The Need for Memory Experts in French Courts

ABSTRACT

Triers-of-facts sometimes face eyewitness or perpetrator memory issues in criminal cases. Their goal is therefore to evaluate the weight that should be given to those statements. The past 40 years of research about how memory works during a criminal event or in judicial contexts have widely documented how easily an eyewitness report may be biased and erroneous. For this reason, in several Western countries, legal and forensic psychologists and psychiatrists, namely memory experts, are called upon to help triers-of-fact to deal with sensitive memory issues. However, in France, this area of judicial expertise does not exist and recent survey data highlighted how little French psychology and psychiatry experts know about memory. This article therefore aims at describing the recent data and providing recommendations toward mental health practitioners and judges for quality improvement concerning expertise work about memory issues in judicial and criminal contexts.

KEYWORDS:

• court expert
• expert witness
• memory expert
• eyewitness testimony
• memory

Acknowledgments

The author would like to thank Frédéric Tomas for his constructive comments on the manuscript and his careful proofreading, and the two reviewers for their valuable comments and recommendations that considerably improved the quality of manuscript.

Notes

1. The official lists of court experts are freely available at https://www.courdecassation.fr/informations_services_6/experts_judiciaires_8700.html.

2. For this reason and because in inquisitorial systems, psychologists and psychiatrists serving as experts do not only intervene as witnesses during trials, the term court expert seems more appropriate, whereas expert witness rather refers to experts who intervene in adversarial systems.

3. Note that the investigating judge must give reasons for that decision, on pain of nullity (paragraphs 3 and 4 of the article 157 of the French Criminal Procedure Code).

4. In France, defendants have a constitutional right to appeal, including for the most severe offenses. Hence, any judicial decision may be appealed, whether there was a jury or not. In trials with a jury, the first trial is composed of three professional judges and six jurors. The appeal trial is composed of three professional judges and nine jurors.

5. This is the official translation of the article. It is available at https://www.legifrance.gouv.fr/content/location/1741.

Additional information

Funding

This research did not receive any specific grant from funding agencies in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.