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How Do We Forget
227 Forgetting This is exactly the sort of biased police lineup that Eyewitness Evidence: A Guide for Law Enforcement (U.S. Department of Justice, 1999) is designed to avoid. Based on research in memory and perception, this guide recommends that no suspect should stand out from all the others in a lineup, that witnesses should not assume that the real criminal is in the lineup, and that they should not be encouraged to “guess” when making an identification. © The New Yorker Collection 2006 Tom Cheney from Cartoonbank.com. All Rights Reserved. freed Charles Fain, who had been convicted of murder and spent almost 18 years on death row in Idaho (Bonner, 2001). Maryland officials approved $900,000 in compensation for Bernard Webster, who served 20 years in prison for rape before DNA revealed that he was innocent (Associated Press, 2003). Frank Lee Smith, too, would have been set free after the sole eyewitness at his murder trial retracted her testimony, but he had already died of cancer while awaiting execution in a Florida prison. Research on memory and perception helps explain how these miscarriages of justice can occur, and it is also guiding efforts to prevent such errors in the future. The U.S. Department of Justice has acknowledged the potential for errors in eyewitness evidence, as well as the dangers of asking witnesses to identify suspects from lineups and photo arrays. The result is Eyewitness Evidence: A Guide for Law Enforcement (U.S. Department of Justice, 1999), the first-ever guide for police and prosecutors involved in obtaining eyewitness evidence. The guide warns these officials that asking leading questions about what witnesses saw can distort their memories. It also suggests that witnesses should examine photographs of possible suspects one at a time and points out that false identifications are less likely if witnesses viewing suspects in a lineup are told that the real perpetrator might not be included (Wells & Olson, 2003; Wells et al., 2000). Forgetting 䉴 What causes me to forget things? The frustrations of forgetting—where you left your keys, the answer to a test question, an anniversary—are apparent to most people nearly every day (Neisser, 2000b). Let’s look more closely at the nature of forgetting and what causes it. How Do We Forget? Hermann Ebbinghaus, a German psychologist, began the systematic study of memory and forgetting in the late 1800s, using only his own memory as his laboratory. He read