In the news by Karen Franklin PhD

Why does the United States lock up so many people?

2012-01-29T22:44:00.000-08:00

Freedom is seldom found

By beating someone to the ground

-- Amos Lee, Freedom

Prisoner sketch, Pelican Bay SHU

The statistics are shocking: One out of every 99 adults quarantined behind bars in the United States, with larger and larger swaths of the civilian work force deployed as a captor class. Although academic scholars have been analyzing the social costs of our 30-year punishment binge for some time, the American public has been oddly disinterested in our de-evolution into a full-blown prison nation.

Finally, that appears to be changing, perhaps in no small part due to the staggering financial costs of mass incarceration during these tough economic times. The direct costs of prisons have quadrupled over two decades, to almost $40 billion a year in the 40 states sampled in a new report by the Vera Institute of Justice's Center on Sentencing and Corrections.

Now, award-winning New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik has stepped up to ask the essential question: WHY do we lock up so many people?

After all, he points out in his essay, "The Caging of America," New York City has managed to buck the incarceration trend, while seeing its crime rate plummet by as much as 80 percent (the topic of criminology scholar Franklin E. Zimring's new book, The City That Became Safe).

Gopnik writes with the outrage of an outsider whose blindfolds were suddenly yanked away to reveal the carceral state in all of its nightmarish savagery:

Death row, Tennessee
Mass incarceration on a scale almost unexampled in human history is a fundamental fact of our country today -- perhaps the fundamental fact, as slavery was the fundamental fact of 1850.

The scale and the brutality of our prisons are the moral scandal of American life. Every day, at least 50,000 men -- a full house at Yankee Stadium -- wake in solitary confinement, often in "supermax" prisons or prison wings, in which men are locked in small cells, where they see no one, cannot freely read and write, and are allowed out just once a day for an hour's solo "exercise." (Lock yourself in your bathroom and then imagine you have to stay there for the next ten years, and you will have some sense of the experience.)

How did we get here? How is it that our civilization, which rejects hanging and flogging and disembowelling, came to believe that caging vast numbers of people for decades is an acceptably humane sanction?

To answer his question, Gopnik weaves together two strands of American history, what we might call the Southern and the Northern penal traditions.

Juvenile In Justice, Richard Ross

The new Jim Crow

The Southern strand, most recently articulated by Michelle Alexander, posits that penal colonies arose to replace the slave plantations in the post-Reconstruction South, with mass incarceration functioning as "The New Jim Crow" for poor African American men in the post-civil rights era. It's hard to argue with the statistics: More than half of American black men without a high-school diploma go to prison at some time in their lives, and more of these men are trapped in today's criminal justice system than were enslaved prior to the Civil War:

Young black men pass quickly from a period of police harassment into a period of "formal control" (i.e., actual imprisonment) and then are doomed for life to a system of "invisible control." Prevented from voting, legally discriminated against for the rest of their lives, most will cycle back through the prison system. The system, in this view, is not really broken; it is doing what it was designed to do.

Procedural justice

Many of you may be familiar with this notion of South's white supremacist contribution to the carceral state, but you may be surprised to learn about the North's major hypothesized contribution: the Bill of Rights.

Wait a minute. Weren't our founding fathers all about protecting our rights, making sure that we were never again victimized by the cruel rule of tyrants?

In blaming the Bill of Rights, Gopnik channels Harvard Law School professor William J. Stuntz, who died just before last fall's publication of his The Collapse of American Criminal Justice, which argues that the Enlightenment era saw the elevation of procedural rights at the expense of moral justice.

The trouble with the Bill of Rights, [Stuntz] argues, is that it emphasizes process and procedure rather than principles…. This emphasis, Stuntz thinks, has led to the current mess, where accused criminals get laboriously articulated protection against procedural errors and no protection at all against outrageous and obvious violations of simple justice.

Thus, in our increasingly impersonal and bureaucratic world, rather than the nemesis of the brutal prison, due process is actually its mirror image:

The more professionalized and procedural a system is, the more insulated we become from its real effects on real people…. Once the procedure ends, the penalty begins, and, as long as the cruelty is routine, our civil responsibility toward the punished is over. We lock men up and forget about their existence.

Gopnik's essay, which I highly recommend, can be found HERE.

Juror’s bad dream becomes defense nightmare

2012-01-26T20:42:00.000-08:00

What would you do if you were defending a man accused of bludgeoning someone to death with a baseball bat, and a juror disclosed having a nightmare in which the defendant chased her around with a baseball bat?

You might request that the juror be dismissed.

That’s what happened this week in a murder trial St. Lawrence County, New York.

But the judge denied the defense request, despite a plea from the juror's family that she is emotionally overwhelmed by the case. Besides her nightmare, the juror also told the court that she started crying when she saw her father sitting in a recliner that reminded her of the chair in which the dead man was found.

The ruling shocked the defendant.

"I just about fell over," defendant Wayne T. Oxley Jr told a reporter. "I was pretty shocked she stayed on the jury. I kind of lost my breath."

The prosecuting attorney said it wouldn't be fair to discharge a juror just because of what she dreamed. "Dreams are dreams, you can't make them not happen," said the attorney.

Prominent forensic psychologist Saul Kassin of the John Jay College of Criminal Justice disagreed.

"It's clear she has formed a negative emotional opinion," Kassin told a reporter from the Watertown Daily Times. "If I were on the defense team, that would make me nervous. People often have difficulty separating reality from fantasy."

This is Oxley's third trial. The first ended with a conviction for second-degree murder, later overturned on appeal. A retrial ended in a hung jury. If Oxley is convicted and successfully appeals based on the juror's emotional bias, Judge Jerome J. Richards's ruling could end up a nightmare for him as well.

Federal judge tosses hebephilia as basis for civil detention

2012-01-20T20:27:00.000-08:00

Hebephilia is too controversial for the government to use it to claim that a sex offender has a serious mental disorder meriting civil commitment in order to protect the public, a federal judge ruled Thursday.

Judge Terrence Boyle

In ordering the release of convicted sex offender Jeffrey Neuhauser, the judge also found that the government had failed to prove that the prisoner was at high risk to reoffend or would have serious difficulty controlling his impulses.

"The Court finds that it would be inappropriate to predicate civil commitment on a diagnosis that a large number of clinical psychologists believe is not a diagnosis at all, at least for forensic purposes," wrote Judge Terrence W. Boyle of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of North Carolina. "Although hebephilia has been proposed to be included as a mental disorder in the revision of the DSM, it has been rejected as a proper mental disorder by numerous psychologists.”

Two of those psychologists, Diane Lytton and Richard Wollert, were retained in the case by Suzanne Little of the Federal Public Defender. Lytton testified that the residual diagnostic category of "paraphilia not otherwise specified" was never intended to turn criminal behaviors such as sex acts with minors into mental illnesses.

Even the government's own expert, Gary Zinik, conceded that the legitimacy of hebephilia is a hotly contested issue in the mental health community, the judge noted.

The pseudoscientific label is typically assigned by government experts when an offender is neither a rapist nor a pedophile, bur rather has offended against more physically mature minors.

Neuhauser acknowledged a sexual preference for pubescent boys. He served federal prison time for distributing child pornography and two counts of interstate travel with the intent to engage in sex with a minor. He also had previous convictions for contributing to the sexual delinquency of a child and assault and battery in connection with the attempted sodomy of a 14-year-old boy.

Disturbance Control Team patch, Butner prison

Boyle's ruling may impact other federal prisoners facing civil detention, as nearly all of the 130 or so federal prisoners that the government is seeking to detain under the Adam Walsh Act of 2006 are housed at a federal prison in Butner, North Carolina, and so are processed through the North Carolina federal court.

Yesterday's ruling follows on the heels of another dismissal of a civil commitment petition by Senior U.S. District Judge Bernard A. Friedman. In a scatching critique of the prosecution's overblown claims of mental illness and risk, Judge Friedman opined that sex offender Markis Revland had fabricated accounts of child molestation in order to placate therapists at the Butner prison.

In Neuhauser's case, Judge Boyle stated that even if hebephilia was a legitimate diagnostic label, the government still did not meet its burden of proving by clear and convincing evidence that the convicted sex offender is at a high risk to reoffend.

He credited the defense experts' analyses of risk as being more accurate than the prosecution's. Wollert relied on an actuarial tool he helped to develop, the Multisample Age-Stratified Table of Sexual Recidivism Rates (MATS-1). (See my review here.) Other actuarial tools used by the various experts included the Static 99-R, the Static 2002-R and the MnSOST-R, which is widely known to overestimate sex offenders' risk of recidivism.

"It should be noted that results of these assessments depend heavily on the choice of reference group to which the respondent is compared," the judge aptly noted. "Because Drs. Wollert and Lytton analyzed their actuarial results in light of Mr. Neuhauser's advanced age, his ability to control his behavior while in the community, his pattern of offending (in particular, the fact that his first victim was by force and later victims willingly participated even though they could not give legal consent due to their age), and the fact that Mr. Neuhauser had not been subject to any deterrent sanctions until his most recent prison sentence, the Court finds their actuarial assessments to more accurately reflect Mr. Neuhauser's likelihood of recidivism."

Boyle said he was impressed by the offender's honesty, remorse and genuine desire to control his illegal behavior: "He openly discussed his sexual orientation toward pubescent boys but demonstrated a true understanding that boys of that age are unable to legally consent to sexual activity, even if they appear to him to be willing to engage in sexual contact…. Mr. Neuhauser's sexual orientation toward pubescent boys … is, standing alone, insufficient to justify his civil commitment under the Adam Walsh Act.… [T]here must be proof of serious difficulty in controlling behavior."

Boyle, by the way, is no political liberal. A former legislative assistant to arch-conservative Senator Jesse Helms of North Carolina, he was appointed to his present post by President Ronald Reagan back in 1984. Democrats later blocked President George W. Bush’s attempt to elevate him to an appellate judgeship, citing concerns over his civil rights record.

Neuhauser will be under parole supervision for five years, during which time he must undergo sex offender treatment and polygraph testing, avoid contact with minors, and submit to other special restrictions.

Further information on the hebephilia controversy is HERE.

Tearing the child apart: Free training in San Francisco

2012-01-18T08:13:00.000-08:00

What motivates parents to -- either consciously or unconsciously -- damage or destroy their own children?

We know the complex psychological effects of high-conflict divorce, but how do we understand the contribution of narcissism, envy and perverse thinking?

This Saturday, Jan. 21, forensic psychologist Michael Donner, a psychoanalyst, child custody evaluator and ethicist, will take an analytic approach to questions usually considered part of the family court system.

Sponsored by the San Francisco Center for Psychoanalysis, Saturday's event features H. Spencer Bloch, MD, author of Adolescent Development, Psychopathology, and Treatment, as discussant.

The event runs from 10:00 a.m. to noon and is free. To register, call Aaron Chow at (415) 563-5815 or email him HERE. More information and online registration is HERE.

Donner authored an excellent article by the same title in Psychoanalytic Psychology. Contact him (HERE) to request a copy of "Tearing Children Apart: The Contribution of Narcissism, Envy and Perverse Modes of Thought to Child Custody Wars."

Our broken family court system: Free training in Arizona

Another free training geared toward child custody evaluators is coming up March 16-17 in Phoenix, Arizona. Co-sponsored by the National Alliance of Professional Psychology Providers and the Nicholas and Dorothy Cummings Foundation, it features a cast of well-known experts, including:

Dr. Lenore Walker (author of the classic, The Battered Woman’s Syndrome)
David L. Shapiro, PhD
G. Andrew H. Benjamin, JD, PhD, ABPP
Judge Marjory Fields
John Caccavale, PhD (speaking on Business Ethics for Custody Evaluators)

More information and online registration is available HERE.

SEX PANIC: Highly recommended

2012-01-16T08:25:00.000-08:00

As nightfall does not come at once, neither does oppression. In both instances, there is a twilight when everything remains seemingly unchanged. And it is in such twilight that we all must be most aware of change in the air – however slight – lest we become unwitting victims of the darkness.

-- Justice William O. Douglas

The strands of modern American containment were woven so gradually that today's prison culture has come to feel almost natural. But imagine how the landscape might look to someone who was experimentally cryopreserved in, say, 1981, and thawed out 30 years later:

People cheerfully taking off their shoes and queuing up to be x-rayed by robotic agents of "Homeland Security," GPS satellite monitoring, DNA databases, civil detention for future crimes, online registries of drug offenders, surveillance cameras everywhere, "zero tolerance" schools where children are viewed as pint-sized criminals.

And, underlying it all, the new carceral state: A massive underclass of surplus labor (one out of every 99 adults) quarantined in prisons, with large swaths of the former industrial and agricultural laboring classes transformed into a security force of prison guards, parole agents and police working to generate yet more prisoners.

"By design this penal system churns the poor and marginal, rendering them all but unemployable, thus poorer and ever more marginal," writes anthropologist Roger Lancaster. "No legitimate theory of corrections, crime, or social order justifies this approach, which can only be understood as vindictive."

In Sex Panic and the Punitive State, Lancaster meticulously explains how 35 years of virtually nonstop panics over crime -- urban unrest in the 1960s, street crime in the 1970s, crack wars in the 1980s, predatory gangs in the 1990s, and terrorists in the 2000s -- have congealed into a durable regime dominated by irrational fear: "Power flows through the nervous system of a body politic paralyzed by dread. Ruled and rulers are equally trapped in fear."

Laying the groundwork for wave after wave of panics, Lancaster convincingly argues, is a synergy between deeply ingrained (but now covert) fears of black criminal-rapists and homosexual child molesters:

Sexual anxieties and fear of crime have come to form a dynamic feedback loop. On the one hand, it seems unlikely that revived sex panics would have put down such deep social roots except in the context of a wider war on crime. On the other hand, it also seems unlikely that crime fears could have become so finely woven into the fabric of everyday life without the element of sex panic.

