Penn & Teller have issued a “friend-of-the-court” or amicus brief, asking the U.S. Supreme Court to hear the appeal of a death row inmate who was convicted on testimony gathered through investigative hypnosis.
“The myth that memory is a video recording playing in a private theater in your brain is one of the biggest lies about hypnosis,” their brief states. “And reliance on that falsehood can inflict serious harm—particularly when hypnosis is presented as a memory recovery tool or an investigative technique for law enforcement….”
The brief later continues: “The fact that memory does not work like a video recorder allows Penn & Teller to trick an audience. They know that the brain captures only fragments of observation and then fills in gaps using logic and what the brain expects to see in certain contexts.”
To prove the point, the document explains how the French Drop works, and then goes through how the police officer manipulated an eye witness to change her description from a white man with long hair to a Hispanic man with short hair.
Penn talked to The New York Times about the brief, and had this to say about his bona fides: “I am bringing this to you with the utmost humility. I am carny trash. I am uneducated. If you want to say I have a position of expertise, it is that I have lied to people onstage and gotten them to believe it. And I think I could do what that police officer did.”