Lawyer Skills Flashcards

Question

What does coutroom observation allow for child?

Answer 1

- Only in the courtroom can the child observe the costellation of participants, the decision-making process, and the role his lawyer plays in that process. And only in the halls outside the coutroom can the child observe the negotiation process that is often more key than any hearing in determining his fate. The value of coming to court to a child’s understanding of his lawyer’s role is great regardless of which model the lawyer assumes.

Answer 2

- Away from the watchful eye of the client, it is very easy for traditional attorneys, in particular, to modify the child client’s position to one that is easier for the lawyer to swallow. Where, for example, the child has expressed a desire to go home, the lawyer may represent the child’s position to the court (if the child is abset) as a desire to go home “as soon as appropriate” or “as soon as his mother completes drug treatment,” even if such qualifications were never provided by the child.

Answer 3

- There is considerable disagreement about the advisability of bringing children to court. Most of the concern focuses on the potential harm to children, although there is also administrative resistance among child welfare agencies to the prospect of being responsible for the burdensome and time-consuming process of bringing children to court and taking them home afterwards. The fear for children is that they will be traumatized by the place and by the process. At court, children are forced to come face-to-face with their history of abuse or neglect and with the deep family tensions invokved by the proceeding. Moreover, children are often called upon take sides, against one or both parents.

- While coming to court can provke considerable anxiety in children, we fool ourselves if we think that avoiding court protects children from those anxieties. Much of the anxiety is created by the existence of the court process (a process whereby a child’s future is determined by a judge) and the issues underlying the court’s involvement (the abuse, neglect, foster care placement, or divorce). Lawyers’ conversations with their cleitns tend to fan those anxieties, whether or not the child appeared in court, because these conversations inevitably (if grounded at all) focus on the court process and the decisions the judge will have to make. Realistically, a child is not shiled from the court process until the court dismisses his case.

Answer 4

- The value of interactive learning can also probably be captured through modeling and role-playing exercises.

Answer 5

who hold a priori beliefs about the occurrence of certain events and, as a result, mold the interview to maximize disclosures from the interviewee that are consistent with the interviewer’s prior belief’s.

Answer 6

is the single-minded attempt to gather only confirmatory evidence (e.g. testing incompatible hypotheses). Thus, biased interviewers do not ask questions that might provide alterative explanatisonf rot eh allegations. Nor do biased interviewers ask about events that are inconsistent with their hypothesis. And biased interviewers do not challenge the authenticity of the child’s report when it is consistent with their hypothesis. When children provide inconsistent or bizarre evidence, it is either ignored or else interpreted within the framework of the biased interviewer’s initial hypothesis.

Answer 7

When questioned by a neutral intervierwe or by an interviewer whose interpreteation was consistent with the activity viewed by the child (an janitor’s interaction with dolls), children’s accounts were both factually correct and consistent with the janitor’s script. However, when the interviewer was biased in a direction that contradicted the activity viewed by the child, those children’s stories conformed to the suggestions or beliefs of the interviewer. Also, children’s answers to interpretive questions (was he doing his job or just being bad) were in agreement with the interviewer’s point of view, as opposed to what actually happened. When asked neutral questions by their parents, the children’s answers remained consistent with the interviewers’ biases.

Answer 8

open-ended questions such as “what happened?” but instead resort to a barrage of specific questions, many of which are repeated, and many of which are leading. This strategy is problematic because children’s responses to open-ended questions are more accurate than their responses to specific questions.

Answer 9

Children were first asked open-ended questions (tell me what happened), and then more specific questions (where did you hurt yourself or did you hurt your knee). The children were most likely to accurately report the important details inf ree recall (91% accuracy); errors increased when children were asked specific questions (45% accuracy).