The resulting system of social control is an amalgam of old and new elements. Its Puritanism, its paranoia about strange outsiders, its enactment of dramas of peril and rites of protection are as old as the United States itself; they are deeply embedded in the national psyche…. At the same time the resulting system of social control departs from long-standing liberal traditions that begin with a presumption of innocence, restrain the reach of law, defer to zones of privacy, and resist the application of excessive punishments or the tacking on of ex-post-facto provisions.

Lancaster sees the creation and privileging of a novel social category -- "the victim" -- as a powerful force in this new social order. In the name of this iconic crime victim, the enormously successful Victim's Rights Movement has led the charge to dismantle traditional legal protections, a trend that may be difficult if not impossible to ever reverse.

Perversely, increased repression of the American citizenry has arisen in tandem with the loosening of economic restraints on "capitalism’s most predatory forms" -- privatization, globalization and the corporations' relentless squeezing of what we now call the 99 percent.

In Lancaster's dystopic vision, America has degenerated into "a broken social order based on mistrust, resentment, and ill will," manifested in a mass addiction to dumbed-down, commercialized vengeance spectacles. We need look no further for evidence of this grim state of affairs than the vitriolic comments of YouTube viewers beneath the video of U.S. Marines urinating on the bodies of murdered Afghanis.

As with Abu Ghraib, we can safely bet that the four Marines will be sanctioned, while the structures that fostered their callous behavior will remain untouched. As Lancaster notes, this is all par for the course: "Any cultural system that equates punishment with justice will foster complicated forms of sadism. And any institutional system that inculcates intense fear and rage will produce technicians who periodically depart from standard operating procedures."

Many of you blog readers will have read other fine books on sex panic and the carceral state. But this meticulously researched and eloquently written analysis goes deeper and wider, masterfully integrating disparate historical, economic, religious and social trends. Lancaster delves at length into the complex interplay of racism and homophobia, even weaving in personal experiences as a gay man that helped to shape his thinking.

Bottom line: Read this landmark book; I guarantee it will enlighten.

A  nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military  defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual  death.

-- Martin Luther King Jr.

MANY THANKS TO BLOG READER JAMES H. FOR DONATING THIS BOOK.

AND THANKS TO THE ANONYMOUS BLOG READERS FOR THE OTHER BOOK DONATIONS.

As usual, if you appreciate this review, I will greatly appreciate your visiting the Amazon site (HERE) and clicking on "yes" (this review was helpful).

Martin Luther King Jr. on maladjustment

2012-01-14T22:36:00.000-08:00

Last year, in honor of Martin Luther King Day, I excerpted a large portion of a keynote speech the visionary civil rights leader delivered at the 1967 convention of the American Psychological Association, just seven months before he was gunned down and at a time when he was drawing larger connections between racial oppression and the Vietnam War. This year, I am excerpting only one short section, but I have made the entire speech, "The Role of the Behavioral Scientist in the Civil Rights Movement," available for download (HERE). It's 45 years old, but still remarkably relevant today.

There are certain technical words in every academic discipline which soon become stereotypes and even clichés. Every academic discipline has its technical nomenclature. You who are in the field of psychology have given us a great word. It is the word maladjusted. This word is probably used more than any other word in psychology. It is a good word; certainly it is good that in dealing with what the word implies you are declaring that destructive maladjustment should be destroyed. You are saying that all must seek the well-adjusted life in order to avoid neurotic and schizophrenic personalities.

But on the other hand, I am sure that we will recognize that there are some things in our society, some things in our world, to which we should never be adjusted. There are some things concerning which we must always be maladjusted if we are to be people of good will. We must never adjust ourselves to racial discrimination and racial segregation. We must never adjust ourselves to religious bigotry. We must never adjust ourselves to economic conditions that take necessities from the many to give luxuries to the few. We must never adjust ourselves to the madness of militarism, and the self-defeating effects of physical violence....

Thus, it may well be that our world is in dire need of a new organization, The International Association for the Advancement of Creative Maladjustment. Men and women should be as maladjusted as the prophet Amos, who in the midst of the injustices of his day, could cry out in words that echo across the centuries, 'Let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream'; or as maladjusted as Abraham Lincoln, who in the midst of his vacillations finally came to see that this nation could not survive half slave and half free; or as maladjusted as Thomas Jefferson, who in the midst of an age amazingly adjusted to slavery, could scratch across the pages of history, words lifted to cosmic proportions, 'We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal. That they are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights. And that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.' And through such creative maladjustment, we may be able to emerge from the bleak and desolate midnight of man’s inhumanity to man, into the bright and glittering daybreak of freedom and justice.

I have not lost hope. I must confess that these have been very difficult days for me personally. And these have been difficult days for every civil rights leader, for every lover of justice and peace.

Emboldened DSM-5 critics issue public challenge

2012-01-10T20:01:00.000-08:00

In October, I reported on the Society for Humanistic Psychology's online petition urging the American Psychiatric Association to reconsider the mental illness expansions and biomedical emphasis proposed for its new diagnostic manual, due out in 2013.

Since then, the effort has taken off like wildfire. More than 10,000 people have signed the petition, and the fledgling Coalition for DSM-5 Reform has mushroomed to include 41 concerned mental health organizations in the United States, Britain and Denmark.

Now, the Coalition has posted an open letter calling upon the developers of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders to submit controversial proposals in the DSM-5 to an independent group of scientists and scholars with no ties to either the DSM-5 Task Force or the American Psychiatric Association for an independent, external review.

"We respectfully ask that you not respond again with assurances about internal reviews and field trials because such assurances, at this point, are not sufficient," says the letter. "We believe an external, independent review is critical in terms of ensuring the proposed DSM-5 is safe and credible."

As the critics gain ground and the battle heats up, it will be very interesting to see how the beleaguered DSM-5 Task Force responds.

More developments on the sex offender front

2012-01-08T20:22:00.000-08:00

Study finds problems with real-world reliability of Static-99

Evaluators differ almost half of the time in their scoring of the most widely used risk assessment instrument for sex offenders, the Static-99, according to a report in the current issue of Criminal Justice and Behavior. Even a one-point difference on the instrument can have substantial practical implications, both for individual sex offenders and for public policy. In by far the largest and most ecologically valid study of interrater agreement in Static-99 scoring, the research examined paired risk ratings for about 700 offenders in Texas and New Jersey. The findings call into question the typical practice of reporting only a single raw score, without providing confidence intervals that would take into account measurement error. The study, the latest in a line of similar research by Marcus Boccaccini, Daniel Murrie and colleagues, can be requested HERE.

California reining in SVP cowboys

Psychiatrist Allen Frances has more news coverage of a memorable state-sponsored training at which Sexually Violent Predator (SVP) evaluators were cautioned to be more prudent in their diagnostic practices. Ronald Mihordin, MD, JD, acting clinical director of the Department of Mental Health program, warned evaluators against cavalierly diagnosing men who have molested teenagers with “hebephilia” and rapists with “paraphilias not otherwise specified-nonconsent,” unofficial diagnoses not found in the current edition of the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. California evaluators have come under fire in the past for billing upwards of $1 million per year conducting SVP evaluations of paroling prisoners. The PowerPoints of the 3-day training are now available online, at the DMH's website.

The neuroscience of sex offending

In preventive detention trials of sex offenders, forensic evaluators often testify about whether an offender lacks volitional control over his conduct. But how much do we really know about this? In the current issue of Aggression and Violent Behavior, forensic psychologist John Matthew Fabian explores the neuroscience literature on sex offending as it applies to civil commitment proceedings. The article can be viewed online, or requested from the author HERE.

Challenge to sex offender registry

Although the sex offender niche is by far the most partisan and contentious in forensic psychology, one thing that just about all informed professionals agree about is that sex offender registration laws do more harm than good. By permanently stigmatizing individuals, they hamper rehabilitation and reintegration; as Elizabeth Berenguer Megale of the Barry University School of Law explores in an essay in the Journal of Law and Social Deviance (full-text available HERE), they lead to a form of “social death.” Now, the California Coalition on Sexual Offending (CCOSO) and the Association for the Treatment of Sexual Abusers (ATSA) have filed a joint amicus brief in a challenge to California's "Jessica's Law," which bars registered sex offenders from living within 2,000 feet of any school or park. The amicus contends that the restriction is punishment without any rational purpose, in that it does not enhance public safely or deter future criminality. The challenge was brought by Steven Lloyd Mosley. After a jury found Mosley guilty of misdemeanor assault, a non-registerable offense, the sentencing judge ordered him to register anyway, ruling that the assault was sexually motivated. The 4th District Court of Appeal granted Mosley’s appeal, and the California Department of Corrections has appealed to the state's supreme court. We'll have to wait and see whether the high court will tackle the issue of registration laws directly, or will sidestep with a narrow, technical ruling.

Civil commitment petition against Butner, NC prisoner dismissed

2012-01-05T20:10:00.000-08:00

Federal judge discounts sex offender's confessions as fabricated

Sex offenses are upsetting, and their perpetrators creepy. Understandably, it's easy for jurors and even judges to brush aside legal technicalities and burdens of proof in the interest of keeping women and children safe.

But it is disturbing when forensic psychologists collude in this endeavor, disregarding the limits of science by overstating the accuracy of risk assessment instruments, inventing pretextual disorders to justify preventive detention, and even claiming omniscient truth-telling powers regarding ancient, unprosecuted allegations.

In an environment replete with such folie à plusieurs, it was refreshing to read the recent federal decision in the case of Markis Revland, a habitual criminal who faced civil detention after serving time for child pornography possession.

Senior U.S. District Judge Bernard A. Friedman systematically analyzed and rejected the evidence as failing to meet the government’s burden of proof. Not only did the government fail to show that Revland had a serious mental disorder that put him at high risk of molesting children if released, it even failed to prove that the convict had engaged in any hands-on child molestation in the past, the judge ruled.

Child abuse claims imaginary

In addition to his conviction for child pornography, Revland had two prior convictions for indecent exposure. But the most damning evidence against him was his own admissions, made during sex offender treatment at the federal prison in Butner, North Carolina, that he had committed 149 additional incidents of sexual abuse of children of various ages.

However, the keen-minded judge of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of North Carolina wasn’t buying those confessions:

The court finds that all of the 149 incidents reported by respondent … were the product of his imagination, not actual events.

He explained that Revland was desperate to enroll in Butner’s treatment program in order to escape the infamous federal prison in Leavenworth, Kansas, where he feared for his life after being beaten and raped at knifepoint by fellow prisoners. Once at Butner, he felt compelled to fabricate “a long list of sex offenses,” lest he be deemed uncooperative and returned to Leavenworth.

The offenses that he described in great detail were implausible, in that he was serving a prior, 10-year prison term for cocaine at around the same time that he claimed to be running around molesting children, the judge determined:

The reported incidents were not only too numerous to believe but also recounted – years afterwards – far too precisely, with respondent providing the age of the victim, the time of day … when each offense occurred, and the location where each incident allegedly occurred…. And yet the government offered no evidence to independently verify that any of these incidents occurred or that any of them – even one – ever resulted in investigation or prosecution.

As a group, Butner offenders – most of them incarcerated on child pornography charges -- have confessed to an unusually high number of undetected sex offenses, leading many observers to suspect that the widely publicized numbers are unreliable. Critics say treatment providers at the federal institution pressured prisoners to report as many offenses as possible, lest they be accused of not cooperating.

No bona fide sexual disorder

Likewise, Judge Friedman was unconvinced by the government's claim that Revland suffered from a mental disorder, pedophilia, that would justify civil commitment by making him likely to engage in future child molestation if released.

Friedman conceded that the convict met the criteria for antisocial personality disorder. But he found that such a diagnosis was irrelevant:

The essence of this disorder is that the patient “fail[s] to conform to social norms with respect to lawful behaviors as indicated by repeatedly performing acts that are grounds for arrest.” Dr. [Jeffrey] Singer testified that the vast majority of prison inmates have this disorder, as they are in prison for breaking the law and failing to conform to social norms. Dr. [Joseph] Plaud testified that there is no documented causal link, in this case or in general, between antisocial personality disorder and sexual dangerousness. The court credits these experts' opinions.

Finally, the judge rejected the claims of two government psychologists that two so-called actuarial instruments, the Static-99R and the MnSOST-R, showed Revland to be at high risk for recidivism.

Judge Friedman said the risk assessments by both Dr. Manuel Gutierrez, a Board of Prisons employee, and contract psychologist Jeffrey Davis were "particularly unreliable in the present case because they both assumed that [Revland] is a pedophile with numerous 'hands-on' victims, whereas the court has rejected both of these premises."

Increasingly, cutting-edge researchers are coming to the consensus that by and large, with a few exceptions at the extreme end of the continuum, sex offenders are not a distinct group worthy of the level of special attention they are getting these days. Rather, they are garden-variety criminals who violate social norms, take what they want, and eventually burn out as they enter middle age.

The judge's bold language in cutting through the empty psychobabble about mental disorder and risk harkens back to the little boy in the Hans Christian Andersen tale, The Emperor's New Clothes, who was not afraid to declare out loud that the emperor was naked.

Happy New Year’s – and thanks for your support!

2011-12-31T21:55:00.000-08:00

Thanks very much to those of you who responded to my request for help, generously donating money and books or signing up for a paid subscription. I really appreciate your kind assistance. For those of you who meant to chip in but didn’t get around to it yet (I know how busy we all get), click HERE to see a list of ways that you can still contribute. (Or, look in the right column of the blog's website.) Please join in today, to help keep this blog thriving in 2012 and beyond.

Happy New Year’s to all of you!

