1986年7月2日 Timothy Hennis被指控对Kathryn、Kara和Erin Eastburn三人犯有谋杀罪，对Kathryn Eastburn犯有强奸罪。
Elizabeth Loftus作为专家证人参与了对Hennis的第二次审判。Loftus此前曾进行了引人注目的记忆重构研究计划——考察“暗示性的”盘问对记忆和后来目击者证言的影响。（Loftus, E.F., & Palmer， J.C. ，1974。 Reconstruction of automobile destruction : An expample of the interaction between language and memory. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 13, 585-589）
详情见：http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2003291530_oldmurder06m.html
Accusations again pursue suspect in 1985 killings, despite acquittal
An ex-soldier was first convicted, then found not guilty in triple slayings in North Carolina. Now he has been recalled to the Army to face a military investigation…
By Nancy Bartley
Seattle Times staff reporter
For 17 years, Timothy Hennis’ name has been synonymous with the wrongly accused.
After the Army sergeant was acquitted in 1989 of the slayings of a North Carolina woman and her two young children in 1985, Hennis became the subject of a book and a TV movie, and he was listed on dozens of Web pages that sought to protect the innocent from wrongful prosecution.
Hennis retired from the Army as a master sergeant in 2004 and settled into Lakewood, Pierce County, far away from Fayetteville, N.C., the scene of the horrific crime that upended his life.
That all seemed to be in the past until Sept. 26, when Hennis received a hand-delivered notice from the Army informing him he was being recalled to active duty. The purpose: so the Army can investigate him for the 1985 murders.
Hennis, a 48-year-old married father of two, has until Oct. 30 to report to Fort Bragg, N.C., where he will be assigned to a special troops battalion and given duties commensurate with his rank, said Col. Billy Buckner, an Army spokesman.
While Hennis is back in uniform, the Army says it will look into what Buckner says is new DNA evidence in the slayings. The ability to process DNA wasn’t available at the time of the murders.
Hennis didn’t return calls seeking comment.
Lt. Charlie Disponzio, of the Cumberland County, N.C., Sheriff’s Office, said the department was running evidence taken from cold-case crime scenes for DNA information when it found evidence relating to the 1985 slayings and contacted the district attorney.
The district attorney provided the new evidence to the military, because Hennis already had been tried in state court and, under constitutional law, can’t be tried there twice for the same crime.
The military has jurisdiction over soldiers even for crimes committed off base.
Legal maneuvers that make it possible to reopen a case and potentially retry a defendant after he’s been acquitted are rarely used, generally being reserved for cases in which prosecutors believe justice has not been served, legal experts say.
“There are rules for prosecution in federal courts, and you shouldn’t do this without some good basis for thinking that justice wasn’t done,” said University of Washington Law School professor John Junker.
The retrial is possible under the U.S. “dual sovereignty” doctrine, which holds that state and federal governments and their courts are “like separate nations,” Junker said. Many cases actually could be tried in both jurisdictions but, for practical reasons, generally aren’t.
“Federal prosecutors usually respect the state court’s verdict, but they don’t have to,” he said.
The most notable case involving a dual-sovereignty issue was the 1992 Rodney King beating, in which a California jury found that Los Angeles police officers charged with assaulting King were not guilty. The officers were recharged and convicted in federal court of violating King’s civil rights.
Hennis was recalled to Army duty because of a decision to pursue a military court-martial rather than a federal court case in the North Carolina slayings.
In 1985, Hennis was a married paratrooper, assigned to the Army’s Fort Bragg, when he answered a classified ad placed by members of a military family, relocating to England, who needed a home for their dog.
Hennis went to the home of Kathryn Eastburn and her three children May 7. Her husband, an Air Force captain, was away on training. Hennis took the dog home.
Several days later someone came to the house, raped and killed Eastburn and fatally stabbed her two daughters, ages 5 and 3. Her 22-month-old baby was left unharmed in a crib.
Hennis and his wife, Angela, heard about the slayings and that police wanted to talk to the man who had taken the Eastburns’ dog. Hennis contacted the authorities and was eventually charged with raping Eastburn and killing the three victims.
In a sensational trial during which the prosecution projected crime-scene images on a wall above Hennis’ head, he was convicted and sentenced to death. The state Supreme Court ruled the trial had been unfair and found there was little evidence linking Hennis to the scene. He was re-tried.
In Hennis’ second trial, world-renowned memory expert Elizabeth Loftus, formerly of the University of Washington, testified about the fallibility of eyewitness recollections, undermining the testimony of a witness who claimed to have seen someone dressed like Hennis in the driveway of the Eastburn home at the time of the slayings.
In 1989, Hennis — who had spent more than two years on death row — was acquitted.
Somewhat in the book “Innocent Victims” but especially in the a made-for-TV movie by the same name, Hennis is portrayed as an innocent man who fought the system and won.
Nancy Bartley: 206-464-8522 or nbartley@seattletimes.com
以及 http://www.expandmind.com/socialcognition.html 中的
(Re) Constructive Memory
(Re) Constructive Memory
What is the role of memory in social cognition? Human memory is primarily reconstructive in nature. By his I mean that we do not record a literal translation of past events-like a tape recorder or a VCR- but instead re-create many of our memories from bits and pieces that we can recall and from our notions and expectations of what should have been. Perhaps you disagree with this assertion about human memory; most people do. If you do happen to disagree, you should expect an argument from Timothy Hennis, a sergeant in the U.S. Army. The research that led to the conclusion that memory is (re)constructive probably saved Sergeant Hennis’s life. Let me explain.
