-[ Quoting William Elliot , to Dennis Menard ]-
 DM> Tucker.  Cute little murderess; Texas, of course; killed hubby with a
 DM> pick-axe; found guilty and convicted; sent to death-row; found Christ
 DM> ... now a big lobby to set her free.  She's a woman after all; and a
 DM> Christian to boot.
 WE> Indeed, she has been saved by Christ, now has she not. -)
:)  Perhaps some will see her squirreled off to heaven, borne by six winged
angelic beings, on a column of holy smoke and faery fire.  :)
 WE> Statistics on murder are racialy biased also.  Black murder of white
 WE> the most likely for convection.
Yes.
:(  As, according to 1995 statistics, the non-Hispanic black population of
the U.S. was only 12%, their almost unbelievable % over-representation with-
in the judicial/penal circuit does seem like some perverse fairytale, or the
dream of some racist fantasy, all right.
 WE> This is an aspect of our police that not so well know, I've heard
 WE> little. Police violence gets aired every so often, stories about
For several years now, I've been accumulating a collection of authenticated
instances with their follow-ups ... there are lots and, frequently, they are
irrefutably overt.  These are scary times we're living in.
 WE> These mind control tactics for false confessions remind me about
 WE> convictions based upon false memory syndrome evidence.  Have you heard
 WE> about this?  It's one of the latest rages in psychotherapy.
:(  Yes.  You may find the reference, below, of some interest:
-----
Curious to see just how difficult it is to muddle one's memories of reality
and fantasy, psychologists Henry L. Roediger III and Kathleen B. McDermott
of Washington University have been asking volunteers to remember words in
specially constructed lists. They have discovered they can make most people
remember--at least for a day--things that never happened. Scientific
American here offers a bare-bones version of an experiment described by
McDermott in the April 1996 issue of the Journal of Memory and Language, so
that readers can produce robust false memories in their friends and family
right in the convenience of the home.
[ I've removed description of the experiment for space considerations; do ]
[ look it up, though ... it's fascinating.                                ]
In her study of 40 subjects, McDermott found that on average each volunteer
correctly recalled fewer than 40 percent of the words read to them. But here
is the interesting part: the average participant also claimed to remember
hearing 57 percent of the unspoken target words associated with his or her
lists.
Varying the test to try to pin down the source of the effect, McDermott and
Roediger put aside the first list of words their human guinea pigs
remembered and made them start over. Given a second chance, the typical
subject proceeded to include even more false memories than before.
Other researchers had male and female assistants take turns reading each
successive word in the lists. Then the psychologists handed each test taker
a page of multiple-choice questions. The page listed, in random order, half
the words just read aloud plus the unspoken target words and a bunch of
completely unrelated terms. The questions were the same for each word in the
list: Did you hear this spoken? Who uttered it, a man or a woman--or don't
you remember? The result was alarming: not only did these intelligent people
often say they recalled hearing a target word that was never voiced, but
many also recollected which experimenter supposedly pronounced it.
It is not too hard to see why. Each list collects words that all have to do
with a target word. The longer a list, McDermott and Roediger discovered,
the more likely people are to falsely remember hearing its target. The
researchers hypothesize that as we hear the words "rest," "slumber" and
"doze," the web of neurons in our brain naturally fetches the word "sleep"
and adds it to our memories of those words actually heard. This simple
theory does not explain, however, why some lists--words associated with
"butterfly," for example--do not seem to produce false memories. Other
factors must be at work.
Although humdrum words in a five-minute test lack the emotional weight and
temporal distance of the traumatic, decade-old recollections at issue in
false-memory syndrome, McDermott says her findings should apply "to all
sorts of episodes ranging from minutes to the whole of one's life."
Psychologists consider all memories that last for more than about 30 seconds
to be "long-term" and thus susceptible to similar influences, McDermott
maintains. She notes that her subjects were motivated to be accurate and
knew that errors would be detected.
So, are you still confident about remembering that childhood argument?
Certain it isn't just a story your grandmother once told you? If so,
Scientific American wishes to remind you that you were planning to send in
the check for your subscription renewal today.
--Tim Beardsley in Washington, D.C.
-----
Aren't you glad that you live in these enlightened times?  :)
--
... Puns are bad, but poetry is verse.
-=- Blue Wave/QWK v2.12
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