Off the Witness Stand

That's the title of a symposium that the John Jay College of Criminal Justice will host March 1-3 in New York City.  It's subtitle is, "Using Psychology in the Practice of Justice."  LINK

Exactly one hundred years ago, Hugo Munsterberg, William James’s hand-picked successor as the director of Harvard’s Psychology Laboratory, rattled the gates of the criminal justice system, and announced that the social sciences wanted in.

Munsterberg offered to pay for his admission with an astonishing series of essays later collected in the book On The Witness Stand. Munsterberg saw the questions that bedeviled the legal system—“Can witness memory be trusted?”, “Can liars be exposed?”, “Can confessions be untruthful?”, “Can crime be prevented?”—and he claimed that his new science had the answers. He was met with derision in some quarters, with patronizing skepticism in others: “When the psychologists are ready for the courts,” Dean John Henry Wigmore wrote, “the courts will be ready for the psychologists.” The gates stayed locked.

And:

“Off the Witness Stand” will bring scientists and justice system practitioners and policy-makers together to see where we stand now in answering Munsterberg’s call to inform practice with science (and science with practice), how we got here and where we are going. The conference will include presentations by psychologists, by practitioners from many points of the criminal justice compass, and by leaders in justice system reform on topics including : perception, witness memory and testimony, deception detection, confessions, forensic assessment, competency and treatment in forensic settings, expert testimony, jury decision making, courtroom procedures, crime prevention, and the influence of psychological research on the legal system.

A hat tip to Mark Godsey.