Toronto Pastor’s Indecency Trial Hears Testimony about Fallibility of Memories

The Chronicle-Herald
November 21, 2016

http://thechronicleherald.ca/canada/1417437-video-toronto-pastor%E2%80%99s-indecency-trial-hears-testimony-about-fallibility-of-memories

The Brent Hawkes trial is hearing testimony today on the nature and fallibility of memory.

Timothy Moore, chair of the psychology department at York University’s Glendon College, told the judge that memories are by nature “constructive and reconstructive.”

Moore says people often recall events differently, and time “can alter or change or misdirect the nature of” memories.

He says it is well-known liquor can impair memories, and an alcoholic blackout can lead to their fragmentation and to assumptions that could be conflated with actual memories.

Hawkes is accused of performing sex acts on a teenage boy more than 40 years ago when he was a teacher in his mid-20s in Nova Scotia’s Annapolis Valley.

Last week, the prominent Toronto pastor denied the allegations of indecent assault and gross indecency in a courtroom in Kentville, N.S.

Last Tuesday, a man testified that Hawkes led him down a hallway during a drunken get-together at his trailer in Greenwood, N.S., and forced oral sex on him in a bedroom.