Can the attractiveness of a defendant affect jury making decision among male and female juror.

Most of the reported memories were of being sexually abused by their fathers and most of these young women had the help ' of therapists who insisted sexual abuse had occurred and that the memory of it remained but needed to be recovered (reviewed in Bowers Farvolden , 1996 While it would be unethical for a researcher to use the techniques that therapists had used to plant false memories of sexual abuse , there have been studies where memories of events that aren 't even possible have been planted , such as remembering the first few

days of one 's life (reviewed in Loftus , 1997

The readiness of people to believe accusations is not limited to sexual abuse . It is part of a tradition , at least in America , of a predilection for believing the worst , as when in the late 17th century , innocent women died because the good people of Salem believed the women were witches and when in the 1950s we saw communists under our beds , in our universities , and in the movie industry (Johnson , 2005 . The good news is that developments in forensic DNA testing has resulted in overturning the wrongful convictions of more than 180 prisoners , including more than 135 (more than 75 ) who had been convicted on the basis of eyewitness identification (Wells , Memon Penrod , 2006 . However , although DNA evidence has made it easier to convict the guilty and harder to convict the innocent , there is a potential problem . We leave DNA all over our homes - in our hairbrushes , on drinking glasses , in sweaty t-shirts indeed on our sheets . Planting evidence hardly is a new phenomenon , but clearly it is now easier to do

As discussed above , it isn 't difficult to use suggestion so that someone remembers an event that never occurred . It also is true that in many...