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17 Judges J. 1 (1978)

handle is hein.journals/judgej17 and id is 1 raw text is: Court
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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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