Answer 10

- One of the reasons that children so willing provide answers to specific yes/no or to forced-choice questions even though they may not know the answer is that young children are cooperative: They perceive their adult interviewer as truthful, not deceptive. To comply with a respectful adult, children sometimes attempt to make their answers consistent with what they see as the intent of the questioner rather than consistent with their knowledge of the event

Answer 11

Not only does accuracy decrease when children are asked specific questions, but there is increased risk of inaccurate reports when young children are repeatedly asked the same specific questions, either within the same interview or across different interviews. Young children tend to change their answers, perhaps to provide the interviewer with the information that the child perceives he wants

Answer 12

(Poole study) repeated open-ended questions (what did the man look like) had little effect, positive or negative, on children’s responses. However, on repeated yes/no questions (did the man hurt Melanie), the younger children were more likely to change their rsponses, both within and across sessions. Also, when children were asked a specific question about a detail for which they had no information (what did the man do for a living), many answered with sheer speculations. Furthermore, with repeated questions, they used fewer qualifiers, omitting phrases such as “it might have been,” and consequently they sounded increasingly confident about their statements. IN other words, children will often cooperate by guessing, but after several repetitions, their uncertainty is no longer apparent.

Answer 13

For example, in one study, five-year old children received an inoculation from a pediatritcian. One year later, they were interviewed four times about salient details of that visit. Children who were repeatedly interviewed in a neutral, nonleading manner provided accurate reports about the original medical visit. In contrast, children who were repeatedly given misinformation about some of the salient details incorporated the misleading suggestions into their reports, they also reported nonsuggested but inaccurate events.

Answer 14

Other studies show that when children are repeatedly and suggestively interviewed about false events, assent rates rise for each interview. For example, childrena re more likely to assent to a false event in a third interview than in a second interview.

For example, in the pediatrician study, he children were given suggestions immediately after they had received their inoculation about how much the inoculation had hurt. This suggestive interview had no effect on children’s reports taken one week after the inoculation, presumably because the episode was still fresh in their mind. However, one year later, when the same children were given similar suggestions, these children now routinely underestimate their level of pain and crying as a result of suggestions about how brave and courageous they had been.

- Over time, children’s memory of the original event fades with time, allowing the misinformation to become more easily planted.

Answer 15

- Reports that emerge in a child’s first interview with a neutral interviewer are the most accurate. When children are later interviewed about the same event and report new details not mentioned in the first interview, these have a high probability of being inaccurate.

Answer 16

Children may give incorrect information to misleading questions about events for which they have no memory if the interviewer creates an emotional tone of accusation.

Answer 17

- Stereotype induction is another component of a suggestive interview. For example, if a child is repeatedly told that a person “does bad things” then the child may begin to incorporate this belief into his or her reports.

Answer 18

- In one study, provided animated descriptions of their “clumsy” friend Sam Stone to preschool children. ON a number of occasions, these children were told of Sam’s exploits, which included accidently breaking Barbie dolls or ripping sweaters. Later, the children met Sam Stone, who came to their classroom for a short, accident-free visit. The next day, the teacher showed the children a torn book and a soiled teddy bear. Several weeks later, a number of three- and four-year-old children reported that Sam Stone had been responsible, with some even claiming that they had seem him do this. Children who had not received stereotype induction rarely made this type of error

Answer 19

- Anatomically detailed dolls. Techniquest that have been especially designed for interviewing children about sexual abuse may be potentially suggestive. For example, anatomically detailed dolls are commonly used by professionals when interviwering children about spesected sexual abuse. It is thought that the use of dolls overcomes language, memory, and motivational (e.g. embarrassment) problems. However, the existing data indicate that the dolls do not facilitate accurate reporting

Answer 20

Thinking about and imagining. Guided imagery is another interviewing technique that is potentially sugesstive. Interviewers sometimes ask children to try to remember or pretend if a certain event occurred, and then to create a mental picture of the event and to think about its details. Because young children sometimes have difficulty distinguishing between memories of actual events and memories of imagined events, when asked to pretend about or imagine certain events, children may later come to report and believe these imagined events.

Answer 21

- The number of suggestive techniques used in an actual interview is a function of the degree of the interviewer’s bias. Interviewers who have strong a priori beliefs and who view their role as one of obtaining information to confirm these beliefs will include the most suggestive elements in their interviews. However, when a number of techniques are combined in one interview, these procedures have detrimental effects much larger than seen in studies where only one suggestive technique is used.

