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17 Judges J. 1 (1978)

handle is hein.journals/judgej17 and id is 1 raw text is: Court News Roundup CRIMINAL CODE REFORM ACT APPROVED BY SENATE On January 30, the Senate approved the first modern- ization and recodification of the U.S. federal criminal code in the nation's history. S. 1437, the offspring of the controversial earlier criminal code bill, Senate Bill One, was passed by a solid 72 to 15 vote. The House Judiciary Subcommittee on Criminal Justice has already begun hearings on the bill. However, because of the size of the bill-382 pages plus conforming amendments-and because of technical difficulties with the drafting, the House may not vote on the act before this session's end, which is tentatively set for September 29. Both conservative and liberal opponents of the bill expressed the belief that the federal jurisdiction in the bill would be broadened too much, that too much discretion would be left in the hands of the federal bureaucrats and that the bill would lead to a national police force. Eight floor amendments were adopted, these include reinstatement of the Logan Act; a provi- sion that would ensure that persons who commit crimes while on pretrial release would receive the maximum degree of punishment allowable for the crimes; and a provision that would allow denial of pretrial release to individuals charged with any of five serious crimes, thus instituting a form of preventive detention. HYPNOSIS AND CONFABULATION The use of hypnosis by police departments to restore a witness's memory is being challenged for the first time in a court of law, reports Gene Blake in the Los Angeles Times. The California Supreme Court has been asked by attorneys for a Santa Barbara murder defendant to apply the same tests to hypnosis that are now required for admitting lie detector and voice print evidence. These tests require that the technique be generally accepted in the scientific community. In an amicus brief filed in the same case, the California Attorneys for Criminal Justice (CACJ), an organization of 1,500 criminal defense lawyers, has urged the court to ban evidence obtained under hyp- nosis, except under court order and medically super- vised and videotaped conditions. Proponents of hypnosis for witnesses say that it is an essential and vital police tool. Recently, the American Express-IACP Police Science award, which includes a cash prize of $10,000, was presented to the Los Angeles Police Department for pioneering hyp- nosis as a crime fighting technique. LEAA is also funding seminars to teach hypnosis to police. Opponents of hypnosis for police use include two of this country's leading experts, who have filed af- fidavits with CACJ: Dr. Martin R. Orne, president of the International Society of Hypnosis and senior author of the Encyclopedia Britannica section on hypnosis; and Dr. Ernest R. Hilgard, the past presi- dent of the association. Blake says that both men contend that a hypnotized subject's memory may be totally inaccurate and should not be accepted without independent verifica- tion. The experts explained how people sometimes construct events that did not happen to fill in memory gaps, a phenomenon called confabulation. Dr. Orne said that in some instances he had found hypnosis to be useful where it helped to bring back forgotten memories of witnesses to crimes, but he warned that other witnesses with the same conditions had produced verifiably inaccurate information. Orne told the Los Angeles Times that: Unfortunately, a witness who is uncertain about his recall of a par- ticular set of events can, with hypnosis, be helped to have absolute subjective conviction about what had happened, though the certainty can as easily relate to a confabulation as to an actual memory. A JUDICIAL HOME LIBRARY PROGRAM A New Jersey program, funded from the state supreme court budget, subsidizes judges-above the municipal level-who want to have a basic working library at home. The court also agreed to regularly up- date the judges' libraries. The program provides legal materials for judges, especially those whose chambers are located in high crime urban areas, where evening and weekend use of the chambers is dangerous. The program was begun in 1974 by Judge Arthur J. Simpson, Jr., acting director of the Administrative Office of the Courts, who obtained a special price agreement with West Publishing Company. The supreme court began the program with an initial sub- sidy of $100,000 later adding $137,000 which enabled all judges wishing to participate to do so. One of the

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