396 Forensic Psychology
desegregation. The resulting Social Science Memo, drafted
by Clark, Cook, and others, urged a strict 1-year deadline for
desegregation, although this point was troubling to several
group members (Jackson, 1998). The Memo also pointed out
that “There is a considerable body of evidence indicating that
where the situation demands that an individual act as if he
were not prejudiced, he will do so in spite of his continued
prejudice” (quoted in Jackson, 1998, p. 170). The Supreme
Court did not make a clear choice between “immediate” and
“gradual.” Instead, in May 1955, the court remanded the
cases back to the federal district courts, which were ordered
to desegregate the public schools “with all deliberate speed”
(Brown v. Board of Education,1955).
Although the Social Science Statement has been widely
lauded as one of psychology’s greatest contributions to soci-
ety, it has remained controversial. Some observers argued
that the Statement really had little or no effect on the
Supreme Court; others criticized the uneven research support
for the Statement (e.g., Cahn, 1955; Karst, 1960). The attacks
on the validity of the Social Science Statement reminded one
observer (Bersoff, 1986, p. 154) of Wigmore’s (1909) rejoin-
der to Münsterberg (1908) more than four decades earlier.
Later, other psychologists (e.g., Gerard, 1983), perhaps
frustrated by the uneven results of desegregation in the two
decades after the Browndecisions, questioned whether the
points made in the Statement were valid. In reply, Cook
(1979, 1984) noted that the mixed nature of subsequent re-
search results pertaining to the effects of desegregation were
not surprising, because rarely did desegregation occur under
conditions conducive to favorable outcomes for the children
participating. Cook (1984, p. 831) suggested rather that there
had been “an evident increase in the credibility of the social
sciences as reflected by the extraordinary range of policy
questions to which social science research is now being
applied. This suggests that the social science role in public
policy has been steadily growing and will continue to do so in
the future.”
Early Research and Expert Testimony on
Eyewitness Memory
One area that Münsterberg (1908) touted as an important
field of expertise was the study of witness memory and testi-
mony. One of the first studies in this area was conducted in
1893 by J. McKeen Cattell at Columbia University, who
asked students a series of memory questions similar to those
that might be asked in a court of law. Cattell (1895) was sur-
prised at the degree of inaccuracy that his respondents
showed and by the tenuous relationship between their accu-
racy and their own certainty that they were correct. It has
been suggested that “Cattell’s study probably was the genesis
of modern forensic psychology” (Bartol & Bartol, 1999, p. 4)
because it sparked the interest of other researchers, particu-
larly those in Europe, in the psychology of testimony. Alfred
Binet in France (e.g., Binet, 1900, 1905) and Wilhelm Stern
in Germany (e.g., Stern, 1906, 1910) carried out a number of
empirical studies on memory and testimony. In Belguim in
1911, psychologist J. Varendonck presented in court the
results of several experiments indicating that children were
inaccurate in their memory of important events (Bartol &
Bartol, 1999). In the United States, Guy Whipple wrote a se-
ries of articles in the Psychological Bulletinthat summarized
(mostly European) research on observation and reported
memories (Whipple, 1909, 1912, 1915, 1918). In the initial
article in this series, Wigmore (1909, p. 154) lamented “the
fact that English and American investigators are conspicuous
by their absence” in studies of the psychology of testimony.
The first recorded instance in which an American psycholo-
gist was proffered as an eyewitness expert was in Criglow v.
State,a 1931 Arkansas case (Fulero, 1993). There was a
resurgence of interest in the study of eyewitness memory and
in expert testimony on the issue by research psychologists,
beginning in the 1970s. We will briefly summarize that re-
search later.Psychologists as Expert Witnesses: Historical TrendsIt was not until 1921 that an American psychologist served as
an expert witness in a criminal case. In State v. Driver,a West
Virginia trial court qualified a psychologist as an expert on
juvenile delinquency, although the court rejected his testi-
mony, which was based on results of psychological tests. The
first psychologist to testify as an expert in a civil trial was
Karl Marbe in Germany in 1922. Marbe discussed the result
of reaction-time experiments in offering an opinion on the
effect of alcohol on an engineer’s responsibility in a train
wreck (Bartol & Bartol, 1999). As a rule, psychological ex-
pert testimony was rejected in criminal cases involving the
defendant’s mental state. The lone area in which psycholo-
gists’ observations seemed to be valued by the courts, even as
far back as the early 1900s, was in the juvenile justice sys-
tem; we will discuss this issue subsequently.
In the decade after World War I, the person most widely
known in American psychology and law was probably
William Marston, a student of Münsterberg’s who was ap-
pointed professor of legal psychology at American Univer-
sity in 1922. Marston, who had both a law degree and a PhD,
initially discovered a relationship between systolic blood
pressure and lying and subsequently developed the polygraph
(e.g., Marston, 1917, 1925). An attempt to introduce expert