Answer 22

- It has often been stated that it is easy to detect false reports that are the result of suggestion, because it was thought that children were merely “parroting” the words of their interrogators. However, evidence from the past decade provides no support for this assertion. First, we have found that when children are suggestively interviewed, their subsequent narratives include false reports that were not suggested to them, but that are consistent with the suggestions [Bruck M, Ceci SJ, Francoeur E, Barr RJ. 1995a. “I hardly cried when I got my shot!”: influencing children’s reports about a visit to their pediatrician. Child Dev. 66:193–208]. Second, subjective ratings of children’s reports after suggestive interviewing reveal that these children appear highly credible to trained professionals in the fields of child development, mental health, and forensics; these professionals cannot reliably discriminate between children whose reports are accurate from those whose reports are inaccurate as the result of suggestive interviewing techniques.
also, - In the study wherein children were repeatedly and suggestively interviewed about true and false events, the children’s narratives of the false events became more embellished and detailed, so that by the third interview, it was impossible to differentiate the true from the false narratives on a number of factors that are generally considered to be markers of good narratives and of autobiographical recall. That is, by the third interview, the false narratives contained the same number of spontaneous statements, details, adjectives, emotional terms, and dialogue statements as did the true narratives.

Answer 23

Two measuers differentiated the true and false stories. First, children were more likely to repeat the same details across interviews for true than for false narratives. Thus, the true narratives were more consistent than the false narratives. One reason for the difference was the fact that with each retelling, children included more new details in their false than in their true narratirves (the false stories expanded and sometimes changed). Second, for some of the children, with reapted suggestive intervies, the number of aggressive, exaggerated, and fantasitical details increased for false narratives, but not for true narratives.

Answer 24

We hypothesize that a more detailed inspection of children’s responses over time will reflect a more complex condition with a comingling of social (compliance) and cognitive (memory) factors in the emercence of false reports. For example, children may start out knowingly complying to suggestions, but with repeated suggestive interviews, they may come to believe and incorporate the suggestions into their memories. However, depending upon the strength of the false belief, children may eventually come to forget their misreports and thus recant their previous allegations, especially if suggestive interviewing has ceased for a long period.

Answer 25

- Preschoolers are the most suggestible age group. Preschoolers do differ from older children and adults in their susceptibility to misleading or incorrect post-event information, although these authors estimated a smaller effect size than heretofore assumed
- It is nonetheless important to point out that concern remains about the reliability of oler children’s testimony when they are suggestive to suggestive interviews. Ample evidence may be cited that children older than six are suggestible about a wide range of events and that adults’ recollections also are impaired by suggestive interviewing techniques.

Answer 26

- It is clear that children—even preschoolers—are capable of accurately recalling much that is forensically relevant. For example, in many of our own studies, children in the control group conditions recalled events flawlessly. This indicates that the absence of suggestive techniques allows even very young preschoolers to provide highly accurate reports, although they may be sparese in the number of details.

Answer 27

What characterizes many such studies is the neutral tone of the interviewer, the limited use of misleading questions, and the absence of the induction of any motive for the child to make a false report. When such conditions are present, it is a common (although not universal) finding that children are much more immune to suggestive influences, particularly about sexual details.

Answer 28

- In a very real sense, the reliability of young children’s reports has more to do with the skills of the interviewer than to any natural limitations on their memory. Research on this topic has been fast finding its way into courts of law, used by one side or the other to bolster or discredit child witnesses’ testim ony.

Answer 29

highly coercive interviewing techniques in widely publicized cases that are not the norm in child sexual abuse investigations. These techniques include telling children that they have been abused, telling children that a particular person is the abuser, and asking children to imagine details regarding how abuse coud have taken place. Moreover, I argued that the research fails to mirror factors in real-world sexual-abuse cases that reduce the likelihood that false allegations will occur. These factors include the age of the child, children’s reluctance to accuse loved ones of immortal acts, and children’s embarrassment regarding sexual topics

Answer 30

and provided the child with details of 12 different misdeeds that the assistant had purportedly witnessed Sam perform. Sam Stone’s visit was two minutes long, and he did not interact with individual children.

