to false memories.

Loftus concluded: 'If I've learned anything from decades of working on these problems of memory malleability it's this; just because someone tells you something and says it with confidence, detail and expresses emotion, does not mean that it really happened. We need independent corroboration to know if we are dealing with a real memory. Wrongful convictions should matter to everyone… memory, like liberty, is a fragile thing.' 

What does the future hold?

Goldsmiths PhD student Rebecca Wheeler quizzed some of the speakers at the launch of the Forensic Psychology Unit about what the future looked like for the field. Here's what Professor Elizabeth Loftus, Professor Fiona Gabbert, Professor Tim Valentine, Dr James Ost and Pamela Attwell told her:

What topics need more attention?

A number of our speakers commented on recent technological advances, and the need for research into the effect these have on legal processes, such as procedures relating to body-worn video footage. Tim Valentine added that there were a number of exciting emerging areas of research that deserved attention, such as the use of 'super-recognisers' in criminal investigations. This group of people with exceptional face recognition skills are already being used by the Metropolitan Police to make arrests based on CCTV images so, he said, we need to understand the nature and limitations of their abilities.

What are the challenges for researchers and practitioners?

Communication came up as one of our biggest challenges. James Ost argued the need to bridge the divide between academics and practitioners, saying: 'We need to translate experimental findings into practice and translate applied questions into good experimental designs.' Fiona Gabbert and Tim Valentine said they want researchers to find more effective means of communicating findings to legal professionals. Elizabeth Loftus stressed the necessity of this – 'It's still a little bit of a war and the innocent people are getting trapped in this war,' she said.

What new criminal justice law would you enforce?

Elizabeth Loftus and Tim Valentine said they wanted more scientific rigor in practice (for example blind-testing in eyewitness identifications) and more scientific training for lawyers and judges. Pamela Attwell said she would like a review of the role of prison officers, with more of a focus on mental health awareness – a vital issue with up to 70% of prisoners having at least one mental health difficulty.

Any advice for new students or researchers?

It was unanimously stated that academic-practitioner relationships and good collaborations are key, so engaging with those in the field, understanding real-life challenges, and designing research around these should lead to having impact outside the laboratory. Do good science, publish in good journals, but also write for wider audiences; in the words of Elizabeth Loftus: 'One of the things that really launched my involvement with the legal system was to write an article for a popular magazine. Describe in accessible terms the work that you and others have done. That's when lawyers started to call because they weren't reading the Journal of Experimental Psychology, but they were reading Psychology Today.'

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