Updates of leading malingering and Miranda rights tests

2011-12-31T21:45:00.000-08:00

As we ring in the new year, here are a couple of updates on tests some of you may be using in your forensic practices.

Miranda instruments revised

When it comes to assessing whether a criminal defendant had the capacity to waive his or her Miranda rights prior to giving a statement to police, there is only one game in town -- the Instruments for Assessing Understanding and Appreciation of Miranda Rights by eminent forensic psychologist Tom Grisso and colleagues. Now, that set of tests has been completely revised and given a new name: the Miranda Rights Comprehension Instruments (MRCI). One of the main problems with the old instruments was that their language was more complex than the actual language used by many police warnings, reducing their real-world validity. That problem has been rectified through simpler language in the new edition. Also, the test developers promise better psychometric properties and updated normative data. But it's kind of a tricky situation, because we are being instructed to use the new instruments when assessing juveniles, but to stick with the old ones for assessing adults until new adult norms are published some time in 2013. More on the new instruments is HERE.

Facelift for gold-standard malingering test

In contrast to Miranda rights, there is no shortage of instruments for assessing malingering. But for assessing malingered psychosis, one instrument is widely recognized as the "gold standard." That test is Richard Rogers and colleagues’ Structured Interview of Reported Symptoms (SIRS). It too was recently revised. The revision was in part due to the discovery that the original SIRS failed to adequately distinguish between some people diagnosed with dissociative identity disorder and people who were instructed to deliberately exaggerate symptoms. But critical reception for the revised tool, the SIRS-2, has been less than stellar. Over at the Open Access Journal of Forensic Psychology, forensic psychologist Greg DeClue warns that the SIRS-2 may be vulnerable to admissibility challenges in court. That is due to the publishers' refusal to be transparent by letting independent professionals such as DeClue analyze their data. DeClue challenges the test's developers to submit a comprehensive description of the SIRS-2 validation study for peer-reviewed publication, and to let independent professionals analyze the data without impediment. His interesting critique is HERE.

Join the blogger's circle of support

2011-12-20T20:39:00.000-08:00

As the year draws to a close, I would like to publicly thank all my loyal readers and subscribers. It’s been gratifying to see subscriptions for this blog grow from a few dozen back in 2007 to today's many hundreds of forensic practitioners, lawyers, educators, criminologists, researchers, authors and policy advocates. It is great to see nearly all of the U.S. states and dozens of nations represented, from Saudi Arabia and Turkey to Scotland and Lithuania.

A snapshot of this morning's blog visitors from around the world

I am especially grateful to the many of you who have lent tangible support through monetary donations, books, and other forms of encouragement. Your generous support has been essential in defraying my costs. Letting me know that the time and energy I devote to blogging is useful in keeping you connected and abreast of developments in the field has also helped me stay motivated.

For those of you who have not yet chipped in, I’ve made it very easy. Here are three ways to join my expanding circle of support, and help keep this blog going:

1. Subscribe. A $3 monthly subscription helps defray my Internet fees and research costs. Just click on the "SUBSCRIBE" button in the upper right column of the blog. Paypal makes it quick and easy.

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3. Gift. Finally, donating a book from my Amazon wish list is a great way to show your appreciation. The list is HERE; you can also browse through it on the blog page. There's a price range for everyone.

And thanks again to all of you who have given me so much support over the years.

Appellate court upholds exclusion of SPECT evidence

2011-12-18T20:30:00.000-08:00

Yerba Buena Island, San Francisco Bay

On May 22, 2002, the body of Juliette Williamson was found washed up on Yerba Buena Island in the San Francisco Bay. Williamson and her long-time partner Bruce Brooks were well-known street performers known as the Chicago Brother and Sister Blues Band. For years, they had lived together in a purple school bus parked under a freeway.

Within days of Williamson's disappearance, Brooks gave three confessions to friends. He provided graphic details of how he bludgeoned her to death with a hammer after a drunken quarrel. He even took one friend to the location where he had tossed her body into the Bay; there, police later recovered blood samples that matched Williamson's DNA.

The couple’s 16-year relationship had always been tumultuous, but it was deteriorating in the weeks before the killing. Brooks had resumed smoking crack cocaine and had openly threatened to kill Williamson if she left him, according to trial testimony.

Bruce Brooks. Photo credit: M. Macer, S.F. Chronicle

By the time he went to trial six years later, Brooks's story had changed. He testified that Williamson attacked him and knocked him "silly." He saw a fluorescent number three in his mind; the next thing he knew he was dropping Williamson's body over the bridge to bury her at sea. He had no recollection of killing her, but figured he must have.

A defense-retained neuropsychologist, Myla Young, testified that Brooks had frontal lobe damage that might cause him to begin a repetitive act like hitting and not stop until worn out. The impairment also made him prone to amnesia, she said.

But the jury wasn't buying. After three days of deliberations, jurors convicted Brooks of second-degree murder. He was sentenced to 15 years to life.

Appeal: Unfair to exclude SPECT evidence

Brooks appealed, citing the trial judge's exclusion of Single Photon Emission Computed Tomography (SPECT) evidence. He had hoped to introduce the colorful brain scans to convince the jury he had organic brain damage that made it impossible for him to premeditate a murder, or even form a conscious intent to kill. Psychiatrist Daniel Amen was prepared to testify that Brooks' scan, which measures blood flow to certain regions of the brain, looked "very abnormal."

San Francisco trial judge Cindy Lee excluded the SPECT testimony based on concerns about both the method and the messenger.

Daniel Amen promotes his Amen Clinics

Under California's Kelly-Frye standard, for scientific evidence to be admissible in a criminal case, there must be proof that the technique is considered reliable in the scientific community and that the witness is a qualified expert who used correct scientific procedures. The party seeking to introduce the evidence has the burden of proving its admissibility by a preponderance of the evidence.

Regarding the method, the judge ruled that research has not established that SPECT scans can accurately determine cognitive impairment, much less impairment so severe as to preclude the requisite mental states for premeditated murder. While the scans were "pretty glitzy" and "high tech," their colors lacked meaning and had a high potential to confuse the jury, she said.

As to the messenger, the judge had "a 'considerable question' ... as to whether [Amen] is an independent and unbiased expert and truly represents a cross-section of the relevant scientific community," according to a just-issued appellate ruling.

The First District Court of Appeal upheld the trial judge's ruling, endorsing her concerns about both the method and the messenger.

The appellate justices were unable to find any published appellate decision on the issue of whether SPECT evidence is admissible in a criminal trial to support a theory that a defendant's ability to form a specific intent was impaired by organic brain damage. So they conducted their own independent review of the scientific status of SPECT evidence. They were ultimately under-impressed.

[W]e agree with the trial court that defendant failed to establish that SPECT was generally accepted by the scientific community as showing brain injuries that were relevant to the defense theory that he did not form the intent necessary to commit murder. Defendant did not establish a generally accepted correlation between blood flow to a particular part of the brain and any particular behavior…. [A]s the trial court correctly summarized the testimony, "[T]here’s a lack of any testimony that there’s any quantitative percentage of blood flow, specific cognitive functions or other factors that will be impaired or even affected."

Regarding the messenger, the appellate justices said it was within the trial judge's discretion to raise "serious questions about Amen’s qualifications to testify as an expert witness. The court doubted that he could be independent and unbiased in light of his long engagement in significant entrepreneurship activities regarding SPECT via the Amen Clinics and activities as a proponent of the utility of SPECT scan imaging."

Amen's methods questioned

Judge Lee and the appellate panel were not alone in viewing Amen's activities with suspicion.

Amen, a graduate of the now-defunct Oral Roberts University School of Medicine, has said he was "led by God to pursue this work." And the missionary zeal with which he promotes SPECT for everything from depression and anxiety to aggression and drug abuse has raised concerns among other medical professionals.

In 2005, Amen's unconventional treatments had caught the attention of Quackwatch, an international network dedicated to exposing medical "frauds, myths, fads, fallacies, and misconduct." Three years later, Salon ran a piece by neurologist Robert Burton, criticizing PBS for running Amen's "self-produced infomercial" touting his unproven intervention for Alzheimer's disease:

It’s hard to dismiss the religious undertones of Amen’s work…. And yet Amen’s sense of calling hasn't led him to undertake the high-quality clinical investigations that would lend scientific credence to his claims…. Amen states that he has read more than 40,000 SPECT scans and holds himself up as a world expert. But a brief quote from his TV special quickly reveals a very peculiar method of determining what constitutes a normal SPECT scan…. Using Amen’s figures from his TV program, only 3 percent of those he has studied have been interpreted by himself and his staff as being normal. Put another way, 97 percent of patients who attend Amen’s clinic can expect to be told that their SPECT brain scan is abnormal.

But the controversies surrounding neuroimaging in court go far beyond those swirling around Amen and his SPECT scans. Echoing the trial judge's concerns in the Brooks case, the UK Royal Society just this week warned that jurors may be far too impressed with brain images, not recognizing their limited applicability to real-world legal questions.

Study: Lads’ mags sound identical to rapists

2011-12-15T10:00:00.000-08:00

As I was driving through America’s Farm Belt on the way to a prison (miles and miles of cows and plowed corn fields as far as the eye could see), it was a bit incongruous to suddenly see --

Photo by Karen Franklin

-- an ADULT SUPERSTORE, perched on the side of the freeway like a giant mousetrap. While sex offenders are chastised for even thinking about pornography, a free-world traveler like me can't escape its dehumanizing specter, whether on the highway or in my hotel room. Novelist Russell Banks was surely on to something when he called sex offenders the canaries in the coal mine, victims of a $10-billion-plus industry that preys on their loneliness and alienation.

With that vision in mind, I was pleased to see that two of my favorite academic scholars are getting a flurry of media attention over their new study finding that most people cannot distinguish between statements about women in British lads' mags and those made by convicted rapists.

In the study, due to be published in the British Journal of Psychology, men identified more with the comments made by rapists than the quotes made in lads' mags. And that's not necessarily a bad thing: On the whole, the statements pulled from Britain's four leading lads' mags (what North Americans would call men's magazines) were actually more denigrating of women than the rape-justifying statements made by rapists.

For example, here are two quotes:

"There's a certain way you can tell that a girl wants to have sex . . . The way they dress, they flaunt themselves."

"You do not want to be caught red-handed . . . go and smash her on a park bench. That used to be my trick."

The first quote is pulled from the book, The Rapist Files: Interviews With Convicted Rapists. The second is from a lads' mag. (If you want to test your ability to differentiate rapists from lads' mags, Jezebel has obliged with an online quiz containing 16 of the statements used in the study.)

The study authors worry that lads' magazines (which are not categorized as pornographic because they do not show full nudity) are mainstreaming hedonistic, predatory attitudes toward women.

"The apparent normalising effect of lads' mags runs counter to the work that is done with sex offenders both in prison and the community,” lead researcher Miranda Horvath told the Guardian. “Sex offender programmes challenge the men about their sexist, misogynistic and derogatory beliefs about women and seek to reeducate them. Yet it appears that some similar beliefs have been presented in recent lads' mags, which are normalised and accepted in mainstream society."

Said co-researcher Peter Hegarty in a press release, “We are not killjoys or prudes who think that there should be no sexual information and media for young people. But are teenage boys and young men best prepared for fulfilling love and sex when they normalise views about women that are disturbingly close to those mirrored in the language of sexual offenders?”

He added that young men should be given credible sex education and not have to rely on lads' mags as a source of information as they grow up.

Dr. Horvath of Middlesex University is a pioneering researcher into multiple-perpetrator rape and co-organizer of the London conference on sexual violence at which I gave a keynote this summer. Dr. Hegarty at the University of Surrey has just completed a fascinating research project on Lewis Terman of Stanford University; his book, Poison in the Gift: Alfred Kinsey, Lewis Terman and the Sexual Politics of Smart Men is in press by the University of Chicago Press.

The article is: "Lights on at the end of the party: Are lads' mags mainstreaming dangerous sexism?" by Miranda Horvath, Peter Hegarty, Suzannah Tyler and Sophie Mansfield, in the British Journal of Psychology. Author correspondence may be addressed to Dr. Horvath (HERE).

Hebephilia hopes hidey-hole will help it slip into DSM-5

2011-12-13T11:30:00.000-08:00

Jean Broc: The Death of Hyacinthos

Hebephilia, the controversial faux disorder proposed for the upcoming DSM-5, has been repackaged in the hopes that no one will notice its presence. Unfortunately for its survival, two newly published journal articles may make it harder to hide.

The proposed label of "pedohebephilia” has been quietly discarded. Instead, hebephilia – defined as sexual attraction to young pubescents – has been buried in the text of revamped criteria for pedophilia. Presumably hoping it will go unnoticed, the web page authors do not mention the change.

The questionable diagnosis is the brainchild of a Canadian sex offender clinic with inordinate influence on the Sexual Disorders Workgroup of the American Psychiatric Association’s DSM-5 revision committee.

It is the last of three quacky sexual paraphilia proposals still standing. Overwhelming opposition derailed paraphilic coercive disorder (which would have turned rape into a mental disorder) and hypersexuality.

These victories notwithstanding, the developers of the DSM-5, due out in 2013, have been remarkably deaf to an ever-increasing roar of concern from allied professions in the United States and internationally. The revision process steamrollers on despite a mushrooming petition by a coalition of psychology organizations, a scathing critique by the British Psychological Society and, most recently, public statements of concern by the 154,000-member American Psychological Association and the 120,000-strong American Counseling Association.

More costly and ineffective civil detentions

Following on the heels of my historical review of hebephilia in Behavioral Sciences and the Law, the Journal of the American Academy of Psychiatry and Law has just published two new critiques.

In an article focusing on the legal ramifications, forensic psychologist and attorney John Fabian warns that the primary result of adding this scientifically unproven diagnosis to the DSM-5 will be an increase in civil commitments of sex offenders.

