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Supreme Court of New Jersey · 1994
642 A.2d 1372 (N.J. 1994)
When child witnesses are subjected to coercive or highly suggestive pretrial interview techniques, a pretrial "taint" hearing is required to determine whether their recollections were so distorted that their statements and testimony are unreliable; once the defendant shows "some evidence" of such techniques, the State must prove reliability by clear and convincing evidence.
Later courts cite it without significant positive or negative signal.
Treatment last confirmed July 18, 2026. Case-wide subsequent treatment; human-set. Not specific to any one passage.
Facilitated communication (FC, "supported typing") is not a valid communication technique: controlled authorship studies unanimously show that FC-generated messages are authored by the facilitator rather than the person with a disability, no new validating evidence has emerged, and every major professional body opposes its use — so statements produced through FC, including abuse allegations, cannot be attributed to the person with the disability.
Delayed disclosure is the norm in child sexual abuse: most victims do not tell during childhood or delay for months to years, with predictable barriers (young age, intrafamilial abuse, lack of caregiver support), so delay by itself is not evidence of fabrication; how often disclosed cases involve subsequent denial or recantation is genuinely contested, with recantation estimates ranging from uncommon to roughly 23% in dependency samples — where recantation tracks family pressure rather than false allegation.
Structured forensic-interview protocols built on open-ended prompts — canonically the NICHD Investigative Interview Protocol — reliably improve child interviews: interviewers use several times more free-recall invitations and far fewer suggestive and option-posing questions, children provide more (and more central) information, and ground-truth studies show the added information comes at no cost to accuracy.
Young children's reports can be substantially distorted by suggestive, leading, or coercive interviewing, creating a real risk of false accounts; at the same time, children are not inherently unreliable — with developmentally appropriate, non-leading, supportive protocols they can give accurate accounts — so reliability turns on interview quality and conditions, not age alone.