Memory Distortion – Eyewitness Testimony

Stock photo by Martin Lopez from Pexels.

You know when someone asks you if you remember you did something at a certain day and somehow you can’t really remember what you did?

Like sometimes, you can’t really remember if you locked the door to your house or whether you locked the car. Or if you already bought a carton of milk, so you end up buying another.

People often think that the human memory is like a recorder, where details are accurately recorded at the correct order with perfect clarity, stored and easily retrieved. It is not that simple. People can think that their memory of a certain event is accurate and feel confident when recalling it, but memory is often very prone to mistakes. Memory distortion can happen for mundane events or for more serious events such as falsely remembering details of an incident or accident witnessed.

This post is inspired by a recent incident I had experienced personally. So let's start off by finding out how our memories are stored, how we forget and how we recall memories. The first part comprises of theories (which may be boring to some) I used to study during my Bachelor's Degree course. In the second part, I share 4 true-crime stories which I have either listened to in podcasts or have watched on TV. These stories have really fascinated me because of its complexity and absurdness revolving around the concept of memory. But when you find out more about each person's story, you begin to understand how injustice can sometimes happen merely as a result of unintentional actions. I hope you give them a chance after reading my post. 

“I don’t know. That look like him over there” - Carrie Lee Elliot, who was sexually assaulted in her own home in North Carolina, USA.

Storing Memories

Let us first talk about how memories are stored in little drawers in our brains. Some drawers are deeper and have more space to keep our things, whereas there are some drawers that are shallow which may cause things to fall out easily. According to a model developed by 2 Richards in 1968, Richard Atkinson and Richard Shiffrin, memory is made up of 3 major components: sensory memory, working-memory (short-term memory) and long-term memory (Passer & Smith, 2004).

Sensory memory briefly holds incoming sensory information which are made up of sensory registers such as our visual sensory register, called the iconic store (what we see) and our auditory sensory register called the echoic store (what we hear). These registers are our bodies’ initial information processors (Passer & Smith, 2004).

Working-memory or short-term memory temporarily holds a limited amount of information through selective attention, which happens when you concentrate on something. Information is retained in short-term memory as codes. Memory codes are mental representations of some type of information or stimulus which take the forms of: mental images (visual codes), sound (phonological codes), a meaning of a stimulus (semantic codes), and physical actions (motor codes). The form of a memory code does not often correspond to the form of the original stimulus. Cognitive scientists view short-term memory as working memory that actively manipulates information and supports other cognitive functions such as problem solving and planning (Passer & Smith, 2004).

Long-term memory is our huge drawer or what scientists called the library of more durable stored memories which can probably last for up to a lifetime. Many scientists believe that humans have several long-term memory systems that interact with one another. The declarative memory involves factual knowledge and includes 2 subcategories: episodic memory is store of knowledge of personal experiences such as recollections of childhood friends, and how you celebrated your 21^st birthday. Semantic memory includes general factual knowledge about the world and language such as knowing the capital of Malaysia is Kuala Lumpur.

Forgetting

Why do we forget? Failure to encode information into long-term memory is one of the reasons for forgetting. We may notice information but fail to encode it because we might give more attention to something else. There are a few theories explaining how people forget.

The interference theory explains that we forget information because other items in long-term memory impair our ability to retrieve it. There are two types of interference: proactive interference which occurs when material learned in the past interferes with recall of newer material (such as remembering where you parked your car yesterday, and mistakenly going to the same spot when you already parked it somewhere else); and retroactive interference which occurs when newly learned information interferes with ability to recall past information (remembering the football score of your favorite team which played last night and forgetting their score last weekend).

Psychodynamic and psychologists propose that sometimes people are consciously or unconsciously motivated to forget. There are a couple of theories for motivated forgetting. The first would be repression which is a motivational process that protects us by blocking the conscious recall of anxiety-arousing memories. Repression is a highly controversial concept because not much evidence supports it.

Amnesia is another form of motivated forgetting. There are few categories. Retrograde amnesia represents memory loss for events that took place sometime in life before the onset of amnesia. A famous Disney character which depicts this is Dory from Finding Nemo. Jason Bourne from the Bourne trilogy is another famous Hollywood character that suffers from retrograde amnesia. Anterograde amnesia represents memory loss for events that occur after the initial onset of amnesia. Guy Pearce starred as character Leonard Shelby in the movie Memento which suffers from anterograde amnesia resulting from an injury. 

Alzheimer’s disease is the most common form of senile dementia that affects the neurotransmitter systems of the brain in mainly the elderly which produces severe retrograde and anterograde amnesia.

