Snap Shot
- The question: How do autism, deafness and interpreter-mediated communication, acquired brain injury, depression and anxiety, and cannabis intoxication affect a witness’s memory and the reports that reach court?
- What the research shows: Members of each group can give accurate accounts, and open-ended recall tends to produce the fewest errors, although it leaves gaps. Autistic adults often recall as much as others but may make more errors under some interview methods, and a meta-analysis found them less, not more, suggestible on laboratory measures; deaf witnesses face risks mainly in language access and interpretation; brain injury can leave a true memory gap; depression is associated with overgeneral memory; and in one randomized trial acute THC intoxication increased false memories on a word-list task and in virtual-reality misinformation scenarios, with effects mostly limited to acute intoxication.
- What it does not show: A diagnosis or condition does not by itself make a witness unreliable or reliable, and group research cannot show whether a particular person’s memory is accurate. Many findings come from small samples of high-functioning adults or students in laboratory settings, and some adaptations have mixed results.
- The law: Every person is presumed competent to testify (Fed. R. Evid. 601; Mil. R. Evid. 601; A.R.S. § 13-4061), courts control the mode of questioning and must use qualified interpreters, and disability-access law supports accommodations. Expert testimony is governed by Rule 702 (as amended in 2023), Daubert, Kumho, Mil. R. Evid. 702 and 1102, Houser, and in Arizona by Rule 702, Chapple, Nordstrom, Lindsey, and Moran.
- Issues for each side: Prosecutors can show that adapted, open-ended interviews allow these witnesses to give accurate accounts and that atypical demeanor is not a sign of deception; defense counsel can legitimately examine how interviews, interpretation, injury, mood, or intoxication shaped a particular account, without treating a condition as evidence that the account is wrong.
Witnesses, complainants, and accused persons bring the full range of human differences to the legal system. Some differences affect how events are remembered; many more affect how a memory is retrieved, communicated, and understood by the questioner. Procedures designed around typical communication can, without adjustment, produce an incomplete or distorted record even when the underlying memory is sound.
This paper addresses groups that are not covered by their own papers in this hub: autistic witnesses, deaf and hard-of-hearing witnesses and interpreter-mediated interviews, people with acquired brain injury, people with depression or anxiety, and witnesses who were under the influence of cannabis. Intellectual disability, ADHD, schizophrenia, Alzheimer’s disease, aging, children, dissociation, trauma, and alcohol have their own papers. A handbook review of several special populations reached conclusions that frame this paper: members of these groups can accurately report at least part of what they experienced; open-ended questions produce the fewest errors but leave gaps; closed questions draw out more information but with proportionally more mistakes; and people within these groups differ from one another more than people in typical research samples do (Soraci et al., 2007).
Terminology matters to the people described. Many autistic adults prefer identity-first language (“autistic person”), while others use person-first language (“person with autism”); community surveys have found no single preferred term (Kenny et al., 2016), and researchers have urged avoiding language that frames autism only as deficit (Bottema-Beutel et al., 2021). This paper uses both forms for autism and person-first language elsewhere, and “deaf and hard-of-hearing” for the broad group, recognizing that many signed-language users identify as culturally Deaf.
Autistic Witnesses
Autistic people come into contact with the justice system as victims and witnesses, and their memory difficulties are specific rather than general (Maras & Bowler, 2014). The handbook review, written when no study had yet closely mirrored an eyewitness situation, found that high-functioning autistic people matched comparison groups on many memory tests but did worse with free recall, temporal order, source, faces, complex scenes, and events they had experienced themselves; in the one word-list study, they produced fewer false memories, a result interpreted as reflecting less reliance on meaning-based associations. The authors voiced concern about reliability in eyewitness settings and called for research that tested it directly (Soraci et al., 2007).
