If a method to enhance recollection, identify an assailant, arrest an offender or improving your insurance claim existed.
USA Forensic Hypnosis has been used as a tool to ensure accuracy in eyewitness testimony.
The legal profession are divided on this issue, as memory isn't all it's cracked up to be, yet hypnosis has played a significant part in many criminal cases. One of the most controversial was the decision to hypnotize Albert DeSalvo, aka, the Boston Strangler.
But the first use of hypnosis to solve a crime was documented in 1845. A clairvoyant was put into a trance to try to identify a thief who had stolen four dollars from a store. She described in detail a fourteen-year-old boy and told where he had gone when he left the store. When he was located, was so startled, he confessed.
Forensic hypnosis has made little impact on legal proceedings in the UK, but in a 1968 USA case, Harding v. State. The victim of a shooting and attempted rape identified her assailant only after she was hypnotized. The Maryland Supreme Court decided that hypnosis was like any other memory aid device and allowed the evidence.