Showing posts with label false memories. Show all posts
Showing posts with label false memories. Show all posts

January 14, 2020

Showdown: DNA evidence vs. cognitive bias

Back in the 1980s, southern Alameda County in the East Bay was the hellmouth for serial murder. As a newspaper reporter covering the crime beat, I was reporting on at least three separate fiends prowling the suburbs and picking off young teenage girls at whim.

It was harder to stop them back then. Forensic DNA was still in its infancy. The historic evidentiary hearings in Oakland, California on the admissibility of DNA typing, with full-scale scientific battles tying up courtrooms for months on end, were still a few years away.

Tina Faelz and her mother Shirley
Fourteen-year-old Tina Faelz was one of the victims. In 1984, she was found dead with 44 stab wounds. She had taken a shortcut through a drainage culvert while walking home from school.

(As a side note, Tina had walked home that day because a group of girls was planning to beat her up if she rode the bus. Bullies tyrannized Foothill High School in suburban Pleasanton; on the same day as Tina’s murder, an alpha-male bully threw a football player into a dumpster and locked the lid.)

Detectives had no shortage of suspects. There was the mother’s violent boyfriend. There was the aforementioned school bully, whom someone had spotted near the crime scene. There was a man who was arrested shortly after Tina’s death for a similar assault in which the girl managed to escape.

What they lacked was hard evidence.

The case went cold for decades. It was finally cracked just a few years ago, thanks to the intersection of DNA science and a cop’s pregnancy. Detective Dana Savage couldn’t be on the streets due to her pregnancy, so she decided to take a gander at the vexing cold case.

Detective Savage was fairly certain that the culprit was one of two serial killers who’d been active in the region at the time; she just didn’t know which one. Based on the vigor of the attack, she figured the killer must have shed some blood, so all she needed was something to test for DNA. She struck gold with the victim’s purse, which had been found lodged in a nearby tree.

But when Savage got the call from the crime lab, she was in for a surprise. The culprit was not one of the serial killers. Nor was it any of the original suspects.

It was the 16-year-old classmate who’d been thrown into the school dumpster earlier in the day.

After killing Tina, Steven Carlson had dropped out of school and spent the next 30 years abusing meth and bouncing in and out of custody. When police came to talk to him, he started retching violently. He was tried and convicted, and is now serving a 16–to-life sentence.

It’s unfortunate that it took so long to catch the killer. But on the bright side, the Pleasanton police did things right: They kept their minds open and never fixated on the wrong person. That would have been far worse.

Barking up wrong trees

In other cases during that violent era, police sometimes got it tragically wrong. For example, when 8-year-old girl Cannie Bullock was raped and murdered in her home in nearby San Pablo, Detective Mark Harrison fixated relentlessly on William Flores, the sexually creepy guy next door, literally driving him to his grave. (If every creepy guy was a murderer there wouldn’t be many women left on the planet, or even many male cops if you believe the dismal statistics in the must-watch Netflix series Unbelievable.) Even after Flores self-immolated, the detective wouldn’t let him rest in peace. Once DNA technology became available, Harrison got a court order to dig up Flores’s body, certain the test results would clear the long-dormant case.

He was dead wrong. The DNA didn’t match that found on the little girl’s body.

(That case went cold for many years. Finally, DNA from a man convicted of sexual assault in Colorado was routinely entered into a database, which spit out a match. The killer, Joseph Cordova, was never a suspect in the girl’s killing, although he lived and worked in the area and had used drugs with the girl’s mother. He is now parked on California’s death row.)

But here’s the really bad news: Even with modern DNA technology’s miraculous crime-solving capabilities, fixations like Detective Harrison’s still lead police astray with some regularity. In particular, forensic science is no match for a priori stereotypes about the bad guys.

A case in point: The murder of elderly Leola Shreves in Yuba City, California.

The attack was frenzied. As detailed by San Francisco Chronicle reporter Matthias Gafni, the TV set was smashed and a door was ripped from its hinges. The 94-year-old victim had been tortured, strangled and beaten to a pulp. Her teeth were shattered, her jaw and back broken, and 17 of 24 ribs cracked. Her ears and scalp were nearly ripped from her skull.