Later eyewitness studies show a nuanced picture. In a live first-aid scenario, 18 autistic adults recalled as many correct details as 18 matched comparison adults but made more errors, in both free recall and questioning; both groups remembered actions they performed themselves better than the experimenter’s actions, but autistic participants more often confused who had performed an action during free recall, though not during questioning (Maras et al., 2013). Interview method matters. When 26 autistic and 26 comparison adults were interviewed about a filmed crime, the groups did not differ under a structured interview, but under a cognitive interview the autistic group was significantly less accurate, leading the authors to caution against relying on the standard cognitive interview with autistic witnesses (Maras & Bowler, 2010).
The evidence does not support a presumption that autistic witnesses are more suggestible. A meta-analysis that excluded underpowered studies found increased suggestibility and false memory in people with intellectual disability but decreased suggestibility and fewer false memories in autistic participants compared with others (Griego et al., 2019). Two studies of high-functioning autistic adults used standardized measures of interrogative suggestibility and compliance (North et al., 2008; Maras & Bowler, 2012); because their samples were high-functioning, the results may not extend to all autistic people, and individual variation within any group is substantial. Where autism and intellectual disability co-occur, the research in Intellectual Disability and Memory also applies.
Adapted Interviews and Intermediaries
Several adaptations have been tested. The Witness-Aimed First Account asks the witness to divide the event into separate topics, displayed on notes, and then to recall freely within each topic; with 33 autistic and 30 non-autistic adults, it produced more detailed and more accurate recall than a standard interview for both groups (Maras et al., 2020). With 90 children, sketching the scene while recalling improved autistic children’s recall without increasing errors (Mattison et al., 2015). The evidence is not uniform. A study of 270 children, 71 of them autistic, found no increase in correct details for autistic children with verbal labels, sketching, or a registered intermediary compared with a best-practice police interview, although autistic children performed as well as typically developing children in some interview types (Henry et al., 2017); other researchers responded that the study’s design limited its relevance to practice and that it should not be used to reject these supports (Dando et al., 2018). Registered intermediaries are communication specialists used in England and Wales. A professional consensus statement from the United Kingdom recommends early identification of autistic people in the criminal process and adjustments to communication and environment throughout (Woodhouse et al., 2024).
How Autistic Witnesses Are Perceived
An accurate account can be discounted because of how it is delivered. When observers viewed recorded interviews of autistic and non-autistic adults, truthful autistic interviewees were judged more deceptive and less credible, an effect driven by overall presentation rather than any single behavior (Lim et al., 2022), and behavioral differences in a forensic interview were small and varied widely within both groups (Logos et al., 2026). In a mock-juror study of autistic child witnesses, providing a diagnostic label or general information about autism changed credibility ratings for one child but not the other, suggesting that explanations need to be tailored to the individual (Crane et al., 2020).
Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing Witnesses and Interpreter-Mediated Interviews
Deafness is not known to impair memory for events, and no controlled studies of eyewitness memory in deaf adults were identified; the forensic risks lie mainly in communication. Deaf people vary widely in their primary language and in their English literacy. Some deaf people had limited access to any fluent language in early childhood, and clinicians have described a possible language deprivation syndrome involving language dysfluency, gaps in general knowledge, and disruptions in thinking or behavior, though the authors noted that empirical evidence is very limited (Hall et al., 2017). In two studies, deaf and hard-of-hearing participants understood the Miranda warning less well than hearing participants, and among deaf participants a written warning produced the lowest comprehension, while signed and other presentations produced similar, higher comprehension (Silvasi et al., 2023). Written questions and notes are therefore not a safe substitute for qualified interpretation.
When an interpreter is used, the record of what the witness said is the interpreter’s rendition, and errors in that rendition become errors in the evidence. In an experiment with 103 qualified spoken-language interpreters in simulated police interviews, performance did not differ between face-to-face and video-remote interpreting but declined with audio-only remote interpreting (Hale et al., 2022). Interviewers of child complainants have described interpreters who were unprepared for sensitive content or unfamiliar with best-practice interviewing (Powell et al., 2017), and in an analysis of Swedish verdicts involving 108 children who needed interpreters, courts often cited possible misinterpretation and confusion as reasons to assess the child’s account with caution (Ernberg et al., 2023). These studies concern spoken-language interpreting, but the lesson extends to signed-language interviews: a video record of the witness’s own signing allows the interpretation to be checked later, which protects every party.