Fabian outlines the inconsistent federal case interpretations of hebephilia, including the only federal court of appeals ruling, by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First District in the case of Todd Carta (the case I led off with in my review):

The court in Carta focused on the offender's behavior as causing him distress, impairment, and dysfunction in his life. However, the question of whether hebephilia is a type of paraphilia NOS, depends on whether it is considered deviant and abnormal to have a sexual attraction and to engage in subsequent sexual behaviors toward pubescent adolescents and postpubescent minors. To this date, neither the case law nor clinical research on sex offenders has clearly supported classifying hebephilia as an abnormal pathology.

As we can see through this psycholegal analysis, both clinicians and the courts disagree as to whether hebephilia is a pathological sexual deviance disorder. Given the fact that the U.S. Supreme Court recently denied certiorari in hearing McGee, Michael L. v. Bartow, Dir., WI Resource Center, addressing whether a rape paraphilia NOS, nonconsent, meets the constitutional threshold for legal mental abnormality for civil commitment, it is unlikely that the Court will hear such a case addressing hebephilia. More likely, the DSM-5 will provide guidance for clinicians, attorneys, and judges who evaluate and litigate this issue in civil commitment proceedings.

Focus on clinical impairment

In a commentary on Fabian's article, sex offender researchers Robert Prentky and Howard Barbaree try to take a middle road in the contentious debate. At the outset, they acknowledge the questionable nature of diagnosing a condition that is hard-wired in heterosexual men:

Brooke Shields was only 12 years old when she played a child prostitute in Pretty Baby, three years before she modeled Calvin Klein jeans, asking, "Want to know what gets between me and my Calvin's? Nothing." Klein's young teenage models were so provocative that the Justice Department investigated whether the ads violated federal child pornography and child exploitation laws. Penelope Cruz was only 13 years old when she played a child prostitute in the French soap opera Série Rose. Jodie Foster was 14 years old when she played a child prostitute in Taxi Driver. The model Maddison Gabriel, the official "face" of Australia's Gold Coast Fashion Week in 2007, was only 12 years old. Highly sexualized young girls would not be used in advertising, in movies, and on catwalks unless a great many adult males were paying close attention. It appears that heterosexual human males are hard wired to respond sexually to young females with secondary sexual characteristics.

But, they continue, men with an "exclusive sexual preference for young teenagers" (if such men can be found) may indeed be sufficiently impaired so as to meet the mental disorder requirement of "clinically significant deficits in social and interpersonal skills."

This was the approach taken by the appellate court in upholding the civil commitment of Todd Carta, and it is a tactic being used by government experts in sexually violent predator civil commitment proceedings. In a circular rationale, once the pseudo-diagnosis of “Paraphilia Not Otherwise Specified-Hebephilia” is assigned, clinically significant impairment can be inferred from the mere fact of an arrest and criminal prosecution.

To their credit, Prentky and Barbaree do admit that the research base for hebephilia is insufficient at the present time:

The bright line in the sand should be the clinical and empirical integrity of the proposed diagnosis…. Examined in isolation, there does not appear to be adequate empirical evidence that sexual arousal in response to young adolescents constitutes a paraphilia…. Clearly, this is an area that warrants further research.

Let's just hope the DSM-5 gods tune in to the controversy in time to pull the plug on yet another half-baked idea that will only bring further embarrassment to the profession.

Both articles are freely available online:

John Fabian: Diagnosing and Litigating Hebephilia in Sexually Violent Predator Civil Commitment Proceedings

Robert Prentky and Howard Barbaree: Commentary: Hebephilia—A Would-be Paraphilia Caught in the Twilight Zone Between Prepubescence and Adulthood

The DSM-5 petition, spearheaded by the Society for Humanistic Psychology, is HERE.

"Invasion of the Hebephile Hunters," my oldie but goodie from 2007 (before all this hoopla got started), is HERE.

New critique of APA’s detainee interrogation policies

2011-12-07T21:51:00.000-08:00

Interrogation of Canadian citizen Omar Khadr, age 15, at Guantanamo

Prominent psychology ethicist Ken Pope, a former chair of the American Psychological Association's Ethics Committee who resigned from the APA in 2008, has authored a new article critiquing the APA's controversial policies on detainee interrogations.

Pope said his purpose is to "highlight key APA policies, procedures, and public statements that seem in urgent need of rethinking and to suggest some questions that may be useful in a serious assessment."

He questions the ethical legitimacy of standing behind policies and practices that can cause harm to individuals -- such as detainees -- based on the stated desire to do "the most good for the most people."

Pope provides a history of the APA’s controversial 2002 decision to reject the so-called "Nuremberg Ethic" by permitting psychologists to forego ethical responsibilities when they conflict with government authority (Ethics Code Section 1.02).

Psychologists came under intense criticism from human rights proponents in the wake of 9/11 for their critical role in detainee interrogations. Unlike organized psychiatry and other medical professions, the American Psychological Association promoted its role in detainee interrogations as contributing to national security in a time of crisis.

"APA promoted support for its interrogation policies in its press releases, its journals, its web site, its Internet lists, its conventions, the APA Monitor on Psychology, and other venues," Pope noted. For example, it "submitted a statement on psychology and interrogations to the US Senate Select Committee on Intelligence explaining that 'psychologists have important contributions to make in eliciting information that can be used to prevent violence and protect our nation's security'; that 'conducting an interrogation is inherently a psychological endeavor'; and that 'psychology is central to this process.' "

Accordingly, psychologists under contract with the CIA were given a green light to design aggressive interrogation techniques to break down detainees, while other psychologists on the outside assured the public that techniques such as waterboarding were safe and would not cause lasting mental harm.

The article, "Are the American Psychological Association's Detainee Interrogation Policies Ethical and Effective? Key Claims, Documents, and Results," is slated for publication in the journal Zeitschrift fur Psychologie / Journal of Psychology, the oldest psychology journal in Europe and the second oldest in the world.

Pope's critique is timely. For one thing, the policies authored by the APA's controversial Presidential Task Force on Psychological Ethics and National Security (PENS Task Force) remain in place. Additionally, the issues he raises have broader implications for current ethical practice of psychologists in other custodial settings, such as prisons, jails, and mental hospitals.

Pope has made the article available at his website (HERE), which also has many other useful resources on ethics and interrogations.

First joint psychology-law program with disability focus

2011-12-06T17:13:00.000-08:00

New York Law School and John Jay College of Criminal Justice have announced a new joint degree program in forensic psychology and law that will launch in Fall 2012 and focus on disability law.

New York Law School already offers 13 courses on mental disability law, while John Jay already offers an M.A. in forensic psychology. But this will be the first program of its kind, according to New York Law School professor Michael Perlin, who is also the director of he law school's Mental Disability Law Program.

"I'm very excited about the joint program because it highlights the interdisciplinary nature of what we are trying to do through our mental disability law program," Perlin told the National Law Journal. "We created courses specifically to appeal to both lawyers and mental health professionals. This program helps create a synergy that ensures, as best we can, that graduates will have a deep understanding of the other discipline."

"Our graduates will be well-trained lawyers for people with mental disabilities issues and have the potential to become legal advocates, work on public policy or become law professors in this unique niche," said James Wulach, the director of the M.A. Program in Forensic Mental Health Counseling at John Jay College.

Students must apply and be accepted to both schools separately and will finish with a Master of Arts in forensic psychology from John Jay and a Juris Doctor from New York Law School. Perlin expects an initial enrollment of about 25 students.

The National Law Journal story is HERE.

Good tidings: Violence at all-time low

2011-12-04T07:57:00.000-08:00

How does this sound for entertainment: Your date asks you out to the theater to watch a live cat slowly lowered into a fire and burned to death, howling with pain as it is singed, roasted, and finally carbonized?

If that isn't your idea of a good time, don't hop into the next time machine heading back to medieval Europe.

In 16th-century Paris, throngs –- including kings and queens -- flocked to watch such gruesome spectacles, shrieking with laughter as cats and other animals were tortured to death on stage.

"The Catherine Wheel"

Torture and violence were woven into the fabric of life, from the sexualized sadism of London, where elaborately designed and decorated torture devices were the pinnacle of artistic creativity, to the widespread practice of hacking off the nose of anyone who disrespected you (the source of the strange idiom, "to cut off your nose to spite your face").

In contrast, whether we know it or not, we are now enjoying the most peaceful period in all of human history. Indeed, the precipitous decline in violence of all types may be “the most significant and least appreciated development in the history of our species,” argues Steven Pinker, a renowned professor of psychology at Harvard University, in an epic tome, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined.

"The Judas Cradle"

Given the tenor of the daily news headlines, Pinker knows his claim sounds far-fetched. But in 800 pages of research and analysis, augmented by hundreds of charts and tables, he convincingly establishes that violence is indeed heading in one direction: down.

The decline is drastic across-the-board, in both state-sanctioned and individual violence: International wars, civil wars, terrorism (an obsession far out of proportion to its prevalence), slavery, sexual violence, child abuse, infanticide....

Click HERE to read my full Amazon review of this recommended text. If you appreciate the review, please click on "yes."

Breivik insanity finding showcases Norway’s progressive system

2011-11-30T08:46:00.000-08:00

Sensible and efficient are words that come to mind in reviewing the Norwegian government's handling of mass killer Anders Behring Breivik's legal case.

The court appointed two psychiatrists who worked collaboratively to evaluate Breivik,who admits killing 77 people and injuring 151 others in a mass shooting spree in July.

The psychiatrists spent 36 hours interviewing Breivik on 13 separate occasions before finding him insane at the time of the crimes. Breivik was psychotic and inhabited a ''delusional universe,'' they wrote in their 243-page report.

Although many have expressed surprise, there's not the kind of political grandstanding one might expect with such a politically charged case in the United States or some other Western countries. Even prosecutors are not voicing any objection to the insanity finding.

''Anders Behring Breivik during a long period of time has developed the mental disorder of paranoid schizophrenia, which has changed him and made him into the person he is today,'' prosecutor Svein Holden announced at a press conference.

Inga Bejer Engh, speaking for government prosecutors, also said she was ''comfortable'' with the finding.

An expert panel from the Norwegian Board of Forensic Medicine is expected to approve the finding. If so, Breivik will likely be detained indefinitely in a psychiatric hospital and will not stand trial.

Rehabilitation a central goal

Norway’s criminal justice system stands in stark contrast to the more punitive systems in many other countries. Rehabilitation, rather than just punishment for punishment's sake, is its central goal.

Even if Breivik had been found sane and convicted at trial, his maximum prison sentence would have been 21 years, or at most 30 years if he had been found guilty of crimes against humanity.

For example, a male nurse found guilty of murdering 22 of his elderly patients was released in 2004 after serving just 12 years in prison.

"A lot of resources are put into this. The idea is for people to be able to leave prison and lead a life free from crime,” criminology professor Hedda Giertsen of the University of Oslo told the BBC. "There is help to find accommodation, help with personal finances, education -- nearly half of Norway's prison population is offered some sort of course or education."

Statistics indicate this policy works: Reconviction rates in Norway are about 20 percent, far lower than in other European countries or the United States.

And just think about all of the money Norway will save by avoiding the public spectacle of a lengthy and high-profile trial featuring dueling psychiatric experts.

Rationality: Don't you love it?

MnSOST-3: Promising new actuarial for sex offenders to debut

2011-11-27T09:00:00.000-08:00

Regular readers know that I've criticized our field's overreliance on imprecise and atheoretical screening instruments to predict whether or not an individual will behave violently in the future.

As Patrick Lussier and Garth Davies of Simon Fraser University point out in the current issue of Psychology, Public Policy, and Law, the actuarialist approach of searching for external variables that distinguish individuals "is somewhat at odds with the rationale of risk assessment, which is intended to assess the risk of an individual but also takes into account any changes in the level of risk over time for a specific individual."

In their new longitudinal study, Lussier and Davies identified heterogeneous trajectories in sexual and violent offending over time. They suggest that by turning "a blind eye" to criminological research on the developmental course of offending, the actuarialists have produced measures that are a misfit for many if not most individuals, overestimating risk in some cases and underestimating it in others.

While I agree philosophically with their critique, we have to be realistic.

Legislatures and courts love the so-called actuarials, which rate an individual's risk based on the presence of various preselected risk factors. They're quick and easy to administer. And they offer an illusion of scientific certitude that legitimizes current laws and criminal justice practices.

So, until a more theoretically informed, person-oriented approach gains traction, we should at minimum insist on more accurate actuarials, and better acknowledgment of their limitations. That was the goal, for instance, of the Multisample Age-Stratified Table of Sexual Recidivism Rates (MATS-1), a collaborative project by researchers in the United States, New Zealand, and Australia to more accurately incorporate advancing age into predictions of risk for sex offenders.

With that more modest goal in mind, I am cautiously optimistic about a newly developed actuarial tool for assessing recidivism among sex offenders, the MnSOST-3.

A better actuarial?

Before you recoil in shock based on the name alone, let me reassure you that it's a completely different tool from the old Minnesota Sex Offender Screening Tool (the MnSOST or MnSOST-R). Only three of the new instrument's items are the same, and even those are measured differently, so I don't even know why they kept the tainted name. As many of you know, the original MnSOST (pronounced MIN-sauced) oversampled high-risk offenders and so produced artificially inflated estimates of risk. Also, research on its development was never published in a peer-reviewed journal.

Based on an article by developers Grant Duwe and Pamela Freske accepted for publication in the journal Sexual Abuse, the new and improved MnSOST-3 appears to have several advantages over existing actuarial instruments for assessing sex offender recidivism.

