Opinion ID: 729726
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: Reliability of the Offered Testimony

Text: 65 We have examined both the evidence and the literature presented to the district court and conclude that both support the defendants' offer of proof. In particular, the district court made reference to a recent article by Stephen J. Ceci and Maggie Bruck, Suggestibility of Child Witnesses: A Historical Review and Synthesis, 113 Psychological Bulletin 403-439 (1993), which reviews the research and writing on the subject and supports the view that the very matters observed and testified to by Dr. Underwager can produce biased, untrue or false memories in children, and more particularly young children. Almost all the other literature presented to the court is consistent with the Ceci-Bruck article. 66 The Ceci-Bruck article does not state that young children should not testify but observes that many common interviewing practices can produce an altered memory. Among other things, the article documents adequate research indicating the following: 67 1. A subject's, particularly a child's, original verbal answers are better remembered than the actual events themselves, yes-no questioning leads to more error, and young children are particularly vulnerable to coaching and leading questions. Id. at 406-09. 68 A review of the record here reveals the children were asked entirely leading questions in court. Even though the children testified by television outside the presence of defendants, the prosecutor asked suggestive questions. Not only did the questions call only for yes or no answers, the children were asked only if they remembered reporting abuse to law enforcement officers, doctors, and their therapist, rather than whether they remembered the alleged abuse itself. 69 The questioning at trial represents a highly questionable aspect of testifying about an event. This is exactly what Dr. Underwager described in his offer of proof. 70 2. Children desire to comply or cooperate with the respected authority figure interviewer and will attempt to make answers consistent with what they see as the intent of the questioner rather than consistent with their knowledge of the event even if the question is bizarre. Id. at 418-19. Interviewer bias can skew results as a child will often attempt to reflect the interviewer's interpretation of events, particularly when more than one interviewer shares the same presuppositions. Id. at 422. If the interviewer's original perception is incorrect, this can lead to high levels of inaccurate recall. 71 Here, these children were taken from their homes on the basis of a five-year-old's statements, and were placed under the sole supervision and influences of Donna Jordan, Jean Brock, and Ellen Kelson -- interviewers who had decided at the outset that all the children had been sexually abused. 72 The FBI agents were also strong authority figures -- the kind of high status interviewers described by Dr. Underwager -- with preconceived notions about the facts of this case, and they did not interview the children until after the children had been with Jordan for over a week. Agent Van Roe testified that he had explained his status as an FBI agent at the initial interview and told the children that an FBI agent was like a policeman on the reservation. Van Roe testified that Jean Brock and foster mother Donna Jordan remained in the room while FBI agents conducted the initial interviews of the children on January 19 and 21, 1994 -- over a week after the children were taken from their parents' homes, told by Jordan and Brock that this was because their uncles had done bad things to them, and put into the care of Jordan. 73 At this initial interview, R.R. handed investigator Hudspeth a group of papers which reflected things she had previously told foster mother Donna Jordan which Jordan had written down for her. Thus, agents received a frame of reference which could produce bias, even before the start of the interviews. 74 3. Repeated questions can produce a change of answers as the child may interpret the question as I must not have given the correct response the first time, and the child's answers may well become less accurate over time. Id. at 419-20. Repeated questioning of victims often results over time (or even within a single interview) in an inaccurate report. 75 A three-month hiatus existed from the time R.R. was taken from her home to the time of her complaints of sex abuse. These children were repeatedly questioned by Brock, Jordan, Kelson, doctors and law enforcement agents. By March 1994, the children's accounts of the familial sexual abuse were so skewed that the district court refused to admit these interviews into evidence. 76 4. Younger children are more susceptible to suggestibility than older children, especially in the context of stereotyping. Id. at 407, 417. Stereotypes organize memory, sometimes distorting what is perceived by adding thematically congruent information that was not perceived, and stereotype formation interacts with suggestive questioning to a greater extent for younger rather than older children. Id. at 416-17. Studies have shown children are particularly susceptible to an interviewer's bad man stereotype, and when repeatedly told the actor is a bad man, they may construct a false account of an event often embellished with perceptual details in keeping with the stereotype. Id. 77 Here, various persons told the children from the beginning that the defendants were bad and that it would not be safe to go home until the defendants were gone. The children remained isolated from their families and community. 13 The bad man-uncle theme was replayed again and again, including at trial. 14 In addition, the children testified via closed circuit television based on their fear of defendants. While closed circuit television, other security procedures at the courthouse, and disallowing the children to see any family members before the trial did not amount to trial error, those procedures served to reinforce the children's bad men stereotype of their uncles, the defendants. 78 5. The use of anatomical dolls or sexually explicit materials will not necessarily provide reliable evidence as children may be encouraged to engage in sexual play with dolls, etc., even if the child has not been sexually abused, and further no normative data exists on non-abused children's use of dolls. See id. at 423-25. 