Innocence Imprisoned: The Impact of False Memories

False Memories: Addressing the Malleability of the Human Mind

Each day, an estimated 200 people are accused of criminal activity in the United States alone. In the course of a year, that adds up to roughly 75,000 individuals who have no choice but to take their chances against America’s judicial system. Although the greater majority of that mass could very well be guilty of the alleged crimes, it is important to recognize that thousands of innocent individuals are wrongly accused. The reality of these false accusations is harsh; each year, an unfortunate number of people are imprisoned for crimes that they never committed. In the most inequitable of these cases, innocence becomes subject to incarceration for a crime that never even occurred in the first place. Unless a brain can recall a memory each day with clarity, it relies on confidence as a signal of accuracy to fill in the remaining pieces to create a false testimony.

Elizabeth Loftus puts the malleability of memory into perspective, and describes the plausible causes of false memory as well as the toll it can take on the innocent. Memories come and go with time, fading away when left untouched just to be penciled in again when revisited days, weeks or even years later – until the next recall. Often times, the details of a memory tend to change and the story can even transform one completely unlike the original. In the 1970’s, Loftus performed a study to analyze the effect that introducing false details about a specific memory to people would have on their recall of that event. Loftus found that when erroneous details about an event were presented to people, their personal recollections of that event became distorted. From these findings, Loftus was able to conclude that human memory is susceptible to manipulation by