The developers took advantage of advances in statistical modeling, using a predictive logistic regression model that enables a more nuanced measurement of the effects of continuous predictors such as age and number of prior offenses. Risk is adjusted based on whether an offender will be under any kind of supervision in the community, something other actuarials do not consider. Scoring is done on an Excel spreadsheet, which should reduce data entry errors.

A major strength of the MnSOST-3 is that it was developed on a contemporary sample that included 2,315 sex offenders released from Minnesota prisons between 2003 and 2006. Given the plummeting rates of sexual offending in the Western world over the past couple of decades, this is imperative in order not to overestimate risk.

The developers report that the MnSOST-3 is well calibrated with actual recidivism rates for all but the highest-risk offenders, for whom it overestimates risk. In other words, the predicted probabilities of recidivism match up pretty closely with the actual rates of reoffending except for the very highest-risk offenders. Overall, about four percent of the released offenders were reconvicted of a new sex crime within four years, a base rate that is consistent with other recent research findings.

Moose Lake sex offender facility, Minnesota

The authors frankly acknowledge the problem that this low base rate poses for accurate identification of recidivists. While offenders who scored in the top 10 percent on the MnSOST-3 were more likely than lower-scoring men to reoffend (their rate of reconviction was 22 percent), if you predicted that any given individual in this top bracket would reoffend, you would be wrong four times out of five.

The optimism-corrected accuracy of the MnSOST-3 for the contemporary sample, as measured by the Area Under the Curve (AUC) statistic, was .796. This means that there is about an 80% chance that a randomly selected recidivist will have a higher score on the instrument than a randomly selected non-recidivist -- although this applies only to the sample from which the instrument was developed and is not generalizable to other samples.

Although we must wait to see whether this moderate accuracy will generalize to sex offender populations outside of Minnesota, the MnSOST-3 may be about as good as it gets. After a decades-long search for the Holy Grail of risk prediction, consensus is building that the obstacles are insurmountable. Low base rates of recidivism, along with fluid and unpredictable environmental contexts, place a firm ceiling on predictive accuracy.

Which gets us back to the point made by Lussier and Davies: Consistent with a large body of criminological theory, we need to recognize the criminal career as a process with a beginning, a middle and an end. In other words, it's time to start looking at the individual offender and understanding his specific offense trajectory, rather than just continuing to amass collections of external variables to measure him against.

Oh, in case you were wondering how well the old MnSOST-R did at predicting which men in the contemporary Minnesota sample would reoffend, it had an AUC of .55. That's about as good as a coin flip.

So, if nothing else, the MnSOST-3 should seal the death warrant of its worn-out ancestors. Given their inaccurate and bloated estimates of risk, that will be a very good thing.

The articles are:

Lussier, Patrick and Davies, Garth (2011) A Person-Oriented Perspective on Sexual Offenders, Offending Trajectories, and Risk of Recidivism: A New Challenge for Policymakers, Risk Assessors, and Actuarial Prediction? Psychology, Public Policy, and Law 17 (4), 530–561. (To request a copy from the author, click HERE.)

Duwe, Grant and Freske, Pamela (In Press), Using Logistic Regression Modeling to Predict Sex Offense Recidivism: The Minnesota Sex Offender Screening Tool-3 (Mnsost-3), Sexual Abuse. (To request a copy from the author, click HERE.)

Related blog posts:

MnSOST-R actuarial instrument critiqued (July 3, 2008)
SVP industry sneak peek: Problems in Actuaryland (Oct. 4, 2009)
Study: Actuarials fail to predict sexually violent recidivism (March 5, 2010)
Delusional campaign for a world without risk (April 3, 2010)
New study: Do popular actuarials work? Newer instruments outperform Static-99 and RRASOR (April 20, 2010)
Groundbreaking study of sex offender life courses: Challenge to actuarials: 4 distinct trajectories ID'd (June 4, 2010)
Metaanalysis debunks psychopathy-violence link (Sept. 3, 2010)
Age tables improve sex offender risk estimates (Dec. 1, 2010)

Thanksgiving roundup

2011-11-23T09:34:00.000-08:00

Brandon McInerney

Gay panic defendant gets 21 years

The gay panic case of Brandon McInerney that we’ve been tracking here since 2008 is finally over. The defendant, who was 14 when he shot and killed classmate Larry King, agreed to a 21-year prison term after a jury deadlocked in his murder trial two months ago.

"The missing militant" pleads no contest

Ronald Bridgeforth

Ronald Bridgeforth, the man I blogged about a couple of weeks ago who spent 43 years underground before deciding to turn himself in, pleaded no contest yesterday to a 1968 charge of assault on a police officer. His sentencing is set for February. For those of you who are interested in his fascinating life, I recommend a profile (HERE) by Laura Rena Murray in Tuesday's San Francisco Chronicle. As Bridgeforth put it, "Not being in jail is not the same as being free."

From Australia: Prolonged detention and mental health

An investigative journalism program in Australia has aired a remarkable documentary on the psychiatric effects of lengthy detention of asylum seekers. ABC’s Four Corners obtained rare footage of conditions in facilities that are typically kept out of sight and out of mind. The show portrays rampant self-mutilation, suicide and psychotic decompensation among Australia's 4,000 incarcerated asylum seekers. "I have only seen darkness in life and a dark future ahead," explains a young Iranian man who has just tried to hang himself after the third rejection of his immigration petition. In a secretly filmed interview, a psychiatric nurse states that suicide attempts and grotesque self-mutilations are daily occurrences, with as many as 30 detainees at a time on one-to-one suicide watch at her facility alone. Psychiatric staff are shown responding to the overwhelming despair by overprescribing sedating medications. Dr. Suresh Sundram of the Mental Health Research Institute describes the detention sites as factories for producing mental illness, especially for detainees who are held for lengthy periods and those who have undergone torture and other traumas before fleeing their homelands. Click below to watch the 45-minute video, which is relevant not only in Australia but other countries around the world with similar immigration issues.

Juveniles: Lifelong benefits of multisystemic therapy

In a study that's getting a bit of buzz around the Web, a researcher has found that Multisystemic Therapy's positive effects on juvenile delinquents extend for decades. An average of 22 years later, youths who were randomly selected for MST treatment had significantly fewer arrests and family problems than those who got traditional individual therapy. MST, developed by study co-author Charles Borduin of the University of Missouri, has become one of the most widely used evidence-based treatments in the world. It owes its success to the fact that it involves the offender's entire family and community, whereas traditional therapy targets only the offender without modifying his problematic environment. The new study is published in the Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology. The Abstract is HERE; a press release summarizing the findings is HERE.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Photo (c) Karen Franklin 2011

And finally, if you're reading this in the comfort of your warm and cozy home or office, you can be thankful you're not at the bottom of the 99 percent, living in a plywood shack being torn down just in time for the rainy season. That's the plight of the folks in one of the many homeless encampments near where I walk.

I wish all of you readers and subscribers a nice holiday.

Psychology rife with inaccurate research findings

2011-11-20T10:00:00.000-08:00

The case of a Dutch psychologist who fabricated experiments out of whole cloth for at least a decade is shining a spotlight on systemic flaws in the reporting of psychological research.

Diederik Stapel, a well-known and widely published psychologist in the Netherlands, routinely falsified data and made up entire experiments, according to an investigative committee.

But according to Benedict Carey of the New York Times, the scandal is just one in a string of embarrassments in "a field that critics and statisticians say badly needs to overhaul how it treats research results":

In recent years, psychologists have reported a raft of findings on race biases, brain imaging and even extrasensory perception that have not stood up to scrutiny….

Dr. Stapel was able to operate for so long, the committee said, in large measure because he was “lord of the data,” the only person who saw the experimental evidence that had been gathered (or fabricated). This is a widespread problem in psychology, said Jelte M. Wicherts, a psychologist at the University of Amsterdam. In a recent survey, two-thirds of Dutch research psychologists said they did not make their raw data available for other researchers to see. "This is in violation of ethical rules established in the field," Dr. Wicherts said.

In a survey of more than 2,000 American psychologists scheduled to be published this year, Leslie John of Harvard Business School and two colleagues found that 70 percent had acknowledged, anonymously, to cutting some corners in reporting data. About a third said they had reported an unexpected finding as predicted from the start, and about 1 percent admitted to falsifying data.

Also common is a self-serving statistical sloppiness. In an analysis published this year, Dr. Wicherts and Marjan Bakker, also at the University of Amsterdam, searched a random sample of 281 psychology papers for statistical errors. They found that about half of the papers in high-end journals contained some statistical error, and that about 15 percent of all papers had at least one error that changed a reported finding -- almost always in opposition to the authors' hypothesis….

Forensic implications

While inaccurate and even fabricated findings make the field of psychology look silly, they take on potentially far more serious ramifications in forensic contexts, where the stakes can include six-figure payouts or extreme deprivations of liberty.

For example, claims based on fMRI brain-scan studies are increasingly being allowed into court in both criminal and civil contexts. Yet, a 2009 analysis found that about half of such studies published in prominent scientific journals were so "seriously defective" that they amounted to voodoo science that "should not be believed."

Similarly, researcher Jay Singh and colleagues have found that meta-analyses purporting to show the efficacy of instruments used to predict who will be violent in the future are plagued with problems, including failure to adequately describe study search procedures, failure to check for overlapping samples or publication bias, failure to investigate the confound of sample heterogeneity, and use of a problematic statistical technique, the Area Under the Curve (AUC), to measure predictive accuracy.

Particularly troubling to me is a brand-new study finding that researchers' willingness to share their data is directly correlated with the strength of the evidence and the quality of reporting of statistical results. (The analysis is available online from the journal PloS ONE.)

I have heard about several researchers in the field of sex offender risk assessment who stubbornly resist efforts by other researchers to obtain their data for reanalysis. As noted by Dr. Wicherts, the University of Amsterdam psychologist, this is a violation of ethics rules. Most importantly, it makes it impossible for us to be confident about the reliability and validity of these researchers' claims. Despite this, potentially unreliable instruments -- some of them not even published -- are routinely introduced in court to establish future dangerousness.

Critics say the widespread problems in the field argue strongly for mandatory reforms, including the establishment of policies requiring that researchers archive their data to make it available for inspection and analysis by others. This reform is important for the credibility of psychology in general, but absolutely essential in forensic psychology.

Related blog posts:

Beware "voodoo" brain science (March 10, 2009)
Violence risk meta-meta: Instrument choice does matter (June 19, 2011)

Hat tips: Ken Pope and Jane

New article of related interest:

False-positive psychology: undisclosed flexibility in data collection and analysis allows presenting anything as significant

Psychological Science (November 2011)
Joseph Simmons, Leif Nelson, and Uri Simonsohn (click on any of the authors' names to request a copy)

From the abstract: This article show[s] that despite empirical psychologists' nominal endorsement of a low rate of false-positive findings (≤ .05), flexibility in data collection, analysis, and reporting dramatically increases actual false-positive rates. In many cases, a researcher is more likely to falsely find evidence that an effect exists than to correctly find evidence that it does not. We present computer simulations and a pair of actual experiments that demonstrate how unacceptably easy it is to accumulate (and report) statistically significant evidence for a false hypothesis.

Backlash against penal excess hits New Zealand this weekend

2011-11-16T07:54:00.000-08:00

When I was in Australia over the summer, giving a keynote at their national forensic psychology conference, I got the distinct impression that Aussie practitioners were a wee bit savvier about criminal justice excesses than the average American.

Now comes evidence that neighboring New Zealanders are equally astute: A joint conference this weekend of Australian and New Zealanders is entitled: Crime and Punishment: The Rising Punitiveness.

The Wellington conference, co-hosted by the Australian and New Zealand Association of Psychiatry, Psychology and Law and the Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Psychiatrists, features intriguing keynotes on:

Law and psychiatry, from cooperation to contamination (my favorite title in a great lineup) -- Law and Ethics Professor Nigel Eastman, St George’s University of London

New Zealand's three strikes legislation: Sound policy or penal excess -- Law Professor Warren Brookbanks, Auckland University Law School

Off with their heads…said the Queen (runner-up for best title) -- Forensic Psychiatry Professor Emeritus Paul Mullen, Monash University

While it may not be criminalisation, it is criminal: The plight of people with mental illnesses in the criminal justice system -- Forensic Psychology Professor James Ogloff, Monash University and Director of the Centre for Forensic Behavioural Science and Director of Psychological Services at the Victorian Institute of Forensic Mental Health

Contrasts in punishment: An examination of Anglophone excess and Nordic exceptionalism (one I would especially like to hear) -- Criminology Professor John Pratt, Institute of Criminology, Victoria University

Reconceptualizing psychopathy to promote effective intervention -- Psychology and Social Behavior Professor Jennifer Skeem, Centers for Psychology and Law and Evidence-based Corrections at the University of California

Politics and punitiveness – Limiting the rush to punish -- Kim Workman, retired public servant with the New Zealand Department of Maori Affairs and Ministry of Health

If you happen to be in or near Wellington this weekend, check it out. I am excited to see this growing backlash against penal excesses, and I sure wish I could be there!

Predicting behavior: The case of the missing militant

2011-11-11T15:38:00.000-08:00

There is an oft-repeated axiom in our field that the most reliable predictor of future behavior is what a person has done in the past.

But is this axiom valid?

Let's take the example of Ronald Stanley Bridgeforth, featured on America's Most Wanted.

Forty-three years ago, while being detained on suspicion of trying to buy merchandise with a stolen credit card, the 24-year-old Black militant pulled out a revolver and shot at police. He jumped bail and, three years later, became a suspect in the killing of a police sergeant during an armed invasion of a police station in San Francisco.

Would this information lead you to predict that he was likely to engage in more violence in the future?

If so, you would be wrong.

