In amongst the seeming frenzy of attention the hypnotist thief seems to be getting, another story snuck into the headlines this morning that diverted me away from that discussion…

Ok, so here is what was written in this hypnosis article in Russia Today:

Hypnotism specialists are being drafted in to help solve the murder of Dagestan television executive, Gadzhi Abashilov. The head of the Dagestan Republic’s state TV station was shot dead in the capital, Makhachkala, last Friday.

Aleksandr Bastrykin from Russia’s Prosecutor-General’s Office says investigators requested the help of experts on reviving human memory.

Abashilov was gunned down in his car. His driver survived the attack and was taken to hospital.

I find this incredible. In neighbouring Ukraine, hypnosis is banned by law from being used amongst groups of people, in Canada hypnosis is no longer considered useful in eye witness testimony and many US states have doubted the efficacy of it’s use. It is virtually never used in that way any longer in the UK.

In somethng as important as a murder investigation, surely people would understand what they are using. If it is simply to enhance ideas for the use of the investigation team and not going to be used as evidence, then ok, but surely they are not going to use this as trial-bound evidence. If not for the fact that the infomation is possibly unreliable, then because the methodology maybe flawed and the usefulness of hypnosis in this way is not really proven beyond subjective cases being made.

I have discussed this a lot in the past here and so am not going into detail today, just wanted to cite this case and am going to be keeping my eye on it.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 26th, 2008 at 3:46 am and is filed under hypnosis. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.