In Blindspot by Mahzarin R. Banaji and Anthony G. Greenwald, the idea of the “Memory Mindbugs” caused me to recall the famous Central Park Five case. First off, the research Elizabeth Loftus did regarding witness testimonies and interrogations intrigued me because of the sheer number of wrongful convictions the Innocent Project has discovered in recent years. The Innocence Project is an organization dedicated to dismissing crimes among the innocent through DNA testing, and so far 250 people have been exonerated by tests that concluded they were innocent. This means there were 250 people wrongfully convicted of a crime, and there were most likely a number of them who suffered because of human memory mindbugs.

The Central Park Five also known as the Central Park Jogger case, revolved around the rape and murder of a 28-year-old white woman, along with the attacks of 8 eight other people, in 1989. The police immediately arrested and took 14 or more suspects into custody, resulting in the prosecution of the five defendants. The trials of these five defendants, who were all African American or Hispanic American, were primarily reliant on confessions which they had made after police interrogations. They all pleaded not guilty, but the four juvenile defendants served 6–7 years each while the 16-year-old was tried and sentenced as an adult and served 13 years in an adult prison. Out of all five boys, none of them had DNA that matched DNA from the crime scene. The primary form of evidence was the confessions made during police interrogations, where I believe it could be likely that police purposely modified their vocabulary in order to get the boys to confess. When reading about the memory mindbugs and the specific car crash example where the word “hit” and “smashed” were interchanged, I immediately began to think and wonder how the police investigation of the Central Park Five utilized the memory mindbugs.