Bridgeforth vanished from the radar screen, and eventually police figured he might have died. But the former community activist was far from dead. After fleeing to Africa, he moved to Ann Arbor, Michigan, married, and raised two sons. Under the assumed name of Cole Jordan, he worked as a janitor, earned a bachelor’s degree from Wayne State University and a master's degree in counseling from Eastern Michigan University, became a licensed professional counselor, and eventually worked his way up to the rank of a full-time faculty member at Washtenaw Community College.

Bridgeforth with attorney Paul Harris (L) and wife Diane (R)

Last week, Bridgeforth finally turned himself in. Authorities were not closing in, but he had a troubled conscience. He plans to plead guilty in the assault case, in which he faces a maximum of five years in prison. Prosecutors announced they will not prosecute him in the infamous murder of Sgt. John Young at San Francisco's Ingleside Station on Aug. 29, 1971. That case unraveled two years ago in part due to allegations (aired in a documentary, Legacy of Torture) that police used torture with electric shock, cattle prods, beatings, sensory deprivation and asphyxiation to obtain confessions from three of the nine suspects.

One might argue that Bridgeforth is an exception to the rule. Only, he's not. Time and again, we hear about a long-time fugitive who lived a quiet life, surrounded by friends and co-workers who had no clue about his or her violent past.

David Gonzales, William Walter Asher III, Katherine Ann Power, Claude Daniel Marks and Donna Jean Willmott, to name just a few.

These cases are testament to the weak validity of the axiom that past behavior is a good predictor of the future. There are several flaws with the theory, among them:

The base rate: Most serious crimes have a low base rate of recidivism. That makes us most likely to be correct if we predict that the behavior will NOT reoccur. For example, because of the base rate of rearrest for murder, we would be wrong in the broad majority of cases if we predicted that someone who has killed once will most likely kill again. The same is true for sexual offending. In one recent study, 95 out of 100 people arrested on sex charges had no prior sex crimes; an inordinate focus on the five percent lends an illusion of a higher base rate of reoffending than the evidence warrants.

Desistance: A second major problem with static predictions is that people change. In fact, even hard-core criminals almost universally desist from crime as they age. This holds true across all eras and cultures. As scholars Shadd Maruna and Laub and Sampson have shown, crime is mainly a young man's game. As they age, offenders settle down and become less impulsive. Or, they simply burn out.

Environmental context: The axiom of past as prelude also ignores the circumstances that contribute to offending. Criminologists have long known about the critical importance of context. For example, peer influence is critical to crime by adolescents and young adults, who have the highest rates of offending. Lifestyle circumstances that can -- and often do -- change over time influence other types of crimes as well, such as robberies and drug offenses. For Bridgeforth and others of the 1960s-1970s era, the context was a militant revolutionary movement that swept up many idealistic young people.

Unproven allegations: The Bridgeforth case also highlights the problem of relying on allegations of past misconduct that may not be reliable. Bridgeforth has denied the charge that he was the getaway car driver in the San Francisco police killing, and now prosecutors have chosen not to prosecute him.

Ultimately, the past-as-prelude axiom may hold better for some behaviors than others. Perhaps it is more reliable when predicting scripted or compulsive acts that a person engages in with high frequency over a lengthy period of time. However, it is less reliable when applied to context-influenced behaviors with low base rates of reoccurrence.

And never should we ignore the influence of aging. Bridgeforth is not the same man at 67 as he was at 24. Think back to your own adolescence or early adulthood; are you the same person now as you were then?

The viewpoint that past is prelude is fundamentally pessimistic, leaving little room to acknowledge that human beings are highly adaptive, and often capable of learning from mistakes and changing our lives.

Call for papers on violence risk assessment

2011-11-06T20:39:00.000-08:00

The field of violence risk assessment has expanded rapidly over the past several decades. But despite a plethora of new risk assessment tools, confusion abounds as to how to understand their accuracy and utility. And controversy is growing over how well these tools actually predict violence in the individual case.

To address these gaps, forensic scholars John Petrila and Jay Singh of the University of South Florida have teamed up to edit a special issue of the respected journal, Behavioral Sciences and the Law on the topic of "measuring and interpreting the predictive validity of violence risk assessment."

The goal of the special issue is to provide a comprehensive and accessible resource for researchers, clinicians, and policymakers interested in the measurement of predictive validity or the use of such findings in clinical or legal practice.

The editors invite empirical and conceptual papers on the measurement of predictive validity as it relates to violence risk assessment. In addition, papers focusing on the implications of the measurement of predictive validity for public protection and individual liberty are also welcome, as are legal perspectives on these issues.

Papers should be no longer than 35 pages, including tables, figures and references. The deadline for submissions is July 1, 2012. Authors should send two electronic copies of any submission, one blinded for peer review, to John Petrila, JD or Jay P. Singh, PhD.

Salon covers Halloween hype

2011-11-01T09:35:00.000-07:00

As it turns out, I didn't need to write my annual column on Halloween this year, because Tracy Clark-Flory over at Salon.com did it for me -- even quoting my blog musings on the topic:

Year after year, new measures are introduced to keep registered sex offenders of all stripes from coming into contact with trick-or-treaters -- and yet there is zero evidence to support the legislative trend.... It isn't just law enforcement that is joining in the Halloween paranoia: Tech entrepreneurs are hyping new smartphone apps -- including a brand-new one for Facebook -- as tools to steer kids clear of sex offenders’ homes and even allow parents to track their kids by GPS, instead of actually accompanying them in person....

Karen Franklin, a forensic psychologist who has long railed against the Halloween crackdown, calls it "security theater" and "the Halloween boogeyman."* She says "the scare feeds into a deep-rooted cultural fear of the boogeyman stranger."Just as with scary movies, this holiday allows us the thrill of confronting our fears in a controlled manner. Similarly, the inevitable spate of stories about stranger danger each October both exploit and assuage parental nightmares. Canny entrepreneurs sell parents ways to protect their kids from "real monsters" -- as though safety and control were but an app away -- while local politicians and sheriff’s departments circulate press releases to celebrate their own valiant efforts fighting ... a problem that does not appear to exist.

Most interesting of all to me were the comments on Ms. Clark-Flory's column, which were universally critical of the overblown hype surrounding sex offenders, and also raised the issue of civil rights and the infringement of civil liberties.

By the way, credit for the term "security theater" goes to Bruce Schneier, who writes and blogs about security. Schneier defines security theater as "security measures that make people feel more secure without doing anything to actually improve their security." Prominent examples include airport screenings and increasingly ubiquitous metal detectors. Thanks to Dave S. for alerting me to Schneier's interesting blog.

** I actually spell it "bogeyman," but opinion on the correct spelling is not unanimous.

Happy Halloween!

2011-10-31T08:00:00.000-07:00

For the past four years on this date, I have posted a column on Halloween and the sex offender bogeyman. I'm going to skip it this year, but you can check out my previous offerings by clicking on these links:

2007: Beware the Halloween bogeyman!
2008: Pendulum swing on Halloween hype? (an erroneous prediction)
2009: Halloween "security theater" endures
2010: Yet another year of (yawn) Halloween security theater

View from my walking path of San Francisco Bay and Golden Gate Bridge

By the way, there is an actual crime spike on Halloween; it's just not of a sexual variety. You may also be interested in an article at The Psychologist on "The Lure of Horror."

Collating these Halloween posts reminds me that I’ve been blogging for almost five years now. It's hard for me to believe this will be my 735th post! My increasingly large and diverse international subscriber base makes quitting unthinkable. But occasionally blogging must take a back seat to other things, including my forensic work, academic writing, non-professional activities, and even simply enjoying our glorious October weather (so much nicer than the record-breaking snow storm that just struck the East Coast!).

I did manage to find time to view and review three indie films, a diversion from the increasingly mindless Hollywood fare that is so hard to stomach. You can click on any of these links to read the full review. In order from most to least recommended, they are:

Salt of This Sea (a Palestinian film I highly recommend)
Incendies (a critically acclaimed film about the Lebanese conflict, which is worth seeing if you are into horror)
Ballast (a film set in the Mississippi Delta that doesn’t live up to the hype)

When I don't get around to blogging, I often still find time to tweet forensic news, a much shorter and simpler task. Click on any of the below links to go to some of the interesting news articles I've tweeted about in the past couple of weeks (you can view my tweets in real-time at any time, on the upper-right side of my blog site):

Juvenile curfews as prejudice: Great editorial on why we need more kids on the streets, not fewer (San Francisco Chronicle)
Teenage brains: Nice feature in this month's National Geographic
Obesity playing increasingly common role in child custody battles, as ex-spouses hurl accusations in court about their kids' nutrition and exercise (Wall Street Journal)
Boy Scouts' "perversion files" of 5,000+ pedophiles; like Catholic Church, Scouts kept abuse secret (USA Today)
Man who borrowed a cell phone to tell his family he was paroling gets extra 5 years in prison (Los Angeles Times)
Gizmodo series: Life and technology in San Quentin (Be grateful for the things you take for granted!)
The Invisible Man: How the sex offender registry results in social death (online article)
Turning conventional wisdom on its head: A successful executive's struggles with severe mental disorder (New York Times)
Food rationing in Texas prisons; weekend lunches eliminated (Grits for Breakfast blog)
Book review: "A Plague of Prisons" – why U.S. incarceration boom is social catastrophe on scale of worst global epidemics
Sybil Exposed: The extraordinary story behind the famous multiple personality case (New York Times book review)
Topeka Kansas repeals local domestic violence law due to budget cuts; agencies won't accept new cases
California governor approves bill speeding involuntary medication of incompetent defendants held in state hospitals (Los Angeles Times)

In closing, whatever you are up to today, I wish you a very happy Halloween. No tricks, just treats.

Study: Psychopathy score fails to predict sexual recidivism

2011-10-30T10:00:00.000-07:00

Many forensic psychologists believe that psychopathy is a risk factor for sex offender recidivism. Not surprisingly, when forensic psychologists assign a sex offender a high score on a psychopathy test, it increases the risk of extreme legal sanctions such as civil commitment.

But a new study out of Texas found zero correlation between sexual recidivism and psychopathy, as measured by the widely used Psychopathy Checklist (PCL-R). If anything, sex offenders who were arrested for a new sexually violent offense tended to have lower scores on the PCL-R than those who were not rearrested!

Regular blog readers should be familiar with these researchers by now: Dan Murrie, Marcus Boccaccini and crew are the same scholars who informed us of the partisan allegiance phenomenon, in which evaluators working for the government tend to assign far higher PCL-R scores than do those working for the defense.

In their most recent study, they examined PCL-R scores from about 400 sex offenders in Texas who were released from prison and then tracked for anywhere from about two to seven years. They examined not just the total scores on the PCL-R, but also scores on the instrument's two factors, as well as four so-called facet scores. Not one of these seven PCL-R variables was a statistically significant predictor of whether a man would be arrested for a new sex crime.

“Overall, these predictive validity findings were striking because the PCL-R apparently failed to predict the type of outcome (i.e., sexually violent reoffense) for which it was administered in this context,” the authors noted.

Further, in cases in which the PCL-R was administered by more than one evaluator, the study found poor agreement between the two, even though both were working for the government. Consistent with prior research, interrater agreement was higher on Factor 2, which measures antisocial behavior and an impulsive lifestyle, than on Factor 1, which measures the vaguely operationalized personality and emotional dynamics thought to underlie psychopathy.

In an interesting twist, the researchers tried to determine whether some evaluators were more accurate than others at predicting recidivism through PCL-R scores. They identified four highly prolific evaluators; together, these three psychologists and one medical doctor had provided almost two-thirds of the PCL-R scores in the study. Although the PCL-R scores of three of these four evaluators were more likely than other evaluators' scores to correlate with a new arrest for a non-sexual crime, even these evaluators could not produce PCL-R scores that predicted sexual offense recidivism.

Despite the PCL-R’s lack of predictive validity, sex offenders with higher PCL-R scores were more likely than others to be recommended for civil commitment, indicating that the unreliable rating was far from harmless in forensic practice.

The study is:

Murrie, D. C., Boccaccini, M. T., Caperton, J. and Rufino, K. Field Validity of the Psychopathy Checklist–Revised in Sex Offender Risk Assessment. Psychological Assessment. Click HERE to request a copy from the first author, at the Institute of Law, Psychiatry, and Public Policy.

Of related interest:

DSM-5 petition takes off like wildfire

2011-10-27T09:05:00.000-07:00

I just checked back on the status of the petition by psychologists about the DSM-5 that I blogged about Sunday, and found that it's gaining momentum fast: 1,160 signatures as of this moment, and there will be a dozen more in the few minutes it takes me to upload this post!

The blaze of interest is especially remarkable because the petition was launched without any publicity at all, and has gained traction solely through word of mouth.

If you haven’t checked it out yet, I urge you to do so, and pass it along to others.

According to Allen Frances, chair of the DSM-IV task force and an outspoken critic of the current DSM-5 process, the American Psychiatric Association leadership is aware of the petition, but plans no formal response. Writing yesterday at the Psychiatric Times, he said:

They hope to ride out the storm of opposition mounting on all sides and dismiss it as the work of professional rivals or antipsychiatry malcontents. Characteristically, DSM-5 offers no rebuttal based on evidence. Instead, it stubbornly soldiers on in its promotion of radical diagnostic changes that are risky, untested, unsupported by a strong science base, and vigorously opposed by the field.

The really unexplainable paradox is the APA's systematic promotion of greater diagnostic inflation at a time when we are already so obviously plagued by diagnostic inflation, fad diagnoses, and false epidemics. Unless it comes to its senses, DSM-5 will promote greater drug use exactly when we have a public health problem caused by the inappropriately loose prescription of antipsychotics, antidepressants, antianxiety agents, pain medicines, and stimulants. The paradox is that, contrary to conspiracy theorists, the DSM-5 experts are not making their risky suggestions because of financial conflict of interest or the desire to line drug company pockets. They have the best of intentions, but are terminally naïve about how their suggestions will be misused....

