The judge in the Michelle Troconis trial ordered the court into recess around noon on Thursday due to “unhinged” court proceedings.
“We’re going to take a recess because things are becoming unhinged,” said Judge Kevin A. Randolph.
The interruption came as state prosecutor Sean McGuiness cross-examined a witness for the defense, a University of California professor who is testifying about memory.
Dr. Elizabeth Loftus, a professor on memory and law who said she has testified in about 300 trials — only once for the prosecution — took the stand Thursday morning on the 26th day of the trial. Loftus testified that she has consulted as an expert witness for the defense in the cases of Ted Bundy, O.J. Simpson, Timothy McVeigh, the Menendez brothers, Bill Cosby and Harvey Weinstein, among other high-profile cases.
McGuiness spent much of his cross-examination asking Loftus about her hourly rate as a consultant on Troconis’ case ($600) and the history of her past testimony in other cases, prompting interruptions from Randolph who said the court would not tolerate disrespect.
Loftus and Schoenhorn spoke outside the courthouse after her testimony, with Loftus directly addressing McGuiness’ cross-examination and mentioning other cases she has consulted on or testified in.
“Well, first of all, the prosecutor did what most prosecutors do, he tried to bring up all of these unpopular people … in whose cases I’ve testified or for whom,” she said. “I have consulted in their case, unpopular people like Tim Bundy or Timothy McVeigh or O.J. Simpson of Michael Jackson.”
She said she thought that was an unfair move.
“And I think it is kind of an unfair thing to try to link the current accused, Michelle, with these people who are unpopular,” Loftus said. “It seems like the judge stopped that from happening after it had been going on for a while.”
During cross-examination, McGuiness also introduced the title and subtitle of a book authored by Loftus in 1991, titled “Witness for the Defense: The Accused, the Eyewitness and the Expert Who Puts Memory on Trial.”
McGuiness quoted a section of her book in which she wrote that as an expert witness, she may act as both an impartial educator and an advocate for the defendant. She addressed that topic outside the courthouse as well.
“I’ve had some other cases where I think there’s some other absolute strong evidence that the person’s being railroaded,” she said. “Here I can see that some bad stuff happened to her, but I can’t say and it’s not my role to say, ‘Was she lying? Or did she honestly believe what she was saying and then got fed this biased information and changed her story?'”
She said it remains a possibility that it was the latter, but that she only met Troconis on Thursday morning.
When questioned by Troconis’ attorney Jon Schoenhorn earlier Thursday, Loftus testified at length about how memory can be impacted by repeated questioning and the implantation of false memories. She testified that after an event occurs, people can be exposed to “post-event suggestion” through interrogations, conversations or media coverage.
In her research, she said she has discovered that post-event information if it is misleading, “can contaminate, or distort or transform a person’s memory.”
Much of the trial so far has focused on hours and hours of video-recorded interrogations Troconis sat through with investigators in which her account of the events on May 24, 2019, changed.
Loftus said that when people are told information after an event, “many times they will succumb to the suggestion, fall sway to the suggestion and adopt it as their own memory,” adding that when you expose people to misinformation, they can sometimes be more confident about the misinformation than they are about the actual information.
“These are not people who are lying, these are people who really believe what they are saying,” she said.
She also testified that sleep deprivation and stress can impact a person’s memory, as can repeated questioning about an event or events.
“It’s not good for the accuracy to be putting a lot of pressure and to have people wanting to come up with a lot of information just to satisfy that perceived pressure,” she said.
Outside the courthouse, Loftus said the key point to take away from her testimony was that a person’s memory can be influenced by what others tell them.
“What’s always important to me is that memory is malleable, as humans we make mistakes and one of the common reasons why we make mistakes is because people feed us misinformation or they tell us things that aren’t true or they tell us things that are highly suggestive or bias,” she said.
And that hearing false or biased information can alter, change or cast doubt on their memories.
“When that happens to people they are not lying. I think in this case the prosecution wants the jury to believe that she’s a big fat liar. And there’s an alternative explanation here.”
Schoenhorn said Loftus’ testimony is meant to serve an educational purpose, not an opinion.
“This entire case seems to be about whether Ms. Troconis said things at different times that contradicted things at another time,” said Schoenhorn, pointing out the conditions under which Troconis was arrested and interrogated.
“I believe that the question about how that happened, why that happened, what she might have said after having been arrested…having been strip searched the night before that…having been kept in a cold cell all night long…hadn’t had anything to eat, had very little sleep, played a role in how she related what otherwise were mundane details of her day on May 24, 2019.”
Schoenhorn said the defense said the science they tried to present to the jury on Thursday indicates that there’s an alternative theory to what he said prosecutors claimed, and investigators “blatantly came right out and said during the interrogation, questioning her credibility.”
In the third interview, investigators told Troconis that they knew she had not told them everything and asked her if she was ready to admit she haf not been 100% truthful, to which she said yes.
Troconis is charged with conspiracy to commit murder, tampering with evidence and hindering prosecution.
