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Unreliable admissions to homicide
A case of misdiagnosis of amnesia and misuse of abreaction technique
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 03 January 2018
Abstract
The past decade has witnessed a recognition that unsafe criminal convictions may be occasioned by unreliable confessions.
To present a case which illustrates the dangers of using abreaction interview techniques in a legal context and demonstrate the relevance of the memory distrust syndrome to an unsafe confession to murder.
We undertook a detailed assessment of a person appealing against his original murder conviction/the appellant’, and a careful scrutiny of all the relevant papers in the case.
The appellant served 25 years in prison before his conviction was quashed as ‘unsafe’ on the basis of fresh psychological and psychiatric evidence.
Amnesia for an offence had been misdiagnosed, and the use of repeated abreaction interviews had further confused both the appellant and the original court. At the Appeal Court, the advice was that the man had experienced a form of source amnesia which resulted in an unreliable confession.
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- Copyright
- Copyright © 1999 The Royal College of Psychiatrists
Footnotes
Declaration of interest
All three authors were instructed as expert witnesses at the Appeal Court. There was no further involvement of the authors in legal proceedings or advice. The appellant's signed consent to publication was obtained after he had read a longer version of this paper.
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