Police quickly latched onto the next-door neighbor, a socially awkward video-game devotee. Michael Alexander aroused police suspicion in part due to his troubled past: He had been arrested at age 15 for threatening to kill a high school teacher and burn down the school after fighting with and choking another student.

Burdened with an intellectual disability, the 20-year-old was no match for the seasoned detectives who brought him in for questioning. When he denied ever being at his neighbor’s house, police lied to him, saying his fingerprints, shoe prints and DNA had all been found there. When he continued to profess his innocence, detectives suggested that maybe he had blacked out, and an alter ego named “Angry Mike” had committed the crime. Alexander’s naïve acceptance of the detectives’ ruses eventually led him to accede to their version of reality despite not having any recollection of it.

For anyone with expertise on false confessions, Alexander’s had all the classic hallmarks. It was replete with maybes and probabilities. The details did not match the evidence from the crime scene. And Alexander immediately recanted.

“Have you been looking for the real killer?” he later asked the detectives.

His question fell on deaf ears. He was arrested and charged with capital murder.

Unbeknownst to him at the time, there was indeed an abundance of real physical evidence – DNA, fingerprints and shoe prints. All of it excluded him and pointed to someone else.

Astonishingly, the identity of Shreve’s killer was in front of the detectives the entire time, but it took them six long years to realize it.

Armando Cuadras
On the night of the murder, a man named Armando Cuadras was found collapsed on the street just 300 yards away, drunk and badly injured. He was taken to the hospital by ambulance, but police failed to connect the two events. Cuadras, whose DNA was splattered all over the bloody crime scene, is now awaiting trial.

Mental blinders

Cognitive scientists have various names for the mental processes that cause people to prematurely focus on one solution to the exclusion of other possibilities. Tunnel vision. Myopia. Confirmation bias. In essence, the Yuba City police identified a suspect, based in part on their preconceived ideas about what a guilty person should look like, and in the process closed their minds to alternate possibilities.

Then, once all of the physical evidence came back and screamed out Alexander’s innocence, cognitive dissonance kicked in: It can be hard to abandon a firm belief even when confronted with irrefutable evidence that it is wrong. Cognitive dissonance was on florid display in the infamous case of the Central Park Five. As documented in the powerful Netflix series When They See Us, prosecutors still refuse to accept overwhelming evidence of the young men’s innocence. Such is the power of cognitive blinders. (My blog post on that astonishing case is HERE.)

Unfortunately, when police focus on the wrong person they not only destroy the suspect’s life, but also allow the real culprit to remain free, thereby endangering others in the community. There are myriad cases of very dangerous men who went on to rape and kill again after police investigators failed to diligently pursue all leads. (Again, let me plug the harrowing series Unbelievable.)

After almost two years in jail, Alexander was finally set free and the charges against him dismissed. But even with another suspect in custody and awaiting trial, police and prosecutors have stubbornly refused to concede that Alexander is innocent.

Which just goes to show, even the miracles of DNA typing are no match for minds that are rigidly shut.

* * * * *

FURTHER RESOURCES: The transcript of Michael Alexander's confession is available online, and is a good resource for teaching and learning about false confessions. Tina Faelz's killing is the subject of a true-crime book, Murder in Pleasanton, which includes back-story information not available elsewhere. If you are interested in diving deeper into the problem of cognitive biases in police investigations and how they can be avoided, a great resource is Criminal Investigative Failures, edited by D. Kim Rossmo. Two chapters I especially recommend are "Who Killed Stephanie Crowe," focusing on the appalling case that I've blogged about several times in which a 14-year-old boy was wrongfully arrested in his sister's murder, and "On the Horns of a Narrative," by my colleague David Stubbins and his brother, which focuses specifically on cognitive biases in criminal investigations.

A NOTE TO MY FAITHFUL SUBSCRIBERS: My apologies for the diminishing quantity of posts as of late. I'm working on a couple of larger writing projects. I also Tweet regularly on forensic psychology and criminology topics, so feel free to follow me on Twitter for more regular news and commentary.

