Breaking the Spell of Hypnosis

By Michael S. Serrill

Courts are limiting the work of police "Svengali squads"

It has happened to every veteran detective a hundred times. The officer is interviewing a rape or assault victim who he knows got a good hard look at the person who committed the crime. But it all happened too quickly or was too traumatic. The victim cannot quite remember.

Until recently such situations prompted many police departments to call in the "Svengali squads," the teams of specially trained police hypnotists that sprang up across the country in the '70s. Pioneered by the Los Angeles police department, the widespread use of hypno-investigators led to hundreds of convictions, many of them in cases where battered rape victims blocked out memory of the crimes. Even the FBI trained some of its agents in hypnosis. But the courts have not been so mesmerized. In recent years a number of state supreme courts have declared that hypnotically induced testimony is inherently unreliable and should not be admitted in criminal trials, since a hypnotized subject is as likely to concoct fantastic hallucinations as he is to recall true events.

Now one more tribunal, the North Carolina Supreme Court, has joined the chorus. Two weeks ago, the North Carolina justices disallowed the statements of a man who testified against his co-defendant in a robbery case and had his memory jogged by hypnosis. The decision will almost certainly mean freedom for four defendants in a much more notorious case, the 1982 rape and murder of retired Union Mills, N.C., Schoolteacher Nannie Newsome, 88.

The brutal attack on the friendly and generous Newsome caused outrage in the tiny mountain town, brought the local Ku Klux Klan out of the shadows and put tremendous pressure on police. They finally arrested four local youths, relying on the statements to investigators of one of them. That man, Roderick Maurice Forney, initially denied involvement, but later, during a session with Charlotte Hypnotist Stann Reiziss, blurted out a barely coherent story in which he implicated at least eight people in the murder, even though physical evidence at the scene suggested the presence of only one. Two of the three other defendants, Brothers Lester and Richard Flack, were convicted on the basis of Forney's story, which one defense attorney now calls an "incredible tale." Forney and CoDefendant Stephen Christopher Hunt have both had their convictions reversed on grounds other than hypnosis, and are awaiting new trials. The Flacks remain in jail, each serving three consecutive life terms.

A principal defense witness at the Flacks' trial was Dr. Martin Orne, one of the nation's foremost experts on hypnosis, who says that Forney's description of events was a classic case of "confabulation," in which a hypnotized subject fills in gaps in his memory with information sometimes suggested to him by police or the hypnotist. Orne, a University of Pennsylvania psychiatrist, says that Forney was particularly susceptible to suggestion, given his borderline IQ of 74 and a history of mental problems in his family. The psychiatrist, who has for years been conducting a relentless campaign against police hypnosis, called the North Carolina case one of the worst abuses he has seen. Testimony from witnesses like Forney is especially dangerous, he explains, because even the most vigorous cross-examination may not shake their belief in the truth of their hypnotic recollections.

In banning hypnotically induced testimony, North Carolina joins at least eleven other states. One of the first was Minnesota, whose supreme court ruled it out in 1980. In that case a woman under hypnosis, who at the time of the event was apparently drunk and confused, summoned up a scene in which a male companion sexually assaulted her with a knife. Under hypnosis she recalled too much, including several incidents that could not have happened. In throwing out a rape conviction in 1983, New York's highest court declared that hypnosis created "a mixture of accurate recall, fantasy or pure fabrication in unknown quantities."

Perhaps the cruelest blow for would-be police mesmerizers came in 1982, when the California Supreme Court banned previously hypnotized witnesses from testifying. The decision sharply curbed the operation of the Los Angeles police department's busy hypnosis unit, whose officers now use their skills only in dead-end cases. It also cut back the activities at Los Angeles' Law Enforcement Hypnosis Institute, which, beginning in 1976, trained more than 1,000 officers from across the country in hypnotic-interrogation techniques; they in turn trained thousands more.

Martin Reiser, director of the institute and chief psychologist for the Los Angeles police department, continues to defend police hypnosis vigorously, claiming that in Los Angeles no defendant was ever convicted on the basis of hypnotically enhanced testimony alone. In July the state legislature reversed part of the California Supreme Court decision, allowing witnesses and victims who have been hypnotized to testify as to their prehypnotic recollections, while stipulating that sessions be conducted only by disinterested outside psychiatrists. But since it is witnesses' posthypnotic testimony that is most valuable to police, the Svengali squads in California and elsewhere continue to wither away.

That suits the defense lawyers in the Nannie Newsome case just fine. Speaking of Forney's fantastic tales, Attorney James Ferguson says, "It's really quite amazing and shocking that someone's life or liberty can hinge on that sort of testimony.''

With reporting by B.J. Phillips, Dianna Waggoner