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Elizabeth Lof tus has spent decades exposing flaws in eyewitness testimony. Her ideas are gaining fresh traction in the US legal system.
In the early hours of 9 September, 1984, a stranger entered Mrs M's California home through an open living-room window. Finding Mrs M asleep, he tried to rape her, but fled when other people in the house awoke. Mrs M described her assailant to the police: he was black, weigh- ing about 170 pounds and 5'7" to 5'9" tall, with small braids and a blue baseball cap.
Officers cruising her neighbourhood spot- ted someone roughly matching that descrip- tion standing beside his car a block away from the house. The man, Joseph Pacely, said that his car had broken down and he was looking for someone to jump-start it. But Mrs M identified him as her attacker and he was charged.
At Pacely's trial a few months later, mem- ory researcher Elizabeth Loftus testified on his behalf. She told the jury how memory is fallible; how stress and fear may have impaired Mrs M's ability to identify her assailant, and how people can find it difficult to identify someone of a race other than their own.
Pacely was acquitted. "Its cases like this that mean the most to me," says Loftus, "the ones in which I play a role in bringing justice to an innocent person."
In a career spanning four decades, Loftus, a psychologist at the University of California, Irvine, has done more than any other researcher to document the unreliability of memory in experimental settings. And she has used what she has learned to testify as an expert witness in hundreds of criminal cases - Pacely's washer 101st - informing juries that memories are pliable and that eyewitness accounts are far from perfect recordings of actual events.
Her work has earned her plaudits from her peers, but it has also made her enemies. Critics charge that in her zeal to challenge the verac- ity of memory, Loftus has harmed victims and aided murderers and rapists. She has been sued and assaulted, and has even received death threats. "I went to a shooting range to learn how to shoot," she says, noting that she keeps a few used targets in her...