The Memory Room: Texas courts allow hypnosis despite science, overturned convictions

Part two of The Memory Room, a two-part investigative series:
Prosecutors in the Dallas District Attorney’s Office trying to secure a conviction in the brutal 1988 beating of Southern Methodist University student Helen Barbre did not have much to go on. Police botched the investigation by failing to gather physical evidence from the scene, leaving them to turn to a controversial technique known as investigative hypnosis.

Months after the assault, Barbre spent two hours with a Dallas police hypnotist and finally picked a man out of a lineup as her attacker. The police made the arrest. But now it was up to prosecutors to explain why they had enough evidence to send that man to prison.

Defense lawyer Marsha Halpern felt confident she could prove her case. Her client, Danny Ray King, a former police trainee, had no criminal record. The hypnotist implanted false memories in the victim’s mind, Halpern tried to show the jury. She believed science was on her side. But the law was not, and is not, even today.

An analysis by The Dallas Morning News shows prosecutors in Texas sent at least 54 people to prison in cases that involved a hypnosis session since the mid-1970s.