E
yewitness testimony is an important and
necessary part of the legal system, yet
Ronald Cotton’s case is not terribly unusual.
That raises a difficult question: In the ab-
sence of corroborating evidence, should a
witness’s confidence in his or her memory
be sufficient for establishing guilt? Much is
at stake in our efforts to answer this ques-
tion: getting justice for crime victims and
also avoiding the false conviction of defen-
dants who are innocent.
Memory refers to the capacity to retain
and retrieve information and also to the
structures that account for this capacity.
Human beings are capable of astonishing
feats of memory. Most of us can easily re-
member the tune of our national anthem,
how to use an ATM, the most embarrass-
ing experience we ever had, and hundreds
of thousands of other bits of information.
Memory confers competence; without it,
we would be as helpless as newborns, un-
able to carry out even the most trivial daily
tasks. Memory also endows us with a sense
of identity; each of us is the sum of our
recollections, which is why we can feel
threatened when others challenge them.
Individuals and cultures alike rely on a re-
membered history for a sense of coherence
and meaning; memory gives us our past and
guides our future.
And yet our memories can be distorted,
embellished, and even completely false.
Have you ever had a conversation with a sib-
ling, parent, or friend about a memory of a
shared experience, only to realize you com-
pletely differ on what “really” happened? (“I
was there and remember that evening per-
fectly,” one of you says. “You think you were
there?” the other says in astonishment.
“You weren’t even in the same city. You
didn’t even know about that evening for
three months!”)
This chapter will raise some fascinat-
ing but troubling questions about memory:
When should we trust our memories, and
when should we be cautious about doing
so? We all forget things that happened; do
we also “remember” things that never took
place? Are memory malfunctions the excep-
tion to the rule or are they commonplace?
And if memory is not always reliable, what
does that tell us about the story we “remem-
ber” so clearly of our own lives. How can we
hope to understand the past?
You are about to learn...
• why memory does not work like a camera—and
how it does work.
• why errors can creep into our memories of even
surprising or shocking events.
• why having a strong emotional reaction about
a remembered event does not mean that the
memory is accurate.Reconstructing
the Past
What would life be like if you could never form
any new memories? That’s what happens to older
people who are suffering from dementia and
sometimes in younger people who have brain
injuries or diseases. The case of one such man,
Henry Molaison, is probably the most intensely
studied in the annals of medicine (Corkin, 1984,
2013; Corkin et al., 1997; Hilts, 1995; Milner,
1970; Ogden & Corkin, 1991). In 1953, when
Henry, known in the scientific literature as
H. M., was 27, surgeons removed most of his hip-
pocampus, along with most of his amygdala and a
portion of his temporal lobes. The operationPicking Cotton, which they subtitled “Our mem-
oir of injustice and redemption.”
Nevertheless, Thompson says, she has had
to live with the anguish of knowing that hermistake cost Cotton years of liberty. “I cannot
begin to imagine what would have happened,”
she says, “had my mistaken identification oc-
curred in a capital case.”