July 5, 2016

The Trauma Myth, Revisited

The Trauma Myth may be one of the most misunderstood books of the past decade. Based on its regrettable title, pedophiles erroneously believe it minimizes the harm of child sexual abuse; in the opposite corner, some misguided anti-abuse crusaders have demonized the Harvard-trained author as a pedophile apologist. As guest blogger Jon Brandt explains in this review -- first published in the Summer 2016 issue of The Forum, the newsletter of the Association for the Treatment of Sexual Abusers (ATSA) -- both fans and detractors of Susan Clancy have gotten the courageous researcher all wrong.

The Trauma Myth

by Susan Clancy

Book review by Jon Brandt, MSW, LICSW*

As a former child protection social worker, and now working with both victims and offenders, I was drawn to The Trauma Myth because of both the title, and subtitle: “The Truth About the Sexual Abuse of Children – and its aftermath.” When I first read Susan Clancy’s book, in 2010, nearly every page confirmed my professional experience with victims. I’m offering this review some six years after the book's publication because I believe most experienced professionals will agree that Clancy’s thesis is not just well-researched, but articulate and luminously persuasive.

Dr. Clancy is a Harvard-trained experimental psychologist. Her expertise is not in the field of sexual abuse; it is in the field of memory. This information is important in understanding how Clancy endeavored to interview adults who had been victims of childhood sexual abuse (CSA) – in part, to further understand the role of memory in how adults recalled traumatic experiences. Clancy acknowledges that her career had a rocky start – not only investigating adult memories of childhood sexual abuse, but to understand why some people seemed to believe in alien abductions. Clancy writes about the challenge of having to reconcile her research with two deep concerns: first, she had to abandon some of what she had been taught about the ‘trauma’ of sexual abuse, and second, she had to try to save her reputation and career.

After Clancy interviewed more than 200 Boston-area adult victims of CSA, she came to recognize that most victims’ memories were consistent with previous research – the vast majority of victims knew, liked, and/or trusted their abusers. And she confirmed another finding – that most CSA was tricked and manipulated, not the product of threats, force, pain, or injury. Even young children intuitively understand that when an older person inflicts pain, injury, or fear (elements of trauma), something is very wrong. But when sexual violations occur in the absence of violence and in the presence of trust, most victims reported being confused by the encounter, rather than traumatized. Less than one in ten adults that Clancy interviewed described being sexually abused as “traumatic.” Clancy considered that perhaps CSA is so traumatic that adults had repressed their memories, but that hypothesis ran counter to research that: (1) discredits repressed memories and (2) indicates that the more powerful life experiences are to an individual, the more the events are both strongly embedded and vividly recalled. Clancy goes on to articulately detail how children are indeed harmed by sexual abuse – in the aftermath.

Dr. Clancy has expressed some regret about the title of her book, but does not back-peddle from her findings – that CSA is not universally traumatic. She asserts that many professionals don’t really understand how, why, and when CSA is harmful, and imputing trauma when it’s not present might actually introduce secondary harm. Clancy expresses that children clearly do not have the developmental capabilities to understand interpersonal sex, that acceding to sexual touching is not the same as sexual consent, and that naïve cooperation is not complicity. In the absence of veritable trauma, the harm of CSA comes not from sexual touching, per se, but from relationship violations – a sense of betrayal, shame, and misplaced blame. Clancy explains that as a CSA victim begins to sexually and socially mature, and comes to understand what motivated their abuser, they feel duped and exploited. As victims try to reconcile how and why someone of trust would use them for sexual purposes, the ‘harm’ evolves. Clancy’s message is clear: if we don’t talk to kids about sex, we leave them vulnerable; if we don’t listen to kids who have been sexually abused, we re-victimize them; when we truly listen to child victims, we empower them to guide their own recovery – that helps to turn victims into survivors.

Dr. Clancy uses the controversies around her book to illustrate how difficult it is for professionals to navigate the nuances of CSA, and that it is incumbent on adults to protect children until they are mature enough to navigate the world of interpersonal sex. Clancy acknowledges that she was perhaps naïve in believing that rigorous science would protect the integrity of her research. What she was not prepared for was that CSA is virtually unspeakable – so abhorrent that, even among the educated, it was difficult to separate legitimate research from prevailing public opinion, or simply the politics of sex.

