Man Freed In Repressed Memory Case
Six years after his daughter’s recovered memory helped convict George Franklin Sr. of murdering her childhood friend, prosecutors announced Tuesday that Franklin will be set free today because they do not have enough evidence to retry him for the 1969 murder.
San Mateo County District Attorney Jim Fox told reporters his decision not to retry Franklin after an appellate court judge threw out his 1990 conviction last year was “very difficult.” Prosecutors still believe Eileen Franklin-Lipsker’s recollection of the murder, Fox said, but “we do not believe we could meet our burden in a jury trial.”
Franklin’s attorney, Douglas Horngrad, said the prosecutor’s decision vindicates his client, who has always maintained his innocence.
Prosecutors said testimony given by Janice Franklin, Eileen’s sister, in a court hearing last month was particularly damaging. Janice Franklin said that she and her sister had been hypnotized before their father’s 1990 trial to enhance their memories of events surrounding the death.
In California, testimony influenced by hypnotic suggestion is inadmissible.
In 1989, Eileen Franklin-Lipsker, then 29, told investigators that she had suddenly remembered watching her father molest and murder 8-year-old Susan Nason, a girl who lived on the same block in Foster City as the Franklin family. Franklin-Lipsker said her father picked the two girls up in September 1969 and drove them to a remote spot in his Volkswagen van. There, Franklin-Lipsker recalled, her father molested Susan in the van before smashing her head with a rock because she would not stop crying.
In dramatic testimony, Franklin-Lipsker said the memory of the incident returned to her as she watched her own daughter, who was close to Susan’s age, at play in their Los Angeles home in 1989.
Largely on the basis of Eileen’s memory of the crime, Franklin was convicted of first-degree murder in 1990 and sentenced to life in prison with possibility of parole. It was the first time that repressed memory was used to convict someone of a crime. , The case against Franklin began to unravel in April 1995, when U.S. District Court Judge Lowell Jensen overturned Franklin’s conviction.
Jensen faulted the trial judge for refusing to let defense attorneys introduce newspaper articles about Susan’s murder that they said could have provided Franklin-Lipsker with information that she claimed to have dredged from repressed memories.