O ver the past two decades, there have been important procedural changes to accommodate children’s grow- ing involvement in the legal system. One of the most significant changes in the courtroom has involved the expand- ed admissibility of children’s hearsay statements. As a result, mental health, medical, and law enforcement professionals, as well as parents, frequently testify about children’s prior state- ments. Sometimes, their testimony is aided by diaries or by notes taken during or after interviews. Frequently, however, it is the case that hearsay witnesses rely solely on memory. Although it is assumed that the hearsay testimony can be an accurate account of children’s prior statements, there are times when such testimony can be highly inaccurate, as illustrated by the following case involving alleged sexual abuse of preschool children by their teacher. 1 The state’s appointed expert witness provided the prosecution with written reports of her pretrial evaluations of the child witnesses. One of those written reports included the following passage: “He informed me that she (the defendant) drank the pee-pee. That’s how she got crazy.” Compare this expert’s report to the transcript of the actual audiotaped interview with this child: Expert Witness: Did she drink the pee-pee? Boy: Please, that sounds just crazy. I don’t remember about that. Really don’t. Was this an idiosyncratic error made by an expert who con- sciously misrepresented the content of her interview? The sci- entific literature suggests otherwise. Her error was not deliber- ately motivated, but reflected the limitations of our memory system. We do not remember events in detail, nor do we remember conversations on a word-for-word basis. When we try to reconstruct past experiences at a later time, not only do we fail to report some information, but our current beliefs and motivations guide our reconstructions. As a result, although much of what is recalled is accurate, significant errors can also inadvertently occur. Memories of conversations of interviews are a special instance of this phenomenon. Recently, we and our colleagues have provided scientific support for these conclusions based on our research into adult- child interviews. We asked adults to interview children about a recently experienced event (about which the researchers had full knowledge but about which the interviewers were igno- rant). These interviews were electronically recorded in order to obtain an accurate record of the exact statements made by the interviewer and by the child. Later, the interviewers were asked to recall the content of their interviews. The following consistent results have been reported in various laboratories: Three days after interviewing their four-year-old children about a special event, mothers recalled only 35% of the details of the actual conversation. Two weeks after interviewing four different children about special visitors to their school, mental health trainees made significant substantive errors: 40% claimed that the child had participated in a special event, when an examination of the transcripts revealed that the child had never made this report. Ten minutes after interviewing children about a previously experienced event, highly trained and experienced interview- ers did not recall a significant number of statements made by the children and they frequently reported statements that the children never made. Thus, when asked to recall prior interviews with young children, interviewers of varying levels of expertise frequently omitted important details and also included details that were never stated by the child. The situation regarding the accuracy with which an inter- viewer can recall the gist of what a child told them is worse than the above data indicate. This is because it is not sufficient for witnesses to recall only the essence or gist of what a young child told them (e.g., “According to my notes, he told me she made him drink urine.”) Even if such a statement was made by the child, judges need to consider the full interrogative con- text in which such a statement emerged. For example, was the statement a spontaneous disclosure to an initial, open-ended question, “Tell me everything that happened at school”? Or, was it prompted, the result of monosyllabic acquiescence to a series of suggestive questions? Was the statement a product of initial denials by the child that were eventually abandoned after repeated interviews or repeated leading questions? To make these assessments and to determine whether strategies recognized as capable of affecting the reliability and accuracy of children’s reports were applied by interviewers, the trier of Why Judges Must Insist on Electronically Preserved Recordings of Child Interviews Stephen J. Ceci and Maggie Bruck C ESSAY 10 Court Review - Summer 2000 Footnotes 1. State v. Michaels, 625 A.2d 489, 524 (N.J. Super. Ct. App. Div. 1993), aff’d, 642 A.2d 1372, 1385 (N.J. 1994).