CORRUPTED MEMORY

Abstract

[...]she has used what she has learned to testify as an expert witness in hundreds of criminal cases - Pacely's washer 101st - informing juries that memories are pliable and that eyewitness accounts are far from perfect recordings of actual events. In July last year, the New Jersey Supreme Court issued a ruling - based largely on her findings - that jurors should be alerted to the imperfect nature of memory and the fal- libility of eyewitness testimony as standard pro- cedure. Loftus was casting about for a meaningful way to study memory and get funding when a former Stanford engineer working for the US Department of Transportation said that his employer would probably pay for research into car accidents.