Acquired Brain Injury
Traumatic brain injury (TBI) is common among people involved with the legal system. A meta-analysis of 64 studies with 52,540 participants estimated lifetime TBI prevalence among people under criminal-legal supervision at about 46%, and about 32% for moderate-to-severe injury, while cautioning that estimates varied widely with how injury was defined and detected (Hunter et al., 2023). Complainants and witnesses may also have been injured during the events at issue.
Brain injury can affect memory in two forensically distinct ways. First, many people hospitalized for TBI pass through a period of post-traumatic amnesia, a state of confusion and disrupted memory after the injury (Marshman et al., 2013). Events during that period may never have been stored. A witness who cannot remember the moments around a head injury is not necessarily evasive, and one who later reports them in detail may be drawing on what others have said. Second, injury can impair the communication of memories that are intact. Adults with moderate-to-severe TBI were less accurate and slower than uninjured adults in understanding legal language, and simplifying the wording did not close the gap (Wszalek & Turkstra, 2019); in a related study they produced more errors in discussing legal topics, partly explained by working memory and processing speed (Wszalek et al., 2025). Short, concrete questions asked one at a time, with time to respond, help with both.
Depression, Anxiety, and Overgeneral Memory
People with depression often have difficulty retrieving specific memories of single events and instead retrieve summaries of repeated or extended periods, a pattern called overgeneral autobiographical memory (Williams et al., 2007). A meta-analysis of 74 studies found that people with psychiatric diagnoses, most often major depression, schizophrenia, or PTSD, recalled fewer specific and more general memories than people without diagnoses, with similar effect sizes across diagnoses; few studies examined anxiety disorders (Barry et al., 2021). A meta-analysis of 67 works on depression found reduced specificity that was most pronounced in current clinical depression but also present in remitted and subthreshold depression (Weiss-Cowie et al., 2023).
A complainant describing repeated abuse, or an accused describing a pattern of contact, may answer in general terms (“he would come in at night”) and struggle to separate one occasion from another. Difficulty particularizing repeated events is common even without depression (see Schema and Script Memory) and may be greater with it. It is not, by itself, evidence that the events did or did not occur, and pressing for specific dates and details can produce guesses.
Cannabis Intoxication
The handbook review located only one eyewitness study of cannabis: participants who smoked cannabis recalled about 21% fewer details of a staged confrontation while still intoxicated, but the difference disappeared when they were reinterviewed a week later, and identification was unaffected (Soraci et al., 2007; Yuille et al., 1998). More recent work has examined false memory. In a randomized, placebo-controlled trial with 64 volunteers, participants intoxicated with THC showed more false memories on a word-list task and in two virtual-reality misinformation scenarios, effects mostly limited to the period of acute intoxication, although word-list false recognition remained elevated at a sober retest a week later (Kloft et al., 2020). A review of drug effects on false memory and suggestibility concluded that cannabis increases susceptibility mainly during acute intoxication and not necessarily once the person is sober (Kloft et al., 2021). An interview conducted during intoxication may therefore yield less complete and less accurate information than one conducted after the person is sober.
Limits of the Evidence
Research on each of these groups is small compared with research on typical adults. Autism studies have mostly involved adults and children without intellectual disability, often fewer than 40 per group, and have used filmed or staged events with low stakes. Studies of deaf witnesses, real interpreted interviews, and eyewitness memory after brain injury are scarce, some conclusions rest on related questions such as spoken-language interpreting, and overgeneral memory research uses cue-word tasks rather than forensic interviews. Within every group, individual differences are large. A diagnosis therefore describes a set of possible challenges, not a conclusion about a particular witness, and the most informative evidence about a particular account is how it was obtained and whether it is consistent with other evidence.