Another type of amnesia is infantile amnesia which is memory loss for early childhood experiences, typically before the ages of 3. One hypothesis for infantile amnesia is that probably the brain regions that encode long-term memory is not yet fully developed in the first years after birth. Do you remember things that happened to you when you were 2 years old? 

Another theory for forgetting involves prospective memory which involves remembering to perform an activity in the future. Often, it involves mundane things such as remembering to take your medication or remembering to buy toilet paper. Prospective memory, however, involves other cognitive abilities such as planning and allocating attention while performing other tasks. As an example, a lot of times I had planned to do something but I had walked into the room and totally forget what I wanted to do. I think that situation is pretty common for a lot of people.

Constructing or Reconstructing Memory

So now we know how memories are stored and sometimes lost. The question now is: How are memories retrieved?

Once memories are stored or lost it is only natural to retrieve it. Procedural memory is reflected in skills and actions such as knowing how to type on a computer, riding a bicycle or swimming. Explicit memory involves conscious or intentional memory retrieval when you consciously recognize something familiar (like recognizing an old friend) or recall something (recalling the old friend's name). Implicit memory is connected to procedural memory and occurs when memory influences our behavior without conscious awareness such as riding a bicycle, driving or performing any well-learned skill. This is how habits are formed and most implicit memories are usually procedural. 

Humans usually use a retrieval cue or a prompt that stimulates the activation of information stored in long-term memory. Retrieval cues could be anything from colors, names to objects. Distinctive stimuli have a better chance of being remembered, that is why distinctive events are often easily retrieved such as weddings, births and deaths or accidents. However, just because a memory is distinct and easily retrieved it does not mean it’s accurate. Sometimes people falsely remember details of a distinctive event.

Memories are often constructed or reconstructed like piecing together a puzzle of stored information in a way that makes sense to us or as accurately as we perceive ourselves and the world. Culture can influence memory construction (which is something I will revisit later in the post). Sir Frederick Bartlett, coined the term schema. It is of his opinion that people have basically generalized ideas about how events happen and they use these generalized ideas to organize and construct their memories. A schema may cause people to associate trigger words or critical lures causing people to misinterpret the source of activation and falsely remembering that the lure is existent whereas it was never there.

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The Missing Cases of Gudmuner and Geirfinnur

Memory reconstruction may not always be perfect. The misinformation effect which is the distortion of a memory by misleading post-event information has frequently been investigated in relation to mistaken eyewitness testimony. Memory distortion have always raised concerns about the reliability of eyewitness testimony from adults and even more so, from children.

In a lot of unfortunate cases, eyewitnesses are coerced by the police and investigators in to giving false testimony which will lead to the confession of crime they did not actually commit. How does this happen? Simple, misinformation. Eyewitnesses are given misleading statements or asked misleading questions, provided fabricated evidence, assertion of guilt of a suspect and sometimes given critical lures (as mentioned previously) causing eyewitnesses to falsely remember something that did not actually happen. Simply, the interrogation or the process of testimony taking is not investigative in nature at all. The sole purpose is to draw out a confession or coerce a suspect into confessing to a crime, when in actual fact they are innocent of it. 

This is exactly what happened in the missing persons’ case of two Icelandic men, Gudmuner Einarsson, 18 years old at that time and Geirfinnur Einarsson, aged 32 at that time. They both share the same last name, but are not related.

Stock photo by Wendelin Jacober from Pexels.

I became really fascinated with the story after watching its Netflix documentary “Out of Thin Air”. You should really watch it if you are interested in true crime. The documentary tells a story about two men who disappeared at two separate occasions 10 months apart and how 6 people were eventually punished for a crime they did not commit.

Nearly two years after Gudmuner’s disappearance in 1974, police arrested Saevar Ciesielski and his girlfriend, Erla Bolladottir in their apartment during an investigation for an unrelated minor crime. They were both taken out of their home leaving their 11-week-old daughter.

Erla had first implicated her boyfriend, Saevar after she told police she had a dream about Saevar and his friends suspiciously whispering outside her window. After a roughly 10 hour long interview, she signed a statement prepared by the police admitting she had “witnessed” her boyfriend and three of his friends with the body of Gudmuner wrapped in a bed sheet. Not surprisingly, her boyfriend backed up her story and implicated 3 of his closest friends, Kristjan Vidar Vidarsson, Tryggvi Runar Leifsson and Albert Klahn Skaftason.