79 The second law enforcement (January 21) interview took place at the United States Attorney's Office with the Assistant United States Attorney present. The children saw an anatomical drawing of a penis. Later, Kelson utilized play therapy and art media, and apparently dream journals. Dr. Underwager testified that exposing children to these materials suggests to them that the authority figure wants information about sex. 80 6. [A] major conclusion is that contrary to the claims of some, children sometimes lie when the motivational structure is tilted toward lying. Id. at 433. Patterns of bribes for disclosures, implied threats in nondisclosures, or insinuations that peers have already told investigators of suspects' abusive behavior are highly suggestive. Id. at 423. Children will lie for personal gain, and material and psychological rewards need not be of a large magnitude to be effective. Id. 81 Here, the children were promised picnics, vacations and even a chance to return home as a reward for their truthful, successful testimony at trial. They were told they could not go home until their uncles had been successfully removed. Experts are critical of this kind of reward as bribing children to admit abuse or give abuse-consistent answers, such as promising to end the interview, or giving them other tangible rewards. Such techniques affect the accuracy of children's reports. 82 7. Dr. Underwager testified regarding the concept of cross-germination among the children. Children in studies and in actual cases have shown that peer pressure or interaction with other children has effects on the accuracy of their reporting: they will provide an inaccurate response when other children have already told in order to go along with a peer group or be part of the crowd. See id. at 423; see also Stephen J. Ceci, Jeopardy in the Courtroom: A Scientific Analysis of Children's Testimony 146-50 (American Psych. Assoc. 1st ed. 1995). In several cases where convictions have been overturned, children were shown to have talked with one another about the abuse, sometimes even siblings questioned siblings to get them to open up or provide incriminating evidence. Id. at 150-51. 83 As mentioned above, Kelson reported that she talked to the group in talk circle; that the group seemed to have discussed an agenda among themselves each week and that T.R. was the ringleader. Testimony at trial reflects that Jordan, Kelson, and FBI agents spoke to and questioned the children in groups about the abuse. 84 The Ceci-Bruck article's summary relating to interviewing of children stated: 85 The studies on interviewing provide evidence that suggestibility effects are influenced by the dynamics of the interview itself, the knowledge or beliefs possessed by the interviewer (especially one who is unfamiliar with the child), the emotional tone of the questioning, and the props used. Children attempt to be good conversational partners by complying with what they perceive to be the belief of their questioner. Their perceptions, and thus their suggestibility, may be influenced by subtle aspects of the interview such as the repetition of yes-no questions, but their compliance is evidenced most fully in naturalistic interview situations in which the interviewer is allowed to question the child freely; this gives the child the evidence to make the necessary attributions about the purposes of the interview and about the intents and beliefs of the interviewer. 86 Observations of interactions in the legal arena highlight the fact that children who testify in court are not interviewed in sterile conditions such as those found in many of the experiments we have reviewed. They are usually questioned repeatedly within and across sessions, sometimes about an ambiguous event by a variety of interviewers, each with their own agenda and beliefs. Children are sometimes interviewed formally and informally for many months preceding an official law-enforcement interview with anatomical dolls, providing an opportunity for the child to acquire scripted and stereotypical knowledge about what might have occurred. 87 Id. at 425. The authors conclude with these comments: 88 Our review of the literature indicates that children can indeed be led to make false or inaccurate reports about very crucial, personally experienced, central events. 89 . . . . 90 Therefore, it is of the utmost importance to examine the conditions prevalent at the time of a child's original report about a criminal event in order to judge the suitability of using that child as a witness in the court. It seems particularly important to know the circumstances under which the initial report of concern was made, how many times the child was questioned, the hypotheses of the interviewers who questioned the child, the kinds of questions the child was asked, and the consistency of the child's report over a period of time. If the child's disclosure was made in a nonthreatening, nonsuggestible atmosphere, if the disclosure was not made after repeated interviews, if the adults who had access to the child prior to his or her testimony are not motivated to distort the child's recollections through relentless and potent suggestions and outright coaching, and if the child's original report remains highly consistent over a period of time, then the young child would be judged to be capable of providing much that is forensically relevant. The absence of any of these conditions would not in and of itself invalidate a child's testimony, but it ought to raise cautions in the mind of the court. 91 Id. at 432-33. 92 Other psychological research and writing supports the Ceci-Bruck article and Dr. Underwager's offer of proof. See, e.g., Maryland v. Craig, 497 U.S. 836, 868-69 (1990) (Scalia, J., dissenting) (detailing injustice caused by erroneous testimony of children who were separated from their parents for months and repeatedly interrogated and noting [s]ome studies show that children are substantially more vulnerable to suggestion than adults, and often unable to separate recollected fantasy (or suggestion) from reality); Lindsay & Johnson, Reality Monitoring and Suggestibility: Children's Ability to Discriminate Among Memories From Different Sources, in Children's Eyewitness Memory 92 (S. Ceci, M. Toglia, & D. Ross eds. 1987); Christiansen, The Testimony of Child Witnesses: Fact, Fantasy, and the Influence of Pretrial Interviews, 62 Wash. L. Rev. 705, 708-711 (1987); Debbie Nathan, Justice in Wenatchee, N.Y. Times, Dec. 19, 1995, at A19 (testimony of children increasingly being discredited in sex-abuse cases; children who have not been abused sometimes re-enact purported sexual trauma with anatomically detailed dolls or adopt fantasies complete with visceral details when prompted; videotaped pretrial interviews in some cases have helped prompt jurors to acquit defendants); Daniel Goleman, Studies Reveal Suggestibility of Very Young as Witnesses, N. Y. Times, June 11, 1993, at A1. 93 Indeed, the prosecutor's child abuse expert, Tascha Boychuk of the Child's Advocacy Center, Phoenix, Arizona, who testified at a pretrial hearing stated, [i]f the question is can a child's memory be falsified, certainly the probability and the likelihood is yes. We see situations of that. Yes. 94 The reality of children's susceptibility to suggestive interview practices is well-established in the literature and the necessary analysis is beyond the ken of a non-professional. 15 The expert's foundation related the coercive factors that can influence testimony. The defense provided the court with an abundance of literature supporting the expert's explanation relating to the existence of coercive factors in this case. Yet the court declined to allow the testimony. 95