Frances has another good commentary on the petition and its ramifications at his Psychology Today blog dedicated to the mounting crisis, DSM5 in Distress:

DSM 5 has lived in a world that seems to be hermetically sealed. Despite the obvious impossibility of many of its proposals, it shows no ability to self correct or learn from outside advice. The current drafts have changed almost not at all from their deeply flawed originals. The DSM 5 field trials ask the wrong questions and will make no contribution to the endgame.

But the DSM 5 deafness may finally be cured by a users' revolt. The APA budget depends heavily on the huge publishing profits that accrue from its DSM sales. APA has ignored the scientific, clinical, and public health reasons it should omit the most dangerous suggestions- but I suspect APA will be more sensitive to the looming risk of a boycott by users.

Again, I encourage you to join the movement now, by clicking on the link below and by spreading the word.

More on test administration issues in Twilight Rapist case

2011-10-20T09:22:00.000-07:00

Alan Cohen, the attorney in the Billy Joe Harris case that I blogged about last week, wrote to clarify the unusual test administration procedures of psychiatrist Colin Ross, who testified for the defense. Because his letter (which he posted at my Psychology Today blog, Witness) is of general interest to forensic psychology, I re-post it here, along with my response:

Mr. Cohen wrote:

I found your article of interest and hope this will create a forum for further discussion on DID and its use in the courtroom setting.

The issue of my administering the examination to my client took on a sinister spin from the way it was interpreted by Dr. [Robert] Barden when in fact it was nothing more then my hand-carrying it to the jail and passing the sealed envelope into the hand of a deputy who then gave it to my client. The transaction took less then a minute. I remained in an attorney booth with my client who spent four hours answering the self-administered questions. When he completed the exam he placed the results in an envelope and sealed it. He then handed the envelope to a deputy who then gave it to me. That transaction took less then a minute.

I personally carried the test to the jail so that the contents would not be examined by either the sheriffs department or the prosecutors office since Mr. Harris was under extremely tight surveillance and the results of the test would/could form the basis of our defense. I could not jeopardize the results of the exam being compromised by falling into the "wrong hands."

* * * * *

Mr. Cohen,

Thanks for writing to clarify the circumstances of the test administration. I have seen other cases in which psychologists have had third parties administer psychological tests, or have even given prisoners tests to fill out in their spare time and return at their leisure. While the intermediary who delivers the test is not doing anything sinister, from the standpoint of professional ethics and practice there are several problems with such practices.

First and foremost, if a test is standardized -- that is, if it has norms to which an individual is being compared -- then such procedures violate the standardized administration and may invalidate the results.

Second, such procedures violate test security.

Third, they prevent the expert from ensuring the adequacy of testing conditions, or of observing the individual as he performs the tasks; observation by skilled examiners can be an important component of one's ultimate opinions. Relatedly, sitting with the test-taker allows the examiner to assess for adequate comprehension, and answer any questions that may come up.

When Dr. Barden testified that it was unethical for the attorney to administer the tests, he was likely referring to the Ethics Code for psychologists, as well as the Standards for Educational and Psychological Testing ("The Standards") promulgated by the American Educational Research Association, the American Psychological Association and the National Council on Measurement in Education.

As noted in the introduction to the Standards, which apply to everyone who administers, scores and interprets psychological or educational tests, regardless of whether they are a psychologist:

The improper use of tests can cause considerable harm to test takers and other parties affected by test-based decisions. The intent of the Standards is to promote the sound and ethical use of tests and to provide a basis for evaluating the quality of testing practices.

Collectively, the Ethics Code and the Standards require that:

Test administrators receive proper training (Ethics Code 9.07; Standards 12.8)
Tests not be administered by unqualified persons (Ethics Code 9.07; Standards 12.8)
Examinees receive proper informed consent (Ethics Code 9.03; Standards 12.10)
Test data be kept confidential and secure (Ethics Code 9.04; Standards 12.11)
Assessment techniques be protected from disclosure to the extent permitted by law (Ethics Code 9.11; Standards 12.11)

Again, I appreciate your taking the time to write.

NOTE: After I posted this exchange, the testifying psychiatrist, Colin A. Ross, posted a comment at my Psychology Today blog. He provided more information about the screening tests for dissociation and why they were administered as they were. He also offered his opinion on the validity of Dissociative Identity Disorder. His comment can be viewed HERE. Please feel free to join in the discussion, either here or (preferably) at my Witness blog, where the conversation began.

Multiple personality excluded in Texas insanity case

2011-10-13T22:21:00.000-07:00

A serial rapist’s attempt to claim insanity based on multiple personality disorder fell flat, as a judge ordered the expert's trial testimony stricken from the record as junk science.

Billy Joe Harris

Psychiatrist Colin Ross testified that Billy Joe Harris, the so-called "Twilight Rapist" who targeted elderly women, suffered from multiple personality disorder -- now known as dissociative identity disorder (DID) -- brought on by childhood abuse.

Ross, who runs the Colin A. Ross Institute that provides trainings on psychological trauma and dissociative identity disorder, testified that the condition’s presence in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) published by the American Psychiatric Association establishes it as a "real and valid disorder."

Ross testified that he gave the defendant three tests for DID. However, in a most unusual procedure, rather than personally administering the tests, he gave them to the defense attorney to administer. Thus, he has no way of knowing for sure who filled in the tests, or under what circumstances.

Ross testified that the defendant's scores on a screening test, the Dissociative Experiences Scale, were so high that he questioned the test's validity. He also conceded that the defendant was "clearly telling stories that are not true" about other aspects of his life, for example falsely claiming to have served in Iraq when he was actually in Saudi Arabia. However, Ross testified that after getting a chance to talk personally with one of Harris's alters, "Bobby," he was convinced of Harris's claim of multiple personalities.

"I don't think he's faking the dissociative identity disorder," he testified. "I could be wrong."

The real culprit, David the Dog

The defendant, a former prison employee, also took the witness stand, "weaving tales of bestiality, aliens, transvestites and combat heroism," in the words of news reporter Sonny Long. Harris testified that he had three other personalities inside him, including a black Great Dane named David who committed the rapes.

A dramatic moment came during cross-examination, when prosecutor Bobby Bell asked to speak to the defendant's alter, also named Bobby. As Long described the scene:

Harris lowered his head momentarily, raised it back up, rolled his neck and declared in a deep voice to be "Bobby."

Several jurors stifled laughter during the subsequent give-and-take between Harris and Bell, according to Long's account in the Victoria Advocate.

But perhaps even more damaging to Harris's credibility was an audiotape played for the jury in which he talks to his girlfriend about having put on "a good show" in court one day. Earlier that day, he had fallen to the floor and twitched and shook until he was restrained. The girlfriend warned Harris that the telephone call was being recorded, to which Harris replied, "I know it."

Forensic psychologist Walter Quijano also testified for the defense. (If the name sounds familiar, he has been in the spotlight for using race as a risk factor in death penalty cases, as I recently blogged about.) He testified that when multiple personality popped up as an issue, he stepped back because that is not an area of expertise for him. However, he did testify that it is unusual for someone to begin a rape career so late in life. Harris is 54.

Mere presence in DSM doesn’t establish validity

After the defense rested, the prosecution called as a rebuttal witness a Minnesota psychologist and attorney who has made a crusade out of pushing so-called "junk science" out of the courts.

Robert Christopher Barden testified that dissociative identity disorder (aka multiple personality disorder) is a controversial condition looked upon with skepticism by the scientific mainstream. He cited several articles rejecting the condition as a viable diagnosis, despite its presence in the DSM.

"Because something is in the DSM doesn't mean it's reliable or should be allowed in a court of law," he testified, according to an article in the Victoria Advocate. "One of the ways to get junk science out of the legal system is you rely on the relevant scientific community. If something is controversial it means it's not generally acceptable."

Barden said the number of mental health professionals who tout dissociative identity disorder as viable are few and far between.

"There are a few pockets of people left who are doing this," he said. "The scientists I know condemn it to be the worst kind of junk science and dangerous to the public. Controversial and experimental theories should not be allowed to contaminate the legal system."

Concerning the tests given to Harris, Barden said, "There's no magic to these tests. It looks scientific. It looks professional, but when you get down into it, it's junk. It's unusual for a psychiatrist to interpret a psychological test and it's highly unethical for Mr. Cohen [the defense attorney] to give the tests."

After Barden’s testimony that the condition is not generally accepted by the scientific community, despite the fact that it is listed in the DSM, District Judge Skipper Koetter ordered Dr. Ross’s testimony on dissociative identity disorder stricken from the record.

Justice, Texas-style

In the end, the defendant’s overdramatization and courtroom theatrics likely did him in. During the trial, he trembled and twitched and sat in the courtroom with paper stuffed in his ears, which his attorney said was “to keep the voices from speaking to him."

The jury took only 10 minutes to convict Harris, and another 10 minutes later in the month to sentence him to life in prison.

After the verdict, Barden said in a press release that the outcome demonstrates “the power of science-law teams in protecting the legal system from junk science testimony."

Barden has been involved in hundreds of lawsuits, criminal prosecutions and licensure actions across the United States over the past two decades, targeting not only multiple personality disorder but also quack therapists in the repressed memory and rebirthing therapy movements.

Judge Koetter's ruling is not the last word, of course, as it is just one trial judge's opinion. Appellate courts in other states have ruled differently. For example, in the 1999 case of State v. Greene (139 Wn. 2d 64), the Washington Supreme Court held that dissociative identity disorder was a generally accepted diagnosis because it was listed in the DSM-IV, and therefore met the Frye test for admissibility. But the Court went on to say that the applicability of this diagnosis to the issue of criminal responsibility was problematic and that testimony about DID was not "helpful" to the jury. (The Trowbridge Foundation has more information on this case HERE.)

The battle lines over dissociative identity disorder have heated up in the dozen years since that ruling, so who knows how an appellate court might rule today.

For those interested in learning more about the controversy, I recommend the chapter "Dissociative Identity Disorder: Multiple Personalities, Multiple Controversies" by Scott Ollienfeld and Steven Jay Lynn, in their book, Science and Pseudoscience in Clinical Psychology.

California deals big blow to bogus paraphilia diagnoses

2011-10-10T20:47:00.000-07:00

Government evaluators in California have been instructed to be more cautious in invoking ad hoc psychiatric diagnoses such as "paraphilia not otherwise specified-nonconsent" to justify the civil commitment of sex offenders.

In a report in today's Psychiatric Times, Allen Frances calls the move by California's Department of Mental Health a "giant step forward in ending the Paraphilia NOS fad."

The new marching orders are likely to have national repercussions. California has a large cadre of sexually violent predator evaluators, many of whom moonlight in other states and in federal court as well.

As Frances reports, evaluators were summoned to a training workshop at which "they were explicitly instructed to adhere closely to the intent of DSM-IV and to desist from making idiosyncratic paraphilia diagnoses. The training made clear that a diagnosis of 'Paraphilia NOS nonconsent' would require affirmative supportive evidence that the rapist is sexually aroused specifically by raping rather than all the many very much more common situations in which rape is simply criminal."

Increasingly, government evaluators had been using so-called "NOS" diagnoses to justify civil commitment of men whose sex offenses were not driven by any recognized mental disorder. Because rape is a crime rather than a mental illness, it is not included as a diagnosis in any psychiatric manual. Similarly, evaluators have taken to labeling men who sexually assaulted post-pubertal minors but did not meet the diagnostic criteria for pedophilia with the ad hoc label of "paraphilia not otherwise specified-hebephilia."

Frances expressed optimism that California's policy change signals the beginning of the end for “paraphilia NOS” in court:

The misdiagnosis of rape as a mental disorder has been a forensic disaster, allowing the widespread misuse of involuntary psychiatric hospitalization.... [T]he California DMH has only limited control over its errant state SVP evaluators, who by contract are entitled to exercise their individual 'clinical judgment' however mistaken and baseless it may be. 'Paraphilia NOS' will likely linger longer than it should. But the tide has clearly turned in California and California is likely to be a bellweather state; its return to proper diagnostic practice undoubtedly will spread across the country.

Blog readers may also be interested in Frances's commentary on a proposed change in the diagnostic criteria for Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) in the upcoming DSM-5. The change could open the door for increased forensic misuse of this controversial diagnosis. Frances's report is HERE.

Combating the pull to overpredict violence

2011-10-05T19:18:00.000-07:00

Like the moon's effect on tides, the pull to overpredict violence exerts a powerful influence, even on seasoned forensic evaluators who know its strength.

When directly informed that an event has a low base rate of occurrence -- for example, that a homicide offender has only a 1 in 100 likelihood of being arrested for another homicide -- both laypeople and professionals will markedly overpredict violence.

In an article in the Journal of the American Academy of Psychiatry and Law, eminent forensic psychologist Stanley Brodsky and postdoctoral fellow Sarah L. Miller analyze why this is so.

For one thing, the risk of underpredicting violence has more potential to negatively impact the evaluator. Bad publicity, public outrage, even civil litigation. Not to mention the harm committed by a high-risk individual who reoffends.

Far safer to "err on the side of public safety," goes clinical lore. A claim of dangerousness is well nigh impossible to disprove. And especially in the context of civil commitment of sex offenders, the issue is not framed as punishment but, rather, as "an acceptable restriction of individual rights in the interest of public safety and rehabilitation." It's not as if these guys are sympathetic characters, with a constituency of supporters looking out for their rights.

Certain psychological mechanisms also contribute to bias in the direction of overpredicting risk. These include confirmation bias, or seeking information to support a preconceived conclusion, and illusory correlation, in which the evaluator assumes two things are related just because they co-occurred.