Later, Erla was also asked by police about the second disappearance, that of Geirfinnur’s. She told them that she might know something about it. Police brought her in again for lengthy questioning and she was again implicated in Geirfinnur’s disappearance along with her boyfriend and his friends. They also implicated a 6^th person, Gudjon Skarphedinsson, a 32-year-old former teacher – who had a connection with Saevar, his former pupil. The problem was, Gudjon couldn’t really remember what he was doing at the time of Geirfinnur’s disappearance or anything much at that time of the year.

The investigation lasted more than a year, without physical evidence, and the suspects’ memories were hazy. Despite not having any physical evidence linking them to the crimes, they had all signed statements admitted that they had either killed Geirfinnur and Gudmundur or helped dispose of their bodies. Two years after the first arrests, the court delivered its verdict. Saevar Ciesielski was given a life sentence. The five other suspects were given sentences ranging from 3-12 years.

Luckily, Gudjon kept a diary (which existence only emerged in 2011 when the Icelandic government formed a special committee to investigate how the case was handled by the police) for the 14 months he was held on remand.

Gisli Gudjonsson, a former Icelandic detective has read Gudjon’s diary and believes he knows why Gudjon confessed to the crime even if he has little to no recollection of committing it. Gisli is a leading forensic psychologist and one of the pioneers for research on memory distrust syndrome. His research has shown how memory distrust which is often triggered by isolation, persuasive police interrogations with presentation of false evidence and high emotional intensity, can lead to false confessions. He believes that Gudjon’s diary is a perfect example of memory distrust syndrome which shows the gradual process of Gudjon beginning to question the validity and truth of his memory of the incident.

What was themost striking fact about this case was the prison custody logs that were obtained by the special committee in 2011. It revealed that Gudjon spent 14 months in solitary confinement, and Erla was in isolation for 105 days, away from her young daughter. During this time she was interviewed over 100 times throughout the day and into the night and her lawyer was only present on three occasions. Apparently, keeping suspects in solitary confinement was an acceptable practice in 1970s Iceland.

In the aftermath, all 6 served their time. Most of them had married and had children, 2 of them had passed away. Gudjon still blames himself saying too much during the interrogations and still has lingering doubts about the incident. Erla still feels the anger every now and then at how the police handle the investigations.

Nevertheless, the methods employed by the Icelandic police weren’t unique.

Clockwise from top left: Saevar Ciesielski, Erla Bolladottir, Kristjan Vidar Vidarsson, Gudjon Skarphedinsson, Albert Klahn Skaftason and Tryggvi Runar Leifsson.

The Problem with Memory and Cross-Race Identification

You would probably remember earlier in the post I mentioned that culture can influence memory construction. Memories are constructed or reconstructed in the way we perceive the world and how it makes sense to ourselves. There comes a problem in eyewitness testimony when the eyewitness is asked to identify a person of a different race post-incident. Cross-race identifications have been shown to be unreliable because individuals have an unintentional tendency to less accurately identify members of other races. The idea that “all Chinese people look alike” or “all Caucasian people look alike” is not an entirely bogus thought.

Willie Grimes’ Story

I came upon a case of cross-race identification while listening to an episode (Episode 80: Photo, Hair, Fingerprint) of my favorite true crime podcast Criminal. In the year 1988, in Hickory, North Carolina, Willie Grimes was sentence to life in prison for raping and kidnapping a 69-year-old widow, Carrie Lee Elliot. Carrie Elliot was attacked in her own home where she was raped repeatedly.

She later described her attacker to police in the hospital: an African American man, around 35 years-old, 6-ft tall who wore a green shirt which he removed during the attack. Police put together 6 photographs of potential suspects which were shown to Carrie Elliot. All 6 were African American, and she identified a man. Carrie Elliot discussed this horrifying attack to her neighbor Linda. Linda told Carrie that she might know who did it but she will only tell it to the police. Carrie Elliot called police to tell them that she remembered her attacker had a mole on his face. Later that day, her neighbor Linda also called the police but before she gave a name of the person she suspected of the crime, she asked police if there was any reward money. Police confirmed that there was $1,000 reward. Few minutes later, she dropped by at the police station and told them that she had seen a man wearing a green shirt with a mole on his face and his name was Willie Grimes.

Grimes was charged with 2 counts of rape and kidnapping. At the initial hearing, Carrie Elliot was there to identify him. Grimes recounted that Carrie said, “I don’t know. That look like him over there”, when she was asked if she saw the man that attacked her in the courthouse. In July of 1988, Grimes’ trial began where 8 people testified that they had been with him that night and 4 people testified to his non-violent character. However, the prosecution had one piece of evidence that was apparently full-proof, which was a hair that was found on a fruit at Carrie Elliot’s home. But at that time, microscopic hair examination method was used, not DNA testing so upon examination there was no actual proof that it belonged to Willie Grimes but assumed that it belonged to someone of the same race. Also, fingerprint evidence collected from Carrie Elliot’s house did not match Willie Grimes, but police did not compare it with any other person, not even Carrie Elliot.