In 1998, psychologist, Bruce Rind and colleagues published an article on CSA in the American Psychological Association journal Psychological Bulletin. It was peer-reviewed, sound research, but so contrary to conventional beliefs of CSA that it resulted in an Act of Congress condemning his work. In 1981, Professor Alfred Kadushin (one of my graduate school advisors at the University of Wisconsin) published a book titled Child Abuse, an Interactional Event. He spent the rest of his career explaining that he was not blaming children for being abused.

The truth is, there has never been any time in history that sex could be separated from politics, or that science hasn’t waged an uphill battle against public opinion. The Socratic Method, or the applications of logic and scrutiny to understanding complex problems, is a predecessor of the Scientific Method, and one of the most important legacies of Socrates. It is ironic that Socrates could not survive the politics of his own time – he was condemned to death as a heretic. Nearly two millennia later, perhaps Galileo had taken note of the fate of Socrates. When Galileo found himself charged with heresy, to avoid being executed, he recanted his theory of the heliocentric solar system, and lived out his life under house arrest. It took another 350 years for the Catholic Church to acknowledge that Galileo had been right all along.

Susan Clancy wasn’t charged with heresy, at least not formally, but by her own admission, after a firestorm of controversy over The Trauma Myth, she fled the US to work in Nicaragua for several years. If Clancy was flattered by a favorable book review in the NY Times, she must have been horrified by a book review by NAMBLA [the North American Man/Boy Love Association]. Clancy’s book, and her story, are a testimony to professional courage in the face of deeply held, widespread, long-standing beliefs about the sexual abuse of children. Apparently, Clancy no longer writes or teaches about sexual abuse, based on a Google search, but she is still professionally active in research and education about the functions of memory.

There is so much right about The Trauma Myth that I am hesitant to be critical, but I think Clancy missed the mark on a few points. In my experience, some victims of CSA have the internal constitution to avoid both the trauma and the harm of sexual abuse. Other victims seem to have the resiliency and tenacity, with or without professional help, to truly earn the moniker of ‘survivor.’ Clancy views CSA as dichotomous – if there is a victim, there is an offender, who must be punished. If Clancy understood offending with the same verve, complexity, and nuances with which she understands victims, I think she would forgo the black and white, victim-offender paradigm in favor of the complex dynamics of offending, and the range of uniquely tailored interventions that serve victims, offenders, and their families. With a focus on the etiology and aftermath of CSA, it might not be obvious that Clancy was also advocating for both more prevention and better public policies.

The Trauma Myth is well researched, with endnotes in APA format. With just over 200 pages, and still professionally sound, it is easy reading. Most individuals are likely to approach the book with the same skepticism with which Clancy pursued her research. In the end, I think most professionals are likely to agree with many conclusions that Dr. Clancy found unassailable: that the popular, one-dimensional understanding of ‘trauma’ caused by child sexual abuse is largely a myth – a vestige of the 20th century.

*Jon Brandt is a clinical social worker who specializes in the evaluation, treatment and supervision to sexual offenders. His previous guest posts have reported on the link between pornography and contact sex offending and on an ongoing legal challenge to Minnesota's civil commitment of sex offenders. Many thanks to the editors of The Forum for granting me permission to post Mr. Brandt's review. The original review can be found HERE.

September 24, 2008

Memory: The sharper, the falser

One of the most surprising things about memory is that contrary to popular belief, the more specific the detail, the less likely the memory is to be accurate. And while gaps in a memory are generally believed to indicate an unreliable memory, the reality is that gaps are virtually a hallmark of the remembering process.

"People still have this intuitive belief that if someone recounts a memory, it must be true if they display strong emotions," says Cara Laney, lecturer in forensic psychology at the University of Leicester. "But I've been studying memory so long that I don't trust very many of my childhood memories at all."

From rose-tinted views of childhood to clear recollections of events that never happened, research shows that memories are both suggestible and inherently idealised.

The rest of UK Guardian reporter Kate Hilpern's fascinating summary of memory research, "Is your mind playing tricks on you?"” in online here. The accuracy of memories is of central import in the field of forensic psychology, as well as related fields such as criminal investigation. So, if Hilpern's brief summary whets your appetite for more, I highly recommend scholar Daniel Schacter’s The Seven Sins of Memory: How the Mind Forgets and Remembers (my Amazon review is here). After reading about the seven sins, you’ll never think the same about your own memory, or anyone else's.