Admissibility and Per Se Exclusion of Hypnotically Elicited Recall in American Courts of Law

Abstract

State v. Mack (1980) ruled that hypnotically elicited testimony is per se excluded from Minnesota law courts; this court also ruled that police could employ hypnosis in an attempt to construct an independently corroborated case. In recent years, there have been moves to rescind this exclusion; this raises a question of the probative value of such additional information when it is uncorroborated. This situation is compared with that of the polygraph as an index of deception: Like hypnosis, it is excluded per se in most American jurisdictions. Some legal decisions in Wisconsin are used to illustrate one alternative to the per se exclusion approach. Admissibility of saentific evidence in American courts of law has been based on a criterion of “general acceptability within the relevant scientific community,” as first eluadated in Frye v. United States (1923). Recently, the U.S. Supme Court overturned the Frye decision in Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals, Inc. (1993), by making general acceptability but one of several admissibility criteria. Three Daubert-based decisions, one involving hypnosis and all concerned with “recovered repressed memories,” indicate some problems in law posed by Dauberf.