Decades later, the North Carolina Innocence Inquiry Commission organization agreed to take on Willie Grimes’ case. After uploading the fingerprints into the Automated Fingerprint Identification System, they found that the fingerprints matched a man named Albert Turner, who was also living around the neighborhood. Albert Turner’s photo was in the initial photograph line-up shown to Carrie Elliot. Both Albert and Willie’s photos were quite alike. It has since been 24 years, when Grimes was first brought in to the police station. Willie Grimes was 67 years old when he was finally found innocent of the crime.

You can read more about his story here on the North Carolina Center on Actual Innocence website. 

Thomas Haynesworth’s Story

Another case of false eyewitness testimony due to cross-race identification is that of wrongly convicted Thomas Haynesworth. His story was shown on Netflix's “The Innocence Files”. The story interested me as he was sentenced to prison for two counts of rape and one attempted robbery and abduction based on the testimony of the victims, who were all Caucasian (Haynesworth is African American), in which one of them identified him as he was walking down a street and believed he matched the memory of what her attacker looked like. Of course, there was no evidence that placed him at the crime scene. Haynesworth was aged 18 at the time with no criminal record when he was accused of a series of sexual assaults that took place over a month. The real perpetrator would continue attacking women while Thomas Haynesworth went to prison.

Later, police arrested Leon Davis, and the rapes immediately stopped. Police thought that Davis’ criminal activity started two to three months after Haynesworth’s crimes. However, a review of the cases was ordered and it was discovered that semen recovered from the victim of Haynesworth’s rape conviction matched Davis. An extensive investigation concluded that Davis was responsible for all the crimes attributed to Haynesworth. Even then, Haynesworth was repeatedly denied for parole. Eventually, Haynesworth was granted parole and was released from prison after serving 27 years!

The case was later argued before a three-member panel of the Court of Appeals and at the end of 2011, Haynesworth's name was cleared.

You can read more about his story here on the Innocence Project website. 

Adam Braseel’s Story

This is another story I came across while listening to Criminal podcast (Episode 133: Red Hair, Gold Car). Adam Braseel’s story has nothing to do with cross-race identification because everyone technically involved was white but it has something to do with mistaken identity through eyewitness testimony. In January of 2006, Malcolm Burrows, a 60-year-old white man was found bludgeoned to death nearby his home.

The incident started with a stranger visiting Burrows’ home with the reason that he had car trouble. Both of them left the compounds of the home to check on the car. The stranger came back without Burrows, entered the house and repeatedly struck his sister, Rebecca in the head. Her son Kirk, chased the man out of the house. Rebecca and his son told police later that the attacker had red hair and drove away in a gold car. A police sergeant found Malcolm lying face down on an off-trail nearby his home.

Adam Braseel was called up by the police after he was identified by neighbors. There were not many people in the neighborhood who had red hair, and Braseel was one of them. He also drove his mom’s small gold Honda. He was 22 years old at that time when he was charged with first degree murder, felony murder, aggravated assault and burglary. At first he couldn’t believe the circumstances but he always thought the truth was going to be revealed. There was no physical evidence whatsoever connecting him to the scene. The only connection he had was that two witnesses identified him, Malcolm Burrows’ sister Rebecca and her son Kirk. He was first identified through photographs shown by police and he was later identified in the courtroom during the trial. Rebecca pointed to him, “He’s right there!”

Then something fishy happened, Sergeant Mike Brown who was first at the scene and found Burrows’ body was not called to testify during his trial. A different sergeant, Troy Brown from a different county was called to testify who knew very little and had nothing to do with the case. The jury found Braseel guilty after deliberating for 3 hours. He was convicted at age 24 and sentenced to life in prison. He was not eligible for parole for 51 years. In his interview with Criminal, he told the host that he still felt hopeful when he was convicted, thinking that eventually the truth will come out because he had no prior history of violence, no motive, no confession, and no alibi and he maintained innocence. He was solely convicted based on identification by the victims of a photo line-up of 8 men, not all mugshots of the people had red hair – one of them was Braseel’s. In January 2016, he was released from prison after 8 years to wait for a new trial. He was then sent back to prison later in that year. After repeated appeals of his innocence and further investigation found that fingerprint evidence taken from the car matched a person named Kermit Bryson who also has red hair and his girlfriend drove a gold colored vehicle. They looked similar. The evidence was clear. At 36, he was finally a free man.

