Forensic Psychology

by Graham M Davies

  During the production of this book, one of our lead authors, Professor William [Bill] Lindsay died unexpectedly. Bill was a prolific writer and researcher on issues surrounding intellectually impaired offenders; collaborative in his approach and generous with his time, he is a significant loss to the field.

  Once again, it is our pleasure to acknowledge the help and assistance of our many authors in ensuring that the manuscript was completed on time and dealing tolerantly with our questions and queries. Andrew Peart at Wiley-Blackwell provided the initial impetus to undertake a Third Edition and Liz Wingett has seen it through to its conclusion. Matthew Tonkin and Chelsea Slater compiled the multiple-choice test questions and Nora Naughton and Grace Fairley prepared our book for publication by Wiley. We hope that students and teachers alike will find this new edition a readable, comprehensive and up-to-date guide to the world of forensic psychology.

  Graham M. Davies and Anthony R. Beech

  About the Editors

  Graham M. Davies is Professor Emeritus of Psychology at the University of Leicester and an Honorary Professor of Forensic Psychology at the Universities of Birmingham and Coventry. His research interests focus on the testimony of children and adults and the support of vulnerable witnesses at court, on which topics he has published some 10 books and more than 150 articles in scientific journals. He led the writing team responsible for the original version of Achieving Best Evidence, the standard guidance on interviewing vulnerable victims and witnesses in the English courts, and has considerable experience as an expert witness in court cases where the testimony of children or other vulnerable witnesses are a focus of concern. He is a Fellow of the British Psychological Society and a former president of the Society for Applied Research in Memory and Cognition and of the European Association for Psychology and Law. He is the founding editor of the journal Applied Cognitive Psychology and co-edits the Wiley Series on Crime Policing and the Law. In addition to his academic and professional work, he was for 13 years a Magistrate on the Loughborough, Melton, Belvoir and Rutland bench.

  Anthony R. Beech Professor Anthony Beech is Head of the Centre for Forensic and Criminological Psychology at the University of Birmingham, UK. He has authored more than 180 peer-reviewed articles, 50 book chapters and seven books in the area of forensic science/criminal justice. In 2009 he received the Significant Achievement Award from the Association for the Treatment of Sexual Abusers in Dallas, and the Senior Award from the Division of Forensic Psychology, British Psychological Society. His particular areas of research interests are: risk assessment; the neurobiological bases of offending; reducing online exploitation of children; and increasing psychotherapeutic effectiveness of the treatment given to offenders. His recent research has examined: Internet offending; new approaches to treatment of offenders; and the neurobiological basis of offending.

  About the Companion Website

  www.wiley.com/go/bps/davies3e

  There is a range of resource materials especially developed for the third edition of Forensic Psychology: Crime, Justice, Law, Interventions for use by students and instructors, providing for all your course lecturing and testing needs. These include:

  Interactive short-answer tests for use by students (a popular feature)

  PowerPoint slides of all the figures, tables and boxes from the book

  PowerPoint slides for instructors, complete with text headings as well as diagrams, designed to highlight key points in each chapter

  Introduction

  GRAHAM M. DAVIES, ANTHONY R. BEECH AND CLIVE HOLLIN

  CHAPTER OUTLINE

  FORENSIC PSYCHOLOGY Legal Psychology

  Criminological Psychology

  HOW TO BECOME A FORENSIC PSYCHOLOGIST

  PROFESSIONAL ORGANISATIONS FOR FORENSIC PSYCHOLOGISTS

  STRUCTURE AND CONTENT OF THIS BOOK Part 1: The Causes of Crime

  Part 2: Investigating Crime

  Part 3: The Trial Process

  Part 4: Dealing with Offenders

  FORENSIC PSYCHOLOGY

  Forensic psychology is a broad and growing area of psychological research and practice. It embraces a variety of studies at the interface of psychology and the law, spanning both legal and criminological issues. The legal aspect of forensic psychology concerns the application of psychological knowledge and methods to the processes of law and the criminological aspect deals with the application of psychological theory and method to the understanding (and reduction) of criminal behaviour through interventions. Hence, the legal aspect deals with evidence, witnesses and the courts; while the criminological aspect focuses on crime and criminals. Among the range of tasks undertaken by forensic psychologists can be:

  piloting and implementing treatment programmes for offenders

  generating research evidence to support penal policy and practice

  undertaking assessments of risk for violent and sexual offenders

  domestic violence and family issues

  treating offenders with drug or alcohol problems

  writing reports and giving evidence in court

  advising parole boards and mental health tribunals

  crime analysis and offender profiling

  conducting experimental and field studies on the reliability of witnesses

  advising on interview techniques with suspects and vulnerable witnesses

  counter-terrorism policy and hostage negotiation.

  The umbrella term forensic psychology is used to embrace both legal and criminological research and application, even though the term forensic strictly means the employment of scientific tests, or techniques, used in connection with the detection of crime. As the issue of crime and offending continues to grow in importance in society, it seems inevitable that policy makers will turn increasingly to psychology in general and forensic psychology in particular for answers to such questions as “What makes a person offend?” and “How can crime be reduced?” Therefore, the aim of this book is to give a broad outline of current topics in psychology ranging from causes of crime (Section 1), the detection of crime (Section 2), legal processes (Section 3) and finally risk assessment and treatment of offenders (Section 4).