Questions to Ask About This Research
When the meta-analysis finding lower suggestibility in autism (Griego et al., 2019) is offered to support an account, counsel should ask how much evidence it rests on and whether it applies to this person, since it pooled a limited set of laboratory studies and the adult studies used high-functioning samples (North et al., 2008). When the cognitive interview finding (Maras & Bowler, 2010) is cited to criticize an interview, ask whether the conclusion follows from 26 adults per group viewing a filmed crime, and what this interview actually asked. When registered intermediaries or sketching are cited as proven or as ineffective, ask how well the findings have held up, since Mattison et al. (2015) and Henry et al. (2017) reached different results and Dando et al. (2018) disputed the latter. And when cannabis findings (Kloft et al., 2020) are offered, ask whether the witness was intoxicated at the event, at the interview, or both. These questions are explained in “Reading Research Claims: A Guide for Attorneys” on this site.
Special Populations, Memory, and the Law
Federal and Military Standards
Every person is competent to be a witness unless the rules provide otherwise (Fed. R. Evid. 601; Mil. R. Evid. 601), so a diagnosis or disability ordinarily bears on the weight of testimony rather than its admissibility. The court’s authority to exercise reasonable control over the mode and order of examination can support accommodations such as plain-language questions, breaks, and adjusted settings (Fed. R. Evid. 611(a); Mil. R. Evid. 611(a)). An interpreter must be qualified and must take an oath to make a true translation (Fed. R. Evid. 604; Mil. R. Evid. 604). In federal proceedings instituted by the United States, the Court Interpreters Act generally calls for an interpreter when a party or witness has a hearing impairment that inhibits comprehension or communication (28 U.S.C. § 1827(d)); its application to other forums, including courts-martial, should be checked. Title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act reaches public entities, including state courts (42 U.S.C. § 12132), and Tennessee v. Lane (2004) held that Congress could validly apply Title II to cases implicating the right of access to the courts; what accommodations a given proceeding requires is a separate question.
Expert testimony about memory in these populations is governed by Federal Rule of Evidence 702, as amended December 1, 2023, under Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals, Inc. (1993) and Kumho Tire Co. v. Carmichael (1999), which extended the gatekeeping obligation to all expert testimony, including testimony based on technical or other specialized knowledge. Military Rule of Evidence 702 tracks the federal rule; under Military Rule of Evidence 1102 the 2023 amendment became part of the military rule in 2025 (Joint Service Committee on Military Justice, 2025), and practitioners should confirm current text. Military judges also apply the six factors of United States v. Houser (1993). An expert may explain how a condition can affect memory and communication and how interviews can be adapted; an expert may not testify that a particular witness is truthful or that a particular memory is accurate.
Arizona
In an Arizona criminal trial every person is competent to be a witness (A.R.S. § 13-4061), and Arizona Rules of Evidence 601, 604, and 611(a) parallel the federal rules on competency, interpreters, and control of examination. Arizona Rule of Evidence 702 adopted the Daubert standard effective January 1, 2012, and was amended effective January 1, 2024, to conform to the 2023 federal amendment (Ariz. Sup. Ct. Order R-23-0004). State v. Chapple (1983), Arizona’s leading case on expert testimony about the reliability of eyewitness memory, held that excluding a qualified expert was an abuse of discretion on its facts, while leaving admission generally within the trial court’s discretion; State v. Nordstrom (2001) upheld limiting such an expert to general factors. Experts may not opine on a particular witness’s credibility (State v. Lindsey, 1986, 149 Ariz. at 475; State v. Moran, 1986). Arizona’s general credibility instruction directs jurors to consider, among other factors, the witness’s ability to see, hear, or know the things testified to, the quality of the witness’s memory, and the witness’s manner while testifying (RAJI (Criminal) Standard 15); research showing that manner can be misread in some groups, including autistic witnesses, may be relevant to how jurors weigh that last factor, which remains for the jury.
Special Issues in Legal Practice
The principles described above apply with equal force to every party in a legal proceeding. The science operates the same way regardless of who is asking the questions, and the research summarized here does not by itself favor either side. What differs between the parties is not the science but the vantage point — the particular places where these issues tend to surface, and the particular errors each party is best positioned to guard against. The two summaries below identify those recurring issues. They are offered for orientation, not as litigation strategy; in every case the controlling question is what the evidence in that case will, and will not, support, and the expert’s role is to inform the trier of fact rather than to advocate for either side.
