Priest's Accuser Breaks Down on Witness Stand
Posted on Thu Jan 27, 2005 at 05:46:50 PM EST
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There was a Perry Mason-type moment* in the trial of defrocked Priest Paul Shanley in Boston today, as the accuser broke down on the witness stand, multiple times, and then begged the judge not to make him return tomorrow.
The accuser is not under subpoena, so if he doesn't show to complete the cross-examination, a mistrial will be requested by the defense.
This case is a repressed or recovered memory case in which the accuser suddenly remembered, 20 years later, that he was abused after reading about allegations of others, including some of his classmates, in the news. He immediately hooked up with a personal injury lawyer and settled for $500,000. Tough cross-examination is a necessity in the case. Cross- examination has been called the greatest engine ever invented for ferreting out untruths in the courtroom. (Wigmore on Evidence)
No reputable psychological, scientific or medical organization endorses repressed memories. Or the theory that trauma causes children who were repetitively sexually abused to somehow block out the memory years and years. (At most, some say they can't for sure rule it out.)
As I said on the Abrams Report the other night (available on Lexis.com):
ABRAMS: It`s the kind of case, Jeralyn, where defense attorneys, kind of a defense attorney`s dream, (UNINTELLIGIBLE)?
JERALYN MERRITT, CRIMINAL DEFENSE ATTORNEY: I think so. You have got one witness. You don`t have any corroboration, and let`s face it, repressed memories have come under a lot of fire in recent years. Memory is not like a video recorder. It changes over time. And it`s affected by things such as what you hear other people discussing, what you read in the newspapers. And it may well be that he imagined these things happening and then he came to believe that they really happened to him. But it is going to be a tough road to prove it to a jury beyond a reasonable doubt.
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* A Perry Mason moment is when the witness breaks and confesses to the crime the defendant is charged with, or admits he lied about something very significant. In this case, that didn't happen, so we're calling the breakdown only a "Perry Mason-type Moment."
* Most people who were sexually abused as children remember all or part of what happened to them although they may not fully understand or disclose it." American Psychological Association, Working Group on Investigation of Memories of Child Abuse, 1996.
More on Recovered or False Memory syndrome is here. A more scholarly version by memory expert Elizabeth Loftus is here.
A good Guardian article is here .
The American Psychological Association (APA) now takes the line that most people who were sexually abused as children remember all or part of what happened to them, and that it is rare (though not unheard of) that people forget such emotionally charged events and later recover them. But it states that, "Concerning the issue of a recovered versus a pseudomemory, like many questions in science, the final answer is yet to be known." And the debate simmers on. Several new lines of evidence suggest that the interaction between memory and emotion is more complex than was thought. Powerful emotions, it seems, can both reinforce and weaken real memories. We may be able to actively degrade painful memories. And false memories, once accepted, can themselves elicit strong emotions and thereby mimic real ones.
Update: Dahlia Lathwick at Slate takes a neutral approach that is well worth reading. I agree with her that the case is likely to turn more on the accuser's motives than his memory.
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