Answer 31

had ripped the book or soiled the teddy bear, did not give the child an opportunity to deny that he had done so, and asked the child to choose among details of the fictituious events. For example, “Did Sam Stone rip the book with his hands, or did he use scissors?”

- These questions were asked regardfless of whether the child affirmed or denie that Sam Stone had performed any misdeeds. Ten weeks later, all children were interviewed in a nonleading fashion. At that time, 72% of three and four year olds implicated Sam in one or both misdeeds.

Answer 32

half of that of the younger children. School-age children would be even less likely to succumb to the interviewer's pressures.

Answer 33

particularly vulernable to suggestive questioning, and preschool children predominate in recent research documenting the unreliability of children’s testimony.

Answer 34

by about half. Asking the children, “you didn’t really see him rip the book (or soil the bear), did you? Cut the number by half again. Having been exposed to four trials of stereotype induction and three trials of suggestive questioning, 21% of the three and four year old s (and only 5% of the five and six year olds) maintained that the misdeeds had occurred.

- These percetnages exaggerate the likelihood that a child will accuse a familiar adult of sexual abuse, compared to the likelihodd that a child will accuse a stranger of ripping a book or soiling a teddy bear.

Answer 35

but whether they are being led by current investigative methods.

Answer 36

school-age children are much less suggestible than preschoolers

Answer 37

and counter-suggestible. Researchers often fail to test the persistence of their suggestions; Sam Stone is an exception,a nd dramatically reduced the number of false reports.

Answer 38

by telling them that the events occurred (as opposed to merely asking them), and by providing them with details with which they can imagine the events.

Answer 39

open-ended questions, and relying heavily on closed-ended questions (yes-no questions and forced choice questions). Closed-ended questions are often considered leading and I believe they are being overused. - I emphasize the need for structured interview protocols and the potential benefits of rapport building and greater use of open-ended questions as means of increasing information without reducing reliability.

Answer 40

than the kind of questions asked in studies like Sam Stone.

Answer 41

necessary in some cases. Abused children are often quite reluctant to describe abuse that was painful, shameful, and embarrassing

Answer 42

the dogged perspistence of coercive interviewers that reliably produces false narratives in young children. The cases that inspired the research involved unrelenting suggestion over longperiods of time by interviewers utterly convinced that abuse had occurred.

Answer 43

child’s age, the suggestive influences at issue, and the relationship of the child to the alleged offender.

Answer 44

As with any client, the child’s attorney may counsel against the pursuit of a particular position sought by the child. The child’s attorney should recognize that the child may be more susceptible to intimidation and manipulation than some adult clients.

Answer 45

The child’s ability to contribute to a determination of his or her position is functional, depending upon the particular position and the circumstances prevailing at the time the position must be determined. Therefore, a child may be able to determine some positions in the case but not others.

Answer 46

As in any other lawyer/client relationship, the lawyer may express his or her assessment of the case, the best position for the child to take, and the reasons underlying such recommendation. A child, however, may agree with the lawyer for inappropriate reasons. A lawyer must remain aware of the power dynamics inherent in adult/child relationships. Therefore, the lawyer needs to understand what the child knows and what factors are influencing the child’s decision. The lawyer should attempt to determine from the child’s opinion and reasoning what factors have been most influential or have been confusing or glided over by the child when deciding the best time to express his or her assessment of the case.

Answer 47

Consistent with the rules of confidentiality and with sensitivity to the child’s privacy, the lawyer should consult with the child’s therapist and other experts and obtain appropriate records. For example, a child’s therapist may help the child to understand why an expressed position is dangerous, foolish, or not in the child’s best interests. The therapist might also assist the lawyer in understanding the child’s perspective, priorities, and individual needs.

