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Expertise
or junk science?
Prof puts psychiatric testimony on trial
By Hope Green
As the state attorney for Dade County, Fla., during the 1980s, Janet Reno rose to fame for her leadership in several well-publicized cases of alleged child abuse. Her pioneering methods, which included videotaping therapists’ interviews with children, became a model for abuse prosecutions around the country.
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| Margaret Hagen wants to promote rational discussion of how psychology should be used in the legal system. Photo by Kalman Zabarsky | |
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But after some of Reno’s cases fell apart, including one in which
a 14-year-old boy was put in prison for two years and then acquitted,
mental health professionals and legal experts began to question if the
real abuse was happening in the courts. Among these critics is Margaret
Hagen, a CAS professor of psychology and author of the controversial 1997
book Whores of the Court: The Fraud of Psychiatric Testimony and the Rape
of American Justice. The book questions the use of psychological professionals
in criminal trials of every kind -- including child custody, murder, and
workplace discrimination, as well as child and adult sexual abuse.
“It is the psychologists,” Hagen writes in a section on child
abuse trials, “who make unsubstantiated assertions about the vulnerability
of children, the innocence of children, their veracity, and their invulnerability
to suggestion or coercion. . . . When we admit into our courts as experts
those whose main claim to professional expertise is their admittedly antiscientific
intuition guided by a psychopolitical mythology with intellectual foundations
akin to tea leaf reading, the concept of expert opinion becomes a farce
indeed.”
Hagen aims to promote rational discussion of psychology and the law in
a one-day conference at BU entitled Expert Testimony and Justice Gone
Astray: Trauma, Memory, and Child Sexual Abuse. Participants in the November
1 program -- intended for an audience of psychologists, counselors, social
workers, attorneys, and law enforcement personnel -- will explore such
topics as the appropriate use of expert witnesses, the role of rumor and
hysteria in the creation of false memories, and what can be done about
wrongful child abuse convictions.
“I’m all for fighting crime,” Hagen says. “I just
want the real criminals behind bars and the innocent people outside.”
Hagen first became skeptical of expert testimony from psychiatrists, psychologists,
and other mental health professionals in 1993, when one of her brothers
prevailed after being accused in a recovered memory lawsuit. A woman in
her early 30s claimed that she had repressed and recently recovered the
memory of him forcing her to perform fellatio on him two decades earlier,
on several occasions over a period of six years, and that the abuse was
now causing her to suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder.
Watching the parade of experts brought in to testify at the trial, Hagen
was appalled. “I listened to mental health experts of different
types, an unlicensed counselor, an anger management consultant, and a
licensed clinical psychologist, and they all said the same thing: repressed
memory had surfaced in therapy and that man over there is the perpetrator.
How could they know that?”
Hagen’s brother was acquitted, but the suit “absolutely changed
my perception of what psychology was doing in the legal system.”
In her research and writing, she has championed the cause of eliminating
all psychiatric testimony and what she calls “junk science”
from courtrooms.
With regard to child abuse lawsuits, Hagen attacks what she calls “the
extraordinary empowerment of the self-styled child expert” in whom
police, prosecutors, and judges have put their faith. One example she
cites is the 1986 case against the Fells Acres Day School in Malden, Mass.
A pediatric nurse convinced prosecutors that abuse allegations by a large
group of preschoolers were trustworthy and should be presented to a jury.
The case went forward on that basis, and Gerald Amirault was sentenced
to 30 to 40 years in jail on multiple rape and molestation charges. His
mother and sister also were found guilty but were released after eight
years in prison.
Children who attended the Amiraults’ family day care center claimed,
among other things, that they were taken to a secret room where they were
sodomized, molested by a flame-throwing clown, forced to eat a dead frog,
and threatened by a robot with flashing lights if they did not surrender
to their abusers. Upon cross-examination, the children said they had
rehearsed their testimony.
Critics such as Hagen argue that the pediatric nurse coached the children
intensively when she interviewed them.
“The interrogations were so extremely tainted,” Hagen says,
“that it was almost like a field study of how to produce false testimony
from children.”
To demonstrate how adults can be misled in their zeal to punish abusers,
Hagen cites a famous study by a McGill University psychologist. In the
experiment, researchers videotaped a number of children being examined
by a physician who did no more than tickle their feet, listen to their
heart, and tie ribbons lightly around each child’s wrist. The children
were fully clothed for the entire session. Afterward they were given an
anatomically correct doll and asked, in a series of interviews, to report
on what had happened.
In 40 percent of the cases, when asked where the doctor had touched them,
the children responded by pointing to the doll’s private parts.
One girl said the doctor had put a stick in her vagina and tied the ribbon
tightly around her neck.
Psychological professionals often base their testimony on interviews like
these, Hagen says, while the popular belief persists that children are
incapable of lying about such horrendous acts.
“We need to incorporate the knowledge into our institutions so that
if you’re a child or if you’re the prosecutor or the jury,
you know that the interviewing will be done in ways that are not suggestive,
that it will be videotaped, that the child won’t be traumatized,
but neither will an innocent person be convicted on the basis of unreliable
testimony.”
Too often, Hagen says, juries are ready to believe mental health professionals
and social workers claiming they can recognize an abused child because
they have met with so many victims in their clinical practice. “That’s
like a teacher who says, ‘I just know when a student plagiarizes
because I’ve been teaching for 20 years.’ You can’t
make such an accusation without something to back it up.”
Experimental developments in clinical psychology, and knowledge of how
the brain works, can provide useful insight in criminal trials, Hagen
says, but psychiatric testimony has no place in a court of law. What drives
her in her research and teaching is not only a quest for justice, she
says, but also “a desire to purge the field of psychology of the
junk science that drags it down and trivializes it.”
A family law attorney, a public defender, an investigative journalist,
and an anthropologist who has written a book on traumatic memory are among
the eight speakers Hagen has invited to speak at the conference, along
with four clinical and forensic psychologists.
“The conference is about how to do better evaluations and better
prosecutions,” Hagen says. “It’s meant to decrease the
number of false convictions, increase the number of reliable convictions,
and improve the quality of the contributions of psychologists to the justice
system. We have got to educate everyone about the limits of psychiatric
knowledge, and when psychiatric experts go beyond the boundaries of what
we reliably know, judges have got to start stepping in and saying, ‘I
won’t have that low level of expert testimony in my courtroom.’”
Expert Testimony and Justice Gone Astray: Trauma, Memory, and Child Sexual Abuse will be held on Friday, November 1, in the George Sherman Union basement student conference room. The daylong program, which offers continuing education credits, begins with registration at 8 a.m.; panel discussions start at 8:30 a.m. For more information or to register in advance, call 617-522-0705, e-mail kbegert846@aol.com, or visit www.bu.edu/features/special/educationplus.html.
25 October 2002
Boston University
Office of University Relations