"We Need You to Tell Us That This is What Happened"

Not surprisingly, news coverage of Tuesday's defense presentation at the Jerry Sandusky trial focused on the testimony of Dorothy Sandusky. People are understandably interested in the reactions of a woman who, if her husband is guilty, has been publicly humiliated. However, there was other testimony that day that is potentially more important, testimony about the possibility of suggestive questioning of alleged victims by the Pennsylvania state police.

First of all, it is important to remember that Victim 4 was the prosecution's star witness. He was the first alleged victim to testify, and he gave the most detailed account of his alleged molestation. He is the one who claimed that oral sex happened “almost every time I'm over there. And I'm over there two or three times a week.”

The following four paragraphs are from the inside page of Wednesday's Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, about halfway through the article.

Earlier in the day, Mr. Amendola [Mr. Sandusky's attorney] called state police Cpl. Scott Rossman and retired Cpl. Joseph Leiter in a bid to show jurors that investigators led the accusers to make up stories about the alleged abuse. He played a tape of an April 21, 2011, interview in which Cpl. Leiter tells the man who later would become known as Victim 4 that he was not the first person interviewed, that there were nine others, and that their stories were similar.

“There's a pretty well-defined progression in the way he operated and still operates I guess to some degree,” the officer said. He went on to tell the would-be accuser that in some cases, Mr. Sandusky allegedly went beyond touching or fondling children. “There have been acts of oral sex that have taken place,” and an incident “classified as rape.”

“I don't want you to feel ashamed because you're a victim in this whole thing. What happened happened. He took advantage of you. We need you to tell us that this is what happened. We need you to tell us as graphically as you can what took place,” the corporal said.

Under questioning by the lead prosecutor, Senior Deputy Attorney General Joseph McGettigan, Cpl. Leiter defended his method and said he never intended to elicit anything but the truth from the interview.

Although I only know what I read in the paper, this seems almost like a textbook illustration of how not to interview a possible victim of child abuse.

In the ' 80s and '90s, there were a number of high profile cases—such as the Little Rascals Daycare in North Carolina and the McMartin Preschool in California—in which adults were falsely convicted of molesting children on the basis of testimony elicited either by police officers or by psychologists and social workers employed by the prosecution. The existence of false memories is well documented by research. The false memory syndrome refers to cases in which people who sincerely believe they have been sexually abused, but where their recall of abuse is apparently a memory disturbance, or confabulation. Elizabeth Loftus, among others, has shown that adults can be induced by repeated suggestive interviews to have highly emotional false memories about events their childhood that actually never happened.

At the root of suggestive questioning is the fact that interviewers often exhibit confirmatory bias—the tendency to search for information that confirms their beliefs and ignore information that might disprove them. Stephen Ceci and Maggie Bruck have summarized the research literature on interviewer behaviors which encourage false accusations of child abuse. Among them are:

• Stereotyping the suspect as a bad person.
• Telling the witness that peers have reported abuse.
• Suggestive questioning. A suggestive question refers to a possible answer in the question itself, i.e., “Did he touch your privates?” rather than “What did he do next?” In the worst cases, interviewers describe an abuse scenario reported by others and ask the witnesses whether something like that happened to them.
• Repeated questioning. Interviewers ask the same questions several times until they get the desired response.
• Selective reinforcement of responses. We usually think of reinforcement as attention and praise that occurs after a response. However, reinforcement can be anticipated before the fact when interviewers state or imply that they will be pleased if the witness can make an accusation.

All of these conditions can be read into the description of yesterday's testimony except repeated questioning. The New York Times fills in that particular blank.

The interviewers acknowledged that some of the witnesses at first insisted that nothing untoward occurred and told of abuse only on a second or third police interview, but that such reluctance was not unusual.

It is important to remember that this is not just hearsay. We don't have to speculate about what was said to Victim 4. The interview is on tape. How many other interviews were tape recorded? Was the same interrogation strategy followed with other alleged victims? How many suspected victims were interviewed who did not report abuse despite repeated questioning?

The fact that the investigators knew that the tape was running makes it clear that they were not consciously attempting to falsely implicate Mr. Sandusky. It suggests instead that they were poorly trained in the technique of interviewing alleged victims of sexual abuse and were unaware of the implications of their behavior.

The existence of suggestive questioning does not directly address the question of Mr. Sandusky's guilt or innocence. In either case, this is an unfortunate situation. If he's actually guilty, the incompetence of these officers could have jeopardized the case against him. If he's innocent, it may have contributed to a false conviction.