Texas Rangers stops using hypnosis to investigate crimes following expose

Texas law still allows evidence acquired from hypnosis to be used in courts, while nearly half of all states have banned or restricted it

Texas Department of Public Safety Director Steven McCraw wears boots with the Texas Rangers seal as he testifies before Congress on April 12, 2018. (Getty Images)

The use of hypnosis to investigate crimes has been ended by The Texas Department of Public Safety after an expose by The Dallas Morning News showed that the science was "dubious".

A spokesperson for the department said that the practice of using hypnosis to investigate crimes had ended in January of this year, more than four decades after the start of the programme.

The move to leave hypnosis behind was made less than a year after a Dallas Morning News expose entitled "The Memory Room" raised questions about the effectiveness of the practice.

The two-part series found that Texas had one of the largest programs for using hypnosis in criminal investigations in the United States. The paper revealed that Texas Rangers kept using the method despite science showing that it could distort memories of those it was being used upon and could allow for inaccurate convictions, sending many to prison and some even to their deaths.

Assistant Chief of Media and Communications Travis Considine told The Dallas Morning News that they have "developed more advanced interview and interrogation techniques that yield better results".

The Texas Rangers have done at least 1,700 hypnosis sessions since the 1980s, according to the paper. They used the practice in October of last year to investigate an attempted kidnapping. Department of Public Safety officers did eight sessions last year, three of which in murder investigations. Officers claimed that new information was acquired in seven out of the eight sessions, but it's not clear whether it will be used as evidence now that the programme has been discontinued.

Read more: ‘How self-hypnosis changed my life’

Local police departments may still employ the practice after the end of the programme. More than 800 officers have been approved to perform the practice since the 80s.

Texas law still allows evidence acquired from hypnosis to be used in courts, while nearly half of the states have banned or restricted it.

The Lone Star State is the only state in the country that is known to have an active programme of certification of the practice. It's also likely that Texas' police organisation for investigative hypnotists is the only one still active in the country.

AFP reported earlier this year that 28 experts in cognitive science testified to the Supreme Court, saying hypnosis “invites inaccuracies, false memories, and the creation of 'super' witnesses who are unnaturally confident, often impervious to cross-examination, and therefore disproportionately impactful”.

According to Johns Hopkins Medicine, researchers have found that "hypnosis does not work well as a memory-recovery method," adding that "people who have been hypnotized tend to feel confident that their memories are accurate, contributing to the persistence of false memories".

Republican Texas statehouse representative James White told The Dallas Morning News: “I am encouraged that [the Texas Department of Public Safety] constantly reviews its investigatory processes to ensure that they are evidence-based, peer-reviewed, and striving to earn and maintain the confidence of Texans".

Marx Howell, one of the most prolific users of hypnosis in criminal investigations in the state of Texas, told the paper: “It is a viable investigative technique under certain circumstances in certain types of cases where you don’t have any other leads."