International Journal of Law and Psychiatry
A comparison of memory for homicide, non-homicidal violence, and positive life experiences
Section snippets
Non-homicidal violence, and positive life experiences
Defendants commonly claim partial or complete amnesia for their criminal actions (e.g., Gudjonsson & MacKeith, 1983; Kopelman, 1995, Porter et al., 2001, Roesch and Golding, 1986, Schacter, 1986), typically in cases involving violent crime. In some cases, such reported memory impairment is associated with mental illness (e.g., Bourget, Labelle, Gagne, & Tessier, 2004); a study of 118 homicide offenders found that psychotic disorders were present in 24% of the offenders who claimed amnesia (
The present study
The purpose of the current investigation was to examine perpetrators' memory for their homicide offence relative to another violent offence and a positive life experience. One of the limitations of many previous studies of memory for crime is that there has been no “control group” of memories among the same participants to allow a more refined consideration of the influence of powerful emotion on memory and to control for individual differences. The current investigation is, to our knowledge,
Participants
Fifty participants were recruited from the population of approximately 150 federal male offenders currently incarcerated in Atlantic Canada for homicide (manslaughter, first or second-degree murder). Participants were recruited from Springhill Institution in Nova Scotia (n = 18), and Dorchester Penitentiary (n = 21) and Atlantic Institution (n = 11) in New Brunswick. The mean age of participants was 39.5 years (SD = 9.2, range 22–55 years). Participation in the study was completely voluntary and no
MAP reliability check
An inter-rater reliability check was conducted on the amount of detail component of the Memory Assessment Procedure (MAP, Porter et al., 1999) to ensure that details were being coded consistently between coders across the three memory types. Correlations indicated that detail coding was reliable between raters for homicide, non-homicide, and positive experiences, with correlations ranging from .80 to .92 (all p's < .001).
Self-reported & qualitative memory characteristics1
Self-reported memory characteristics were assessed using the EMS. Offenders
Discussion
While some violent offenders are motivated to feign memory loss to avoid self-incrimination and/or to suggest a lack of criminal intent (Merckelbach & Christianson, 2007), genuine impairments of memory may occur due to a variety of psychological factors, including dissociation and state-dependent effects, as well as potentially from physiological factors. When attempting to discriminate genuine and malingered amnesia in forensic contexts, professionals must evaluate the self-reported amnesia
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2013, International Journal of Law and PsychiatryCitation Excerpt :Given that the minority of homicide perpetrators in our study claimed crime-related amnesia, and that psychopaths who claim amnesia often commit more instrumental homicides (Woodworth & Porter, 2002), it could be argued that those who were claiming amnesia for the committed homicide, might actually have committed a more reactive, ‘crime of passion’ homicide (Porter & Woodworth, 2007; Woodworth & Porter, 2002). For future research, it would therefore be interesting to examine whether individuals who have been incarcerated for homicide and do claim amnesia for their crime, differ in type of homicide (reactive versus instrumental) from inmates who also committed a homicide but did not claim amnesia (Porter & Woodworth, 2007; Walsh et al., 2009; Woodworth & Porter, 2002; Woodworth et al., 2009). Third, the PPI is a self-report questionnaire.
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2012, Psychiatric Clinics of North AmericaCitation Excerpt :For example, McLeod and colleagues43 noted that male prisoners’ high levels of dissociative symptoms were unrelated to their violent crimes. Furthermore, in their study of Canadian homicide offenders, Woodworth and colleagues44 found that although dissociative tendencies measured with the DES were associated with a self-reported memory loss, objective measures of memory quality did not reflect this perceived impairment. When an alleged offender claims amnesia, the evaluator should carefully determine the type (eg, anterograde, retrograde, or both) and extent of memory deficit reported.
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