Kirk Bloodsworth´s Insane Memories: What´s False Memory?

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Kirk Bloodsworth was sentenced to death in Baltimore County, Maryland for the 1984 rape and murder of nine-year old Dawn Hamilton that he did not commit. The principle evidence linking Bloodsworth to the crimes were five eyewitnesses who testified to seeing him either with, or near the scene at the time the crime was committed. In 1992, Bloodsworth obtained a court approval to test biological material preserved from the original evidence, using then-emerging DNA technology test. Nearly a decade later, on June 28, 1993 Kirk Bloodsworth became the first United States death row prisoner to be exonerated by a DNA test. According to the Innocence Project, an organization directed towards exonerating those wrongfully convicted of crimes, such mistakes that eyewitnesses make like those made in Bloodsworth case are unfortunately not rare (Scheck & Neufeld 2008). The goal of the present research was to understand how false memories could be created with little, or no awareness to the individual and such “memories” be recognized with a high confidence level. …show more content…

Psychologists have been intrigued by memory distortions for quite some time. Numerous studies have been conducted on several different components of false memories; producing false memories with or without recognition (Seamon, Luo, & Gallo, 1998), the interaction between language used and memory (Loftus & Palmer 1974), avoiding false memories (Gallo, Roberts, & Seamon, 1997), and research regarding norms for word lists used in memory experiments (Stadler, Roediger, & McDermott,