BILL: Dave, you been following the news stories about Amanda Knox, “Foxey Knoxey?”  The American student studying in Italy convicted of killing her roommate one night in a sex and drugs orgy?

DR. DAVE: That trial centered on the worst case of a manufactured confession I have ever been exposed to as a substance abuse professional. As the prosecutor kept trotting out evidence based on Amanda’s own words during her police interviews, I kept asking myself “Aren’t there any addiction professionals in Italy?” What an incredible miscarriage of justice!

BILL: You mean she should have just pleaded that weak old defense, “I couldn’t help myself, I was loaded?”

DR. DAVE: Not at all-she sat there for 14 hours trying to help the police create a new reality out of her blackouts. She would say she couldn’t remember and they would suggest a scenario to fill in the blank. At the end of the 14 hours, they had a signed confession.

BILL: Didn’t the police explain it as “just trying to help her retrieve her lost memories?”

DR. DAVE: What Amanda Knox did is a classic example of a naturally-occurring process we call “confabulation.”  The substance abuser creates a new memory by filling in a blackout with what someone else tells her. Nobody wants holes in the story of their life-confabulation, in this case abetted by aggressive police suggestions — gives the person a new set of memories…

BILL: -but often false. When I was 18 in the army, and coming back to base at 2 am, drunk in an open jeep, I passed another car on the wrong side of the road going 80. The jeep turned over, and I landed on a cow, breaking her ribs. At least, that’s what the MP investigation said later. I did not remember one second of any of that. Whatever the MPs said became my version of the events. You think that something like that went on with Amanda? The police “refreshed” her memory to the point where in her confusion, she signed a confession? 

DR. DAVE: You can listen to Amanda Knox describe that police interview, in her own words, at this link. I plan on using it to teach my graduate students the concept of drug and alcohol-induced amnesia, confabulation and how the abuser’s world becomes a delusion of the real and the imagined.

BILL: “The most remarkable thing about Knox’s account of the interrogation,” says Rolling Stone Magazine, “is that, even as she signed her confession, she didn’t realize that she was a suspect.” Doc, do you believe she was really that naive? 

DR. DAVE: Bill, that’s beside point. She was so confused in all the interviews that the first murderer she “visioned” being with that night was her boss, a Mr. Lumumba, because the police made that suggestion to her. When he had an air-tight alibi, she promptly visioned a different person for the murder story. Confabulation is a powerful force in extracting false statements-I have had to explain it to juries in municipal, state and federal courts.

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