Answer 48

The child’s failure to express a position is distinguishable from a directive that the lawyer not take a position with respect to certain issues.
The lawyer should clarify with the child whether the child wants the lawyer to take a position or remain silent with respect to that issue or wants the preference expressed only if the parent or other party is out of the courtroom. The lawyer is then bound by the child’s directive. The position taken by the lawyer should not contradict or undermine other issues about which the child has expressed a preference.

Answer 49

The determination of the child’s legal interests should be based on objective criteria as set forth in the law that are related to the purpose of the proceedings. The criteria should address the child’s specific needs and preferences, the goal of expeditious resolution of the case so the child can remain or return home or be placed in a safe, nurturing, and permanent environment, and the use of the least restrictive or detrimental alternatives available.
The lawyer should base the position on objective criteria concerning the child’s needs and interests, and not merely on the lawyer’s personal values, philosophies, and experiences.

Answer 50

The lawyer must determine the child’s feelings about the proposed caretaker, however, because familiarity does not automatically confer positive regard.

Answer 51

Meeting with the child is important before court hearings and case reviews. In addtion, changes in placement, school suspensions, in-patient hospialiations, and othe rsimilar changes warrant meeting again with the child. Such in-person meetings allow the lawyer to explain to the child what is happening, what alternatives might be available, and what will happen next. This also allows the lawyer to assess the child’s circumstances, often leading to a greater understanding of the case, which may lead to more creative solutions in the child’s interest.

Answer 52

Even if it is not required, an older child should be asked to sign authorizations for release of his or her own records, because such a request demonstrates the lawyer’s respect for the client’s authority over information.

Answer 53

A child has the right to meaningful participation in the case, which generally includes the child’s presence at significant hearings. The child’s presence underscores for the judge that the child is a real party in interest in the case.
A decision to exclude the child from the hearing should be made based on a particularized determination that the child does not want to attend, is too young to sit through the hearing, would be severely traumatized by such attendance, or for other good reason would be better served by nonattendance. The lawyer should consult the child, therapist, caretaker, or any other knowledgeable person in determining the effect on the child of being present at the hearing.
Even a child who is too young to sit through the hearing may benefit from seeing the courtroom and meeting, or at least seeing, the judge who will be making the decisions.

Answer 54

The decision of whether or not the child should testify should include consideration of the child’s need or desire to testify, any repercussions of testifying, the necessity of the child’s direct testimony, the availability of other evidence or hearsay exceptions which may substitute for direct testimony by the child, and the child’s developmental ability to provide direct testimony and withstand possible cross-examination. Ultimately, the child’s attorney is bound by the child’s direction concerning testifying.
While testifying is undoubtedly traumatic for many children, it is therapeutic and empowering for others. The decision about the child’s testifying should be made individually, based on circumstances of the individual child and the individual case. The child’s therapist should be consulted with respect to the decision itself and assistance with preparation. In the absence of compelling reasons, a child who has a strong desire to testify should be called to do so.

Answer 55

If the child should not wish to testify or would be harmed by being forced to testify, the lawyer shoudl seek a stipulation of the parties not to call the child as a witness or seek a protective order from the court. If the child is compelled to testify, the lawyer should seek to minimize the testimony taekn informally, in chambers, without presence of the parents.
The child should know whether the in-chambers testimony will be shared with others, such as parents who might be excluded from chambers, before agreeing to this forum.

Answer 56

The lawyer should also prepare the child for the possibility that the judge may render a decision against the child’s wishes which will not be the child’s fault.

Answer 57

The information a child gives in interviews and during testimony is often misleading because the adults have not understood how to ask children developmentally appropriate questions and how to interpret their answers properly. The child’s attorney must become skilled at recognizing the child’s developmental limitations.
The child’s competency to testify, or the reliability of the child’s testimony or out-of-court statements, may be called into question. The child’s attorney should be familiar with the current law and empirical knowledge about children’s competency, memory, and suggestibility and, where appropriate, attempt to establish the competency and reliability of the child.

Answer 58

When the representation ends, the child’s lawyer should explain in a developmentally appropriate manner why the representation is ending and how the child can obtain assistance in the future should it become necessary. I is important for there to be closure between the child and the lawyer.

Lawyer Skills Flashcards

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