Mistakes Were Made - Carol Tavris [131]
40 In the preface to the third edition of The Courage to Heal (p. 14), Bass and Davis responded to the scientific criticism directed at their book and attempted to justify their lack of professional training: “As authors, we have been criticized for our lack of academic credentials. But you do not have to have a Ph.D. to listen carefully and compassionately to another human being.” That is true, but as we hope we have shown in this chapter, some training in science might prevent all those well-meaning, empathic listeners from leaping to unwarranted, implausible conclusions—especially when those conclusions can have tragic consequences. The authors did not attempt to correct any of the mistakes they made in the first edition, apart from making a few brief modifications and adding a self-protective caution that if your therapist pressures you to remember abuse, find another therapist. And oh, yes, for the third edition they talked with a “small number” of women who originally thought they might have been sexually molested but who instead found their pain stemmed from “emotional abuse” or other early trauma.
To our knowledge, neither Bass nor Davis has ever acknowledged that they were wrong in any of their basic claims about memory and trauma. According to her Web site, Laura Davis has moved on to the next trend, advocating reconciliation for families that have been broken apart by allegations of sexual abuse.
41 National Public Radio’s This American Life, episode 215, aired June 16, 2002.
CHAPTER 5
Law and Disorder
1 Timothy Sullivan (1992), Unequal Verdicts: The Central Park Jogger Trials. New York: American Lawyer Books/Simon & Schuster.
2 Reyes confessed because, entirely by chance, he met one of the convicted defendants, Kharey Wise, in prison and apparently came to feel guilty about Wise’s wrongful incarceration. Later he began telling prison officials that he had committed a crime for which others had been wrongly convicted, and a reinvestigation began. Steven A. Drizin and Richard A. Leo (2004), “The Problem of False Confessions in the Post-DNA World,” North Carolina Law Review, 82, pp. 891-1008; see p. 899.
3 See www.innocenceproject.org and Barry Scheck, Peter Neufeld, and Jim Dwyer (2000), Actual Innocence. New York: Doubleday.
4 Emphasis in original. Samuel R. Gross et al. (2004), “Exonerations in the United States, 1989 through 2003.” http://www.mindfully.org/Reform/2004/ Prison-Exonerations-Gross19apr04.htm. This research was subsequently published in a law journal: Samuel R. Gross, Kristen Jacoby, Daniel J. Matheson, Nicholas Montgomery, and Sujata Patil (2005), “Exonerations in the United States, 1989 through 2003,” Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, 95, pp. 523ff.
5 Quoted in Richard Jerome, “Suspect Confessions,” The New York Times Magazine, August 13, 1995, pp. 28-31; quote is on p. 31.
6 Daniel S. Medwed (2004), “The Zeal Deal: Prosecutorial Resistance to Post-Conviction Claims of Innocence,” Boston University Law Review, 84, p. 125. Medwed analyzes the institutional culture of many prosecutors’ offices that makes it difficult for prosecutors to admit mistakes and correct them.
7 Joshua Marquis, “The Innocent and the Shammed,” The New York Times op-ed, January 26, 2006.
8 Harmful Error: Investigating America’s Local Prosecutors, published by the Center for Public Integrity, Summer 2003, reports on their analysis of 11,452 cases across the nation in which appellate court judges reviewed charges of prosecutorial misconduct. The center gave Marquis a chance to respond; “Those few cases,” “The truth is that…,” p. 110. http://www.publicintegrity.org.
9 Quoted in Mike Miner, “Why Can’t They Admit They Were Wrong?” Chicago Reader, August