On 9 Feb 2005, Claudia Stanny wrote: > I was surprised to learn that the primary witness in the recently > adjudicated Shanley case involved a victim with a recovered memory of > abuse. Until I heard that Elizabeth Loftus was involved with the trial, I > had assumed that the victims in this case had continuous recollections of > their abuse. However, I was not able to find any information about the > circumstances of the memory recovery. In the snippet of testimony I heard > on the radio, it sounded like it might have been a spontaneous recovery > rather than something extracted from extended (and potentially suggestive) > therapeutic work. Anybody have more details on this? Three other victims > were dropped from the case. Were their recollections also recovered memories?
Here's an issue that doesn't seem to have been raised. One motive for claiming recovery of memories of abuse is to circumvent statute of limitation laws. If a victim continously remembered abuse over a long period of time, and, for example 15 years later decided to accuse, such a law might prevent prosecution. However, I believe that some courts have decided that this doesn't apply in cases of recovered memory, when the clock only starts ticking from the time of the allleged recovery. So when the abuse was many years earlier, there's a powerful motive to claim that the memory was repressed and only recently recovered. I did some googling to see whether this was an issue in the Shanley case. It turns out it's not, because although the allegations go back many years, apparently the clock also stops (in Massachusetts, at least) when the person leaves the state, as Shanley did. So his criminal prosecution did not contravene the statute of limitation law. Consequently, there was no motive to invent a recovered memory in this trial. It's also of interest that the prosecution apparently made much of the fact that the accuser had already won $500,000 in civil court, so there was no financial gain to his appearing in criminal court against Shanley. I dug a bit deeper, and found something interesting. It turns out that in the civil case which preceded, statute of limitation _did_ apply, and had the accuser not alleged recovery of repressed memory, civil prosecution would have been impossible. Half a million dollars is a pretty big incentive for claiming repressed memory. Once invoked, it would be necessary to continue to maintain this claim in the criminal trial which followed, even if it wasn't needed there. Given that there's other evidence that Shanley was capable of the abuse, I'd think it likely that the abuse happened and the accuser always remembered it. But without alleging recovery of repressed memories, there would have been no civil suit and hence no big payout. Is there any way to distinguish a person who repressed and then recovered memories from one who always remembered them but falsely says he repressed them? I don't think so. My source for the information on criminal/civil Shanley trials and statute of limitations is the Boston Globe, January 17/05 at: http://tinyurl.com/6l8oz Stephen ___________________________________________________ Stephen L. Black, Ph.D. tel: (819) 822-9600 ext 2470 Department of Psychology fax: (819) 822-9661 Bishop's University e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Lennoxville, QC J1M 1Z7 Canada Dept web page at http://www.ubishops.ca/ccc/div/soc/psy TIPS discussion list for psychology teachers at http://faculty.frostburg.edu/psyc/southerly/tips/index.htm _______________________________________________ --- You are currently subscribed to tips as: [email protected] To unsubscribe send a blank email to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
