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  A Trip down Memory Lane

By Eileen McNamara
Boston Globe [Cambridge MA]
January 30, 2005

The Cambridge courtroom in which Paul R. Shanley is being tried for the rape and sexual abuse of a child will become a political forum as well as a judicial arena this week when testimony turns to the reliability of human memory.

The tears of the now 27-year-old accuser during his testimony last week against the defrocked Catholic priest were no more than a manipulation by an avaricious charlatan, according to the defense, which wants the jury to dismiss as junk science the notion that people can forget traumatic events. Those tears were no less than a manifestation of the pain of a little boy who was molested for years by a trusted parish priest, according to the prosecution, which wants the jury to believe that the sexual abuse scandal in the Archdiocese of Boston triggered his long-dormant memories.

It is hard to think of a topic that incites more passion and less insight than the often-ugly public debate about the role of memory in sexual abuse cases. That science has yet to definitively explain the mysteries of how the mind stores and retrieves our memories has not made partisans more humble in their view; it has only fueled their fury to debunk the opposition. The Shanley case is unlikely to settle the matter.

Prominent on the witness list for the defense is the memory researcher whom Psychology Today magazine once dubbed "the diva of disclosure." Elizabeth Loftus is a professor of psychology and social behavior at the University of California at Irvine whose research on the malleability of memory first called into question the reliability of eyewitness accounts of crime and accident scenes. She is better known, however, as a best-selling author and a busy expert witness called by defendants in sexual abuse cases to discredit the legitimacy of claims of "repressed" or "recovered" memories.

The problem in the courtroom as well as the laboratory is how loaded those words have become politically, the scientifically neutral question they raise about the function of memory hijacked by the well meaning and the self-serving alike. The phenomenon of recalling previously unremembered incidents of abuse is itself put on trial, the defendant and accuser reduced to onlookers.

It is not enough for the defense to argue that Shanley's accuser is motivated by greed. That argument is undermined by the fact that the $500,000 settlement he received from the Boston Archdiocese did not require him to pursue criminal charges. Several other accusers, some of whom received larger settlements, did not. The defense needs to convince the jury that he manufactured his memories to cash in on the scandal.

Loftus can be expected to testify about her research that casts doubt on the validity of repressed memories but she is unlikely to argue -- she never has before -- that such repression is impossible. There is too much anecdotal evidence to the contrary. The case against James R. Porter comes to mind. The now-defrocked Catholic priest pleaded guilty in 1993 to 41 counts of the sexual abuse of scores of children between 1960 and 1967. Prosecutors suspect the number of his victims is higher, the church having transferred him out of state in response to the complaints against him.

Porter would never have been stopped had one of his victims, Frank Fitzpatrick Jr., not suffered flashbacks of the abuse in 1989. When he telephoned Porter, then living in Minnesota, to confront the former priest about what he remembered having happened to him as a 12-year-old boy in North Attleboro, Porter confessed. Published accounts of Fitzpatrick's flashbacks triggered similar memories in other men and women who had been victimized as children by the pedophile priest all across Southeastern Massachusetts.

The science of memory is in its nascent stage. It deserves vigorous debate. But the question confronting the Shanley jury is at once more prosaic and more profound. Did the prosecution prove that the specific memories of this particular young man are true?

 
 

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