Summary Of Dr. Elizabeth Loftus Witness For The Defense

With the help of Katherine Ketcham, Dr. Elizabeth Loftus wrote Witness for the Defense: The Accused, the Eyewitness, and the Expert Who Puts Memory on Trial to speak out for all of the victims of false accusations in the justice system making readers think twice before putting someone in jail for life. It puts the injustices of memory into perspective. Loftus is an expert witness in court cases where there is no sufficient evidence against the convict other than that of eyewitness testimony. She speaks to the falsities of memory as a psychology expert. This advocate has worked for the defense of convicts from Ted Bundy to lesser known mistakes such as Howard Haupt. Her goal is to keep innocent people out of jail as anyone can be accused;

In one case that Loftus became involved in, the case of Tony Herrerez, a mother questioned her daughter, Katie, for over a month about her camp counselor Tony. She asked if Tony had touched her or made her watch ‘bad’ movies. Eventually, Katie agreed and Tony was charged with sexual abuse. The only evidence against him was the word of five year old Katie and another child who came forward after Katie’s mother had mentioned it. Both of these children took the stand, but with no other evidence Tony was found innocent. (Pages 127- 155) Why would two young girls say such horrendous things about their friendly counselor? A simple answer: storage failure. Interference is the process in which new memories interfere with the storage of other memories. Katie held the memory of watching a funny movie at camp with her friends until her mother started mixing other ideas in with it. For weeks, she would ask her daughter about inappropriate moments with Tony until one day the memories intermixed. Katie was not lying, she honestly thought that Tony had done awful; things to her. It is hard not to believe an emotional child, but the fact stands that Tony was innocent and did not deserve to go to prison. Witness for the Defense is filled with these themes; Chunking, interference, and decay are all factors in memory that make Loftus’ job so difficult. In class, this book

It lead readers into the dark side of the justice system. The stories of Tony Herrerez and Steve Titus can stick with any person and let the world know that no system is perfect, but should be. Memory itself is far from perfect. So many things can wrong in the hands of a person’s memory, the problem is that most humans are not aware of them.. Any of the stages can be altered from encoding to retrieval. Loftus knows better than anyone this fact, so to her attackers she says, “If it were your life…would you be content to call it a mistake?” (Page 12) Assumably, nobody would answer “Yes!” to this question, proving Loftus’