You can read more about his story here on Knox News. 

Do You Remember That Time When?

So what do these stories all have in common – besides the mini circus of what we call the criminal justice system? The fallible nature of eyewitness testimony. It is actually quite common for people to think that eyewitness testimony is such a convincing form of evidence. The simple reason is that people choose to believe in things which they feel strongly about, and often what people feel strongly about is things in which we see with our own two eyes. We trust our own perception and experience of the world around us.

What people fail to understand is that being convinced of something does not make it accurate. Our memory after an incident, especially a traumatic one often is vulnerable to distortion. Other senses are heightened when trying to escape an attack that usually details of an attacker’s face, body shape or height are not registered into our long-term memory. Stress and fear can actually inhibit memory formation. I have actually written something about panic in my previous post “Panic Buying – Consumer Behavior” and how the human body reacts in response to danger as part of the ‘fight-or-flight’ response. Panic causes people to have perceptual blinkers and revert to their instinct. It also erases short-term memory. Stress and fear often cause people to repress their memory, a form of motivated forgetting. I believe it is quite common for people to not remember traumatic and stressful events, in comparison with events which were more joyful and celebratory. However, this theory is still controversial because sometimes people do remember traumatic events because of its distinctiveness. 

Let me ask you this: Imagine if you were a female victim of a snatch-theft incident in which a person riding a motorcycle snatched your handbag away on the side of the road, would you remember the person’s license plate? Would you remember the details of the person’s face? Would you remember the model of the motorcycle? Most people won’t be able to remember all three details clearly or accurately. And when you file a police report later, you might give details in which you only assumed to be true.

Human memory is not a video recorder. Of course, we are biased to notice, exaggerate, minimize and even overlook details. Despite all these cases of wrongful convictions and mistaken identifications, why does the criminal justice system continue to put faith in eyewitness testimony? Well, eyewitness testimony is the easiest and most crucial first step in any kind of investigation. Through eyewitness testimony, investigators are able to collect more information on top of the physical evidence present at a crime scene and may provide investigators with a timeline of events. Eyewitness testimony may paint a picture of the probable motive and actions of a suspect for the investigators. In the absence of physical evidence, eyewitness testimony becomes the integral part of an investigation.

Therefore, it is an obligation and duty for law enforcement to continue to develop and improve on techniques and recommend reforms in how eyewitness testimony is gathered as evidence. And of course, the judiciary system also hold a crucial role as a gatekeeper of evidence that can be used against the accused. I couldn’t get any statistics on wrongful convictions based on mistaken eyewitness identifications or memory distortion in Malaysia. However, according to the Innocence Project (an independent organization in the US offering representation and counsel to clients seeking help post-conviction), a staggering approximate 69% of more than 375 wrongful convictions in the US overturned by post-conviction DNA evidence is traced back to mistaken eyewitness identifications. This happens all around the world, including in Malaysia.

So, be careful of what you think you saw or heard and be careful of what you say you remember.

 

Thanks for reading!

MY.

References

Cherry, K. (August 1, 2020). False Memories. Very Well Mind. Retrieved from https://www.verywellmind.com/what-is-a-false-memory-2795193

Chew, S. L. (August 20, 2018). Myth: Eyewitness Testimony is the Best Kind of Evidence. Association for Psychological Science. Retrieved from https://www.psychologicalscience.org/teaching/myth-eyewitness-testimony-is-the-best-kind-of-evidence.html

Cox, S. (May 2014). The Reykjavik Confessions. BBC News. Retrieved from https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/resources/idt-sh/the_reykjavik_confessions

Judge, P. (December 1, 2017). Photo, Hair, Fingerprint (Episode 80). In Criminal. PRX Radiotopia. Link to episode: https://thisiscriminal.com/episode-80-photo-hair-fingerprint-12-1-2017

Judge, P. (February 7, 2020). Red Hair, Gold Car (Episode 133). In Criminal. PRX Radiotopia. Link to episode: https://thisiscriminal.com/episode-133-red-hair-gold-car

Mannion, C. (April 20, 2020). Who Is Thomas Haynesworth And Why Was He Wrongfully Convicted For The Crimes Of A Serial Rapist? Oxygen. Retrieved from https://www.oxygen.com/true-crime-buzz/netflix-the-innocence-files-thomas-haynesworth-virginia

Passer, M. W. & Smith, R. E. (2004). Psychology: The Science of Mind and Behavior. (2^nd ed.). McGraw-Hill.

The Innocence Project. Retrieved from https://innocenceproject.org/