See alsoAmerican Bar Association Resolution on
Mental Disability and the Death Penalty; Death Penalty;
Juveniles and the Death Penalty; Mental Illness and the
Death Penalty; Mental Retardation and the Death Penalty;
Racial Bias and the Death PenaltyFurther Readings
Davis v. Minnesota,511 U.S. 1115 (1994).
Highler v. State,854 N.E.2d 823 (Ind. 2006).
Miller, M. K., & Bornstein, B. H. (2005). Religious appeals
in closing arguments: Impermissible input or benign
banter? Law and Psychology Review, 29,29–61.
Miller, M. K., & Bornstein, B. H. (2006). The use of religion
in death penalty sentencing trials. Law and Human
Behavior, 30,675–684.
Miller, M. K., & Hayward, R. D. (2007, June). Religious
characteristics and the death penalty [Electronic version].
Law and Human Behavior.Retrieved from
http://www.springerlink.com/content/x130348n56755747/
?p=4c4a7ef7ab624386926e76a8a17cd1d5&pi= 13
Simson, G. J., & Garvey, S. P. (2001). Knockin’ on heaven’s
door: Rethinking the role of religion in death penalty
cases. Cornell Law Review, 86,1090–1130.
United States v. DeJesus,347 F.3d 500 (3rd Cir. 2003).
Young, R. L. (1992). Religious orientation, race and support
for the death penalty. Journal for the Scientific Study of
Religion, 31,76–88.REPEATEDRECALL
Eyewitnesses to a crime or other incident often recall
that event dozens of times while waiting for a trial that
may take place months or even years later. These recall
episodes are often in response to questioning by arrest-
ing officers, police detectives, district attorneys, friends,
other witnesses, private investigators, and defense attor-
neys, among others. Even in the absence of direct ques-
tioning, witnesses often recall what they have seen on
their own, sometimes to prepare themselves for testi-
mony at trial and other times simply because the event
was frightening, disturbing, or otherwise vivid. The
effects of such repeated recall on eyewitness accuracy
and confidence are complex. Although repeated recall
can occasionally yield new information, it may also
cause memory distortions due to postevent misinforma-
tion effects, imagination inflation, increases in witness
confidence, and retrieval-induced forgetting.Generally speaking, repeated recall helps strengthen
memory associations and can make the practiced infor-
mation easier to retrieve in the future. In some circum-
stances, repeated recall can even lead to hypermnesia,
which is the recall of additional information that was
not recalled initially. Hypermnesia is most likely to
occur when the repeated recall involves multiple
retrieval cues. One prominent method of interviewing
witnesses—the cognitive interview—is designed to
elicit as much information as possible by encouraging
witnesses to recall an event from multiple perspectives.
If administered properly, the cognitive interview can
yield increases in the total amount of information as
compared with straightforward questioning.
Given that repeated recall can help strengthen
memory associations and may even lead to the pro-
duction of additional information, one would think
that an eyewitness should recall the target event as
often as possible. However, recalling information
repeatedly is not without potential costs; repeated
recall can actually alter a witness’s memory of the tar-
get event.
One well-known side effect of repeated recall is the
postevent misinformation effect.When a witness is
exposed to inconsistent or misleading information that
is embedded in questions posed to that witness, the
misleading postevent information can impair later
memory reports of the original target event. For exam-
ple, if a witness is asked how fast the car was going
when it went through the stop sign (when in fact the
car went through a yield sign), that witness is more
likely to report later on that there was a stop sign than
is a witness who was not exposed to the misleading
information. The effects of postevent misinformation
are especially strong when the witness is exposed to
the misinformation multiple times.
A related phenomenon is imagination inflation.
When someone repeatedly recalls an imagined event
that did not actually occur, eventually she or he will
come to believe that the event really did occur, often
with great confidence. As is the case with postevent
misinformation, the magnitude of the imagination
inflation effect generally increases with multiple
imaginings (i.e., with repeated recall).
There are other equally troublesome side effects of
repeated recall that can occur even in the absence of
misleading information or imagined events. For
example, repeated questioning of eyewitnesses can
lead toincreases in witness confidence without corre-
sponding changes in witness accuracy. This effect684 ———Repeated RecallR-Cutler (Encyc)-45463.qxd 11/18/2007 12:43 PM Page 684