On July 4, 1986. Hennis was convicted of the triple murder of Kathryn, Kara, and Erin Eastburn and the raped of Kathryn Eastburn. The crime was a particularly grisly one. Apparently an intruder had broken into the Eastburn home, held a knife to Kathryn Eastburn, raped her and then slit her throat and stabbed her fifteen times. Three-year-old Erin and five-year-old Kara were each stabbed almost a dozen times. The police followed a quick lead. Earlier in the week Timothy Hennis had answered the Eastburn’s newspaper ad requesting someone to adopt their black Labrador retriever. Hennis had thaken the dog on a trail basis.
During the trial, two eyewitnesses placed Hennis at the scene of the crime. Chuck Barrett testified he had seen Timothy Hennis walking in the area at 3:30 A.M. on the morning of the murders. Sandra Barnes testified she had seen a man that looked like Hennis using a bank card that police had earlier identified as one stolen from the Eastburns residence. In spite of the fact that Hennis had an airtight alibi for his whereabouts on the night of the murder and there was no physical evidence (fingerprints, clothing fibers, footprints, bloodstains, hair) to link him to the scene, a jury convicted Hennis and sentenced him to death by lethal injection.
Hennis spent 845 days awaiting his execution on death row before a judge from the court of appeals ordered a new trial on the basis of a procedural technicality unrelated to the eyewitness testimony. Hennis’s lawyers knew that if Hennis had any chance of overturning his conviction, they would need to attack the eyewitness testimony placing him at the scene of the crime. And it was weak evidence. Chuck Barrett had originally told police two days after the murders that the man he saw had brown hair (Hennis is blond) and was six feet tall (Hennis is much taller), and when asked to identify Hennis into a photo lineup, Barrett was uncertain of his judgment. When Sandra Barnes was first contacted by police a few weeks after the crime, she told them firmly and emphatically that she had not seen anyone at the bank machine that day. Why then at the trial had both of these eyewitnesses so confidently placed Hennis at the scene of the crime? Were they both liars? Probably not; their memories of the events had be leveled and sharpened-constructed and shaped-by over a year of questioning by police and lawyers.
Elizabeth Loftus a talented cognitive psychologist, served as an expert witness at he second Hennis trial. Loftus had conducted a fascinating program of research on reconstructive memory-investigating how such “suggestive” questioning can influence memory and subsequent eyewitness testimony. In one of her experiments, Loftus showed subjects a film depicting a multiple car accident. After the film, some of the subjects were asked, “About how fast were the cars going when the smashed into each other?” Other subjects asked the same question, but the word smashed was replaced by the word hit. Subjects who were asked about smashing cars, as opposed to hitting cars, estimated that the cars were going significantly faster and, a week after seeing the film, were more likely to state the there was broken glass at the accident scene (even though no broken glass was shown in the film).
Leading questions can not only influence the judgment of facts (as in the case above), but also can affect the memory of that was happened as well. In another experiment, Loftus showed subjects a series of slides depicting an auto-pedestrian accident. In a critical slide, a green car drove past the accident. Immediately after viewing the slides half of the subjects were asked, “Did the blue car that drove past the accident have a ski rack on the roof?” The remaining subjects were asked this same question but with the word blue deleted. The results showed that those subjects who were asked about the “blue” car were even more likely to claim incorrectly that they had seen a blue car (even though in reality it was green). A simple question had changed their memory. In subsequent experiments, Loftus had succeeded in planting false memories of childhood experiences in the minds of young adults by simply instructing a close relative to talk about these events as fact. For example, if a young man’s older sister says to him, “Remember the time when you were five years old and you got lost into a panic-and an oldish man tried to help you? When we discovered you, you were holding the old man’s hand and were crying?” Within a few days of hearing such a story, most people will have incorporated that planted memory into their own history, will have embroidered it with details (“oh yeah, the old man who helped me was wearing a flannel shirt), and will be absolutely certain that it really happened-when, in fact, it didn’t.
In her testimony at the Hennis trail, Loftus discussed the nature of reconstructive memory and they ways that an interrogation can lead an observer to construct an imaginary scenario and then believe that it really happened. Consider the testimony of Sandra Barnes. At first she could not recall the presence of anyone at the bank teller machine. However, after listening to months of television coverage and reading a year’s worth of newspaper stories about the crime, coupled with the pressure stemming from the fact that she was the only one who might have seen the real murderer, Barns reconstructed a memory of her visit to the bank machine that included someone who looks like Hennis-in a manner similar to the students who recalled a blue rather than a green car in the Loftus experiment. By rehearsing this new construction repeatedly for lawyers and judges, Barnes came to accept the fact. It is important to not that Sandra Barnes was not intentionally lying. She was simply reconstructing the event. She came to believe what she was saying. A similar story can be told about Chuck Barrett’s testimony. Subsequently, the man he was the morning of the murder was conclusively identified as another man on his way to work- not Hennis.
Fortunately for Hennis, this was not the end of the story. On April 20, 1989, a second jury declared Timothy Hennis to be innocent of the crimes, noting that there was no physical evidence linking Hennis to the scene and that the eyewitness testimony was weak. Hennis had been a victim of mistaken identification and the lack of realization that memory is often (re)constructive. The case remains unsolved as of this writing, but police are following two new leads: a second rape and murder in a neighboring town that bears a striking similarity to the Eastburns murders and was performed while Hennis was on death row, and convincing series of “Thank you” notes sent to Hennis and police, by and unknown person, thanking Hennis for taking the rap for his crime.