Special Issues for Prosecutors
The research supports several propositions prosecutors can legitimately present. Witnesses in each of these groups can give accurate accounts, particularly in free recall. Autistic adults have recalled as many correct details as others, were less suggestible on average in a meta-analysis of laboratory studies, and can be misjudged as deceptive because of their manner; general information about autism may help a factfinder evaluate demeanor, although one study found its effect varied by child. A brain-injured witness’s inability to remember the moments around an injury is consistent with post-traumatic amnesia rather than evasion, and a depressed complainant’s general descriptions of repeated events are consistent with overgeneral memory. Prosecutors are well placed to request accommodations, qualified interpreters, recorded interviews, and adapted questioning.
The research also counsels caution. Autistic witnesses have made more errors and source confusions in some studies, and the standard cognitive interview reduced their accuracy in one; interviews should be adapted rather than assumed to work. Interpretation errors become evidence, and an unrecorded or audio-only interpreted interview is harder to defend. A witness who reports detailed memories of a period of post-traumatic amnesia may be relying on what others said, and cannabis intoxication at the time of an interview can increase false memories. Testimony that a condition makes a witness more reliable overstates what group research can show.
Special Issues for Defense
The research supports several propositions defense counsel can legitimately present. Interview methods, interpretation, injury, mood, and intoxication can each shape an account: autistic adults have made more errors and source confusions in some studies, interpretation errors become errors in the record, others’ information may fill gaps left by brain injury, depression can make specific events hard to separate, and in one randomized trial acute THC intoxication increased false memories (Kloft et al., 2020). The same principles apply to an accused, whose comprehension of warnings and questions may be affected by deafness, brain injury, or autism. Expert testimony on these principles, tied to how a particular interview was conducted, is legitimate.
The research also counsels caution about the limits that apply to the defense. No condition discussed here, by itself, establishes that a witness is unreliable, and the meta-analytic evidence does not show autistic people to be more suggestible. Atypical demeanor is not evidence of deception, overgeneral memory is not evidence that events did not occur, and an inability to remember the moments around an injury is not evidence of fabrication. An expert cannot tell the factfinder that a particular witness’s memory is false, and arguments based on a diagnosis alone, without evidence of how the account was obtained, go beyond what the research supports.
This paper is for educational purposes only and is not legal advice. The author is a psychologist, not an attorney; summaries of law are general and must be verified against current authority or with a licensed attorney.
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Legal Authorities
Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals, Inc., 509 U.S. 579 (1993).
Kumho Tire Co. v. Carmichael, 526 U.S. 137 (1999).
State v. Chapple, 135 Ariz. 281, 660 P.2d 1208 (1983).
State v. Lindsey, 149 Ariz. 472, 720 P.2d 73 (1986).
State v. Moran, 151 Ariz. 378, 728 P.2d 248 (1986).
State v. Nordstrom, 200 Ariz. 229, 25 P.3d 717 (2001).
Tennessee v. Lane, 541 U.S. 509 (2004).
United States v. Houser, 36 M.J. 392 (C.M.A. 1993).
28 U.S.C. § 1827(d) (Court Interpreters Act).
42 U.S.C. § 12132 (Americans with Disabilities Act, Title II).
Ariz. Rev. Stat. Ann. § 13-4061.
Fed. R. Evid. 601, 604, 611, 702.
Mil. R. Evid. 601, 604, 611, 702, 1102.
Ariz. R. Evid. 601, 604, 611, 702.
Ariz. Sup. Ct. Order R-23-0004 (amending Ariz. R. Evid. 702, effective Jan. 1, 2024).
Revised Arizona Jury Instructions (Criminal), Standard Criminal 15 (Credibility of Witnesses).
Related topic papers: Intellectual Disability and Memory · ADHD and Memory · Schizophrenia and Memory · Alzheimer’s Disease and Memory · Suggestibility of Children’s Memory · Dissociation and Memory
Related topics from Arizona Forensic Services: False Confessions: Suggestibility · Courts-Martial