A man convicted in the slaying of an 8-year-old girl based on his daughter's repressed memory should get a new trial because of flawed evidence and trial errors, a federal appeals court ruled.

George T. Franklin, the first known criminal defendant whose conviction relied on repressed memory, is serving a life prison term.The September 1969 killing of Susan Nason went unsolved for 20 years. In 1989, Franklin's daughter, Eileen Franklin-Lipsker, told police she had suddenly remembered seeing her father raise a rock above her friend's head.

The much-publicized case was the subject of a TV movie based on "Sins of the Father," a book by Franklin's daughter.

A three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals on Monday upheld a federal judge who had overturned Franklin's conviction.

The lower court judge cited a trial allegation that Franklin's silence in the face of his daughter's accusation was evidence of guilt, and that jurors never saw news clippings that might have been the basis of his daughter's testimony.

Deputy Attorney General Bruce Ortega said he would consult with supervisors but doubted the case would be appealed further. The decision on whether to retry Franklin would then rest with prosecutors in San Mateo County.

Repressed or recovered memory is a subject of intense debate among mental health experts, lawyers and other advocates in the field of child abuse.

At a retrial, "there is going to be a much healthier skepticism about the credibility of repressed-memory testimony," said Dennis Riordan, Franklin's appellate lawyer.

Franklin's conviction was upheld in state courts but overturned last April by U.S. District Judge D. Lowell Jensen, whose ruling was adopted by the 9th Circuit.

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Jensen said he was not judging the credibility of repressed-memory testimony but said it must be scrutinized carefully and should not be unfairly buttressed as in Franklin's trial.

He cited a jailhouse visit by Franklin's daughter, which a prosecutor helped arrange. Franklin-Lipsker testified that she told her father to tell the truth, but he pointed silently to a sign that said conversations might be monitored.

Jensen said the evidence was inadmissible because Franklin was relying on his constitutional right to remain silent.

He also said Franklin's lawyers should have been allowed to show jurors newspaper articles that allegedly contained every factual detail recalled by Franklin-Lipsker.

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