  To understand how forensic psychology emerged as the high-profile psychological science it is today, it is useful to begin by examining briefly the roots of both legal psychology and criminological psychology. We will then describe the professional pathways into forensic psychology, and the principal organisations and journals that support the discipline, followed by an overview of the structure and content of the book.

  Legal Psychology

  Legal psychology was one of the first areas of applied psychology to be explored by experimental psychologists. It then languished as a discipline until the 1970s, when there was a great resurgence of interest in research at the interface of psychology and law, which continues to today. Legal psychology began in Europe around the turn of the twentieth century (see Davies & Gudjonsson, 2013). Prominent among these pioneers was the Austrian Hans Gross (1847–1915) who in his career claimed to have performed more than 45,000 pre-trial examinations of witnesses. As a result of his experiences, he became sceptical about witness accuracy and developed tests to try to discriminate those who might prove reliable. He described his experiences in probably the first textbook of legal psychology, published in 1898.

  One issue of concern to Gross was the suggestibility of witnesses under questioning. The French psychologist, Alfred Binet (1857–1911), had conducted some of the earliest studies on suggestibility and conformity effects in children, described in his book La Suggestibilité (1900) and these ideas were taken up by the German psychologist Louis William Stern (1871–1938). It was Stern who, as part of his programme of research into what he termed the Psychologie der Aussage (the psychology of verbal reports), started the first journal devoted to witness psychology and introduced new methods such as the “event test”: a carefully rehearsed incident staged in front of onlookers who are subsequently asked to report the events in
their own words and answer questions concerning details, a technique still in use today. Suggestibility, particularly in relation to vulnerable witnesses and its impact on their testimony, remains a focus of research today (see Ridley, Gabbert & La Rooy, 2012 and Chapters 6 and 7).

  The Aussage movement continued to be active in Germany up until the First World War, but the person credited with publicising the new science to the English-speaking world was Stern’s friend, Hugo Münsterberg (1863–1916). Münsterberg moved from Germany to Harvard University in 1892 to accept an invitation from William James to set up their first experimental psychology laboratory. Münsterberg’s interests in psychological aspects of the law went well beyond issues of testimony. In 1908 he published On the Witness Stand, a book aimed at publicising and promoting the value of psychology to law enforcement in general and the courts in particular. Among the topics discussed by Münsterberg were:

  the accuracy of witness testimony

  the detection of deception

  false confessions

  suggestive questioning at court

  effective interviewing procedures.

  Sadly, the emergence of Münsterberg’s book did not usher in a new dawn for legal psychology. Its somewhat bombastic tone and casual generalisations alienated lawyers (he dismissed them as “obdurate”), precisely the group to whom the implications of the book might most usefully have been directed. It drew from the distinguished American jurist, John H. Wigmore (1863–1943), a majestic rebuke in the form of a satirical account of an imaginary trial in which Münsterberg’s more specious and expansive statements were held up to ridicule (Wigmore, 1909). Wigmore did concede that while psychology had little to offer to the law at present, there might come a time when psychology would have matured sufficiently to make a significant contribution. This rejection of Münsterberg’s ideas was followed by his death in 1916, which effectively snuffed out the study of legal psychology in the United States. When interest in legal psychology revived in the 1970s, most of the topics Münsterberg identified remained central to contemporary research, together with new themes arising from the stresses of contemporary society.

  One of the principal motives for the renewed involvement of psychologists in legal matters was concern around mistaken identification, which had led to miscarriages of justice. In the UK, Lord Justice Devlin published a report in 1976 that described a series of cases involving mistaken identity, sometimes by more than one witness. The Devlin Enquiry, into law and practice on identification, was the first in the UK to take evidence from psychologists on perception and identification, and one of his recommendations was that, “Research should be directed as to establishing ways in which the insights of psychology can be brought to bear on the conduct of identification parades and the practice of the courts” (Devlin, 1976, p. 149). This led directly to Home Office funding of research into bodily and voice identification (Shepherd, Ellis & Davies, 1982; Bull & Clifford, 1984) and in turn to a more positive approach generally toward the value of psychological research as applied to the police and the law (Kebbell & Davies, 2006). Research on identification issues remains a major strain in contemporary forensic research (see Valentine & Davis, 2015 and Chapter 15).

  In the United States, the involvement of psychologists in identification issues took a rather different form. In the UK, psychologists with expertise in witness matters were not generally permitted to give evidence in criminal trials, with the exception of cases of alleged false confession (i.e. Gudjonsson, 2003). In the United States, Elizabeth Loftus (1944–) and Robert Buckhout (1935–1990) were among the first psychologists permitted to testify as experts at trials regarding the reliability of eyewitness testimony in general and identification in particular. This testimony was routinely challenged at trial and this in turn led to a greater investment in research to better understand the processes that led to witness error (see Chapters 6 and 15). An important distinction emerged between estimator and system variables (Wells, 1978):

  Estimator variables concerned the haphazard circumstances surrounding an initial observation of a perpetrator, such as lighting and distance from the witness.

  System variables covered those factors in control of law enforcement officials, such as how many persons were present on an identification parade and their degree of similarity to the suspect.

  Much of this new research was summarised in Loftus’ influential book Eyewitness Testimony (Loftus, 1979), which added to the growing interest among experimental psychologists in the legal process. Loftus’ work had focused very much on the vagaries of witness testimony. It built on the findings of the Aussage movement by exploring the impact of so-called “post-event information” – information that a witness to a crime read, saw or talked about after an incident and the adverse impact this might have on the reliability of their testimony at any subsequent trial. In the 1980s, universities in the United States launched the first joint doctoral programmes involving the study of both psychology and law (“JD/PhD programs”), which in turn led to research with a much wider focus on psychological aspects of legal procedure. Research in areas such as the wording and timing of legal pronouncements and in particular jury decision-making (Hastie, Penrod & Pennington, 1983) laid the foundations for a psychology of jurisprudence (see Chapter 13).

  One of the earliest concerns of forensic psychologists was the reliability of child witnesses and this issue too sprang back into prominence in the 1980s. In the UK and the United States, children’s evidence had traditionally been excluded or restricted by the courts because of concerns over suggestibility. However, there was increasing public concern that such restrictions effectively prevented most child complainants of abuse from seeking justice. New research, particularly by the U.S. psychologist Gail Goodman demonstrated that under appropriate circumstances, children were capable of providing reliable testimony and this increased the pressure for reform of the law and the introduction of such child-friendly measures at court as remote or video testimony and the use of intermediaries (see Plotnikoff & Woolfson, 2015 and Chapter 14).

  The dangers of uncritical acceptance particularly of very young children’s testimony are demonstrated by such miscarriages of justice as the Kelly Michaels trial in the United States (Bruck, Ceci, & Hembrooke, 1998) and the Shieldfield Nursery affair in the United Kingdom (Webster & Woffindon, 2002). Research, particularly by the U.S. developmental psychologist, Stephen Ceci, has highlighted situations where children’s testimony is likely to be more or less reliable. Official guidance written by psychologists for investigators charged with interviewing children is careful to take account of the vulnerabilities, as well as the strengths, of children’s testimony (see Lamb, Hershkowitz, Orbach & Esplin. 2008 and Chapter 7).

  Another concern dating from Münsterberg is the detection of deception. Psychologists have carefully researched the many assumptions surrounding so-called “lie-signs” and have cast a critical eye over the various devices, from the polygraph or “lie detector” (Wilcox, 2009) to fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) brain scanning, which have claimed infallibility in spotting lies (see Granhag, Vrij, Verschuere, 2015 and Chapter 9). In 2004, the British Psychological Society published a research review of all established methods to date and concluded that none had yet reached a point where their use in the courts for determining truth and falsity could be recommended.

  The suggestibility and reliability of adult witnesses has been raised by the acrimonious debate over the status of recovered memories: memories of trauma often recovered during the course of therapy of which the person was previously unaware. This issue, too, came into prominence as a result of a murder trial in which there was a clash of expert testimony. In California, George Franklin stood trial for the murder of a young girl, Susan Nason, some 20 years previously. The principal evidence against him was the eyewitness account of his daughter who had recently recovered a vivid memory of her father carrying out the murder when she was a young child. The prosecution expert, psychiatrist Leno
re Terr, argued that the repression of memories was commonplace among clinical patients and that Ms Franklin’s memories fitted this pattern. For the defence, Elizabeth Loftus argued that Ms Franklin’s testimony contained significant errors and that there was nothing in it that could not have been gleaned from local newspaper reports of the time: Ms Franklin was confusing real events with self-generated imagery, perhaps fuelled by suggestion in therapy. The jury found George Franklin guilty, but the sentence was reversed on appeal (Maclean, 1993). This reversal was due in part to the research evidence accumulated in the interim that recovered memories are often unreliable and false memories can be readily generated by established experimental techniques in the psychological laboratory. Cognitive and clinical psychologists continue to debate the circumstances in which recovered memories may be reliable or false (Patihis, Ho, Tingen, Lilienfeld, & Loftus, 2014).

  In recent years, three high-profile areas of policing and detection have benefited from psychological input in a way that would no doubt have intrigued Münsterberg. Movies such as Silence of the Lambs and television series like Cracker have glamorised the role of psychologists as offender profilers, though the reality of psychology’s involvement in profiling and crime analysis inevitably falls short of the picture painted by the media (see Chapter 10). Stalking is another crime that is rarely out of the public eye, generally in the context of the obsessive following of celebrities by “fans” (Meloy, Sheridan & Hoffman, 2008); however, it is also seen by the courts as a feature of intimate partner violence (see Chapter 11). Terrorism, too, is never too far from the news pages and psychologists are increasingly called upon by the state to understand the motivation of terrorists and thus ways of mitigating the risk and consequences of terrorist acts (see Horgan, 2014 and Chapter 12).