The purpose of Brodsky and Miller's well-argued review is to make evaluators more aware of the natural overprediction tendency, and to provide a checklist that evaluators can use to assess and correct their potential biases.

It's a great idea, although I am a bit skeptical that such a simple approach will make much of an impact in the adversarial arena.

The full article is available for free download HERE.

Russell Banks' new novel explores sex offender banishment

2011-10-01T06:00:00.000-07:00

The Kid is all alone in the world, hiding in the shadows under the freeway, part of an ever-growing mass of exiles electronically shackled to a society that despises and shuns them.

But who are these modern-day lepers? And why are there so many of them? What if sex offending is a symptom of a malfunctioning society, and these men are just the canaries in the coal mine, carrying the burden of society' shame? What if the Internet is the snake in the Garden of Eden, and pornography is the forbidden fruit?

In Lost Memory of Skin, best-selling novelist Russell Banks explores the deeper ironies of a culture that condemns pedophiles even while turning its children into dehumanized sexual commodities. But on a deeper level, the novel is about the profound loneliness and alienation of the digital age, the inability of people to get beyond false facades to truly trust and connect with each other.

My review continues HERE.

(As always, if you appreciate the book review, please click "yes" at the Amazon site, to boost the placement of my Amazon reviews.)

Future orientation a major factor in juvenile competency

2011-09-30T10:00:00.000-07:00

Photo credit: Richard Ross, Juvenile in Justice

Unlike adults, most children and adolescents who are found incompetent to stand trial are not psychotic. Rather, they have cognitive impairments. And, in a factor gaining greater attention from courts and legislatures, they are often immature.

Indeed, developmental maturity is so important that in California and some other states, juvenile competency evaluators are now required by law to assess for it.

That’s easier said than done. After all, what is immaturity, and how does it affect competency?

In a study just published in the Journal of the American Academy of Psychiatry and Law, four scholars state that one big chunk of maturity is future orientation, or the extent to which a youngster takes long-range consequences into account in making decisions. One reason that youngsters engage in risky behaviors, the theory goes, is because they are present-focused and lack a more mature perspective on the future.

Testing the influence of future orientation on competency, the researchers found that the well-established relationship between age and competency is moderated by a child's degree of future orientation.

Further, competency is particularly "fragile" in immature children. In other words, smaller deficits in cognitive abilities are more likely to influence competency in immature children as opposed to their more mature peers.

I recommend the full article, by Aaron Kivisto, Todd Moore, Paula Fite and Bruce Seidner. It is available for free online, HERE.

What does it take to prove innocence?

2011-09-27T20:22:00.000-07:00

Thomas Haynesworth hugs his mother.
Photo: P. Kevin Morley, Richmond Times-Dispatch
One Sunday morning in February 1984, Thomas Haynesworth’s mother sent him to the Trio supermarket to pick up some bread and sweet potatoes. He never got there. Instead, he was stopped and questioned in connection with a recent rape. That began a 27-year odyssey through false accusation, arrest, prison and pain.

So begins yet another Kafkaesque story set in the United States, whose criminal justice system seems to have gone totally berserk. When I was traveling abroad this summer, overseas colleagues expressed amazement about practices they've heard about in our country -- juveniles sent to prison for life, young men placed on lifelong sex offender registries for consensual relationships with teen girlfriends, criminal prosecution of young children. Last week's execution of Troy Davis despite mounting doubts about his guilt is the latest case that has international observers scratching their heads.

But the Haynesworth case is unusual in that prosecutors and even a state attorney general are going to bat for the wrongfully convicted man, yet that still isn't enough to get him an exoneration.

To recap the facts:

Haynesworth after his release. Photo credit: Morley

When he was 18, Haynesworth was arrested for five rapes in his neighborhood. He had no criminal record, but that didn't matter. He was prosecuted for four rapes, convicted of three, and sentenced to 84 years in prison.

Two years ago, a broad review of old cases in Virginia turned up a DNA match to a serial rapist who was already in prison for a string of rapes that occurred in that same neighborhood after Haynesworth's arrest.

Haynesworth was released this March, on his 46th birthday, and everyone thought his exoneration would follow swiftly.

But, no.

Instead of apologizing to Haynesworth for robbing him of most of his adult life, what is the court doing? It's asking for more proof of innocence.

Only, there's a slight catch: The state has disposed of the DNA evidence from the other rapes, evidence that could conclusively clear his name.

"It seems paradoxical to demand 'conclusive' evidence from Haynesworth when the commonwealth has deprived him of the opportunity to produce such evidence," said the attorney general of Virginia, a staunch conservative who has even given Haynesworth a job in his office.

Meanwhile, as his bid for exoneration languishes on, Haynesworth must remain on the sex offender registry, with all of the stigma and restrictions that carries. He cannot move without permission, and he must even get approval to visit his nieces.

The trial penalty

This is yet the latest in a string of similar cases focusing public attention on the reliability problems plaguing eyewitness identification and, more broadly, on racial inequities in the administration of justice here in the Land of the Free.

But things are likely to get worse before they get better. That's because across the United States, legal changes have concentrated more and more power in the hands of prosecutors, who can now coerce defendants into pleading guilty by threatening much harsher penalties for those who insist on a trial.

As Richard Oppel reports in an in-depth analysis in the New York Times, prosecutors now wield more discretionary power than judges, and are using that power to punish defendants for exercising their right to a trial:

Threats of harsher charges against defendants who reject plea deals often are the most influential factor in the outcome of a case, but this interplay is never reflected in official data.

Even defendants with winnable cases are opting to plead guilty because the stakes are so high if they lose. The ratio of guilty pleas to trials has nearly doubled in the past two decades, according to Bureau of Justice Statistics reported by Oppel. And the number of acquittals in federal cases has dropped even more dramatically, from one out of every 22 cases 30 years ago to only one out of 212 last year.

So if a young Haynesworth came along today and had the audacity to insist that he was innocent and wanted a trial, he would likely be punished with multiple life prison terms, rather than a mere 84 years.

We may never know how many Haynesworths are being sentenced every year based on faulty eyewitness identification and/or racially biased prosecution.

New York Times reporter John Schwartz's only-in-America report on the Haynesworth case is HERE.

Richard Oppel's excellent report, Sentencing Shift Gives New Leverage to Prosecutors, is HERE.

Hat tip: J and B

Fiji travelogue: A different approach to murder

2011-09-25T10:00:00.000-07:00

Guest post by Jules Burstein*

Three weeks ago while on a vacation in Fiji, I was on the third-largest island, Taveuni, walking in a light rain up a not-so-steep hill, when I encountered the following sign in front of what looked like a series of dormitories:

Fiji Correction Services

Taveuni Prison

Giving a Second Chance

I walked inside and explained to a secretary at the front desk that I was a forensic psychologist and was interested in learning something about the criminal justice and prison system in Fiji. She invited me to speak to the Director (Warden) who was just outside the main building and was quite receptive to having an exchange with me.

I was more than a little astonished to learn from him that on an island with 18,000 people there were only a dozen men serving time for murder. But more compelling than that was the Director informing me that all men convicted of murder are sentenced to 10 years.

At that point they are evaluated to see whether they have sufficient remorse for their offense, and have made constructive changes in their character so as to warrant release. If that is the case they are discharged from custody. If not, there are periodic reviews every two years to determine whether inmates are then suitable for release. Thus, all inmates are strongly motivated to effect positive changes while in custody in order to earn the right to be reintegrated into society.

I found it impressive (and sad) to consider that this progressive approach exists in a country that just obtained its independence from Great Britain 40 years ago, while we in America have prisons filled with thousands of men convicted of murder either sentenced to death or to life sentences with little chance of parole.

*Jules Burstein is a clinical and forensic psychologist in Berkeley, California.

Forensic trainings on the Eastern Seaboard

2011-09-23T08:00:00.000-07:00

Oct. 2: Fun-filled training in New York

Stephen Morse

The New York State Psychological Association's Forensic Division is holding a one-day conference that some are billing as the best single-day conference this year. Keynote speaker Stephen J. Morse JD, PhD will open the day with a talk on “Folk Psychology: The Key to Legally Relevant Forensic Communication.” The day will end with a 2-hour moot court and then a wine social. Sandwiched in between are presentations by:

William Barr, PhD on “Evaluating Competency: A Neuropsychological Perspective”
Michael Perlin, JD on “ There Must be Some Way Out of Here: Why The Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities is Potentially the Best Weapon in the Fight Against Sanism in Forensic Facilities”
Joseph Plaud, PhD on “Psychological Assessment of Sexual Offenders: Where We’ve Been and Where We’re Going”
David Martindale, PhD on “A Reviewer’s Take on Custody Evaluations”


Michael Perlin

The conference is being held at the Faculty House at Columbia University in New York City, which I am told is a great venue. The full conference program is HERE. Registration is HERE. Get it while it's hot.

Oct. 14: Risk management in the community

Well-known forensic psychologist Kirk Heilbrun of Drexel University is the featured presenter at this Forensic Mental Health Symposium sponsored by the Institute of Law, Psychiatry, and Public Policy at the University of Virginia. The event will be held at the Crowne Plaza Richmond West in Richmond, Virginia. More information is available at the ILPPP website. To register, click HERE.

Nov. 4: Police custody and the interrogation of youth

Kirk Heilbrun

This Advanced Seminar in Juvenile Forensic Practice, also sponsored by the ILPPP, features several interesting speakers, including:

Lawrence Fitch, Esq on The Rights of Juveniles in Delinquency Cases: Understanding the Principles of Miranda Waiver and the Admissibility of Confessions in Juvenile Court
Dick Reppucci, PhD on Research on the Police Interrogation of Juveniles
Gregg McCrary (FBI, Retired) on Controversial Juvenile Cases: Evidence, Testimony and Outcomes

The event will be held at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. To register, click HERE.

Next semester, the ILPPP is planning an advanced workshop on evaluating sanity with Ira Packer, and a workshop on Motivational Interviewing with David Prescott. Check back with their website for updates on those, and more.

Texas capital case highlights racial bias in psychology

2011-09-21T21:23:00.000-07:00

Is it fair to forecast future danger based on demographics?

Even as Troy Davis's execution tonight draws attention to Georgia's death penalty, Texas remains the undisputed execution capital of the United States. And in Texas, psychologists are integral to the process because of the prerequisite of proving future danger.

Texas psychologist Walter Quijano

It is here that Texas psychologist Walter Quijano stepped in, testifying in more than 100 capital cases. And in case after case, called by both the prosecution and the defense, he testified that defendants on trial for their lives were especially dangerous if they happened to be African American or Latino.

Like Davis's execution, Quijano’s racially imbued risk assessments are also in the international spotlight, after the U.S. Supreme Court's grant of a 30-day reprieve from death for Duane E. Buck, a convicted double-murderer who had already eaten his last meal when he got the news.

To his credit, former Texas Attorney General John Cornyn agreed with defense attorneys that infusing race into criminal sentencing is unfair. When Quijano's testimony was called to his attention some time back, he red-flagged seven cases as meriting a new sentencing hearing. (The government now argues that Buck's case is different from the others for procedural reasons.)

Duane Buck

The "infusion of race as a factor for the jury to weigh in making its determination" violates a defendant's "constitutional right to be sentenced without regard to the color of his skin," the top prosecutor stated in reference to another of the seven cases. "Discrimination on the basis of race, odious in all respects, is especially pernicious in the administration of justice."

Quijano, a native of the Philippines, said in an interview with CNN correspondent Raju Chebium back in 2000 that his opinion about the dangerousness of Blacks and Latinos derives from the fact that they are overrepresented in prisons. "When you look at a problem, you have to consider all the factors that you identify and not ignore (selected ones) because of political reasons."

But using incarceration rates as evidence for violence risk is circular logic. It conveniently ignores other factors that contribute to the vastly disproportionate incarceration of non-white men. These include racial profiling, poverty, economic discrimination, and most of all the racial bias endemic within all stages of the criminal justice system.

Quijano's self-styled risk method is not the only instance in which psychologists use a demographic factor to elevate risk. But hopefully the Buck case will draw attention to the larger issues of fairness and social justice that the practice raises.

Free access to forensic articles

2011-09-18T12:22:00.000-07:00

The Journal of Forensic Sciences, published by the American Academy of Forensic Sciences, is offering free access to select articles, including several of potential interest to this blog’s audience. Click on any of the below titles to read (and/or download) the full article.

The CSI Effect and the Canadian and the Australian Jury

By Janne A. Holmgren and Judith Fordham

Abstract: Television shows, such as CBS's CSI and its spin-offs CSI: Miami; CSI: Las Vegas; and CSI: New York, have sparked the imagination of thousands of viewers who want to become forensic scientists. The shows' fictional portrayals of crime scene investigations have prompted fears that jurors will demand DNA and other forensic evidence before they will convict, and have unrealistic expectations of that evidence. This has been dubbed the "CSI effect." This phenomenon was explored using results from a Canadian study based on 605 surveys of Canadian college students who would be considered jury-eligible and Australian quantitative and qualitative findings from a study that surveyed and interviewed real posttrial jurors. Information about the way jurors deal with forensic evidence in the context of other evidence and feedback about the way in which understanding such evidence could be increased were gained from both these studies. The comparison provides insights into the knowledge base of jurors, permitting adaptation of methods of presenting forensic information by lawyers and experts in court, based on evidence rather than folklore. While the Canadian juror data showed statistically significant findings that jurors are clearly influenced in their treatment of some forensic evidence by their television-viewing habits, reassuringly, no support was found in either study for the operation of a detrimental CSI effect as defined above. In the Australian study, in fact, support was found for the proposition that jurors assess forensic evidence in a balanced and thoughtful manner.

Understanding Juror Perceptions of Forensic Evidence: Investigating the Impact of Case Context on Perceptions of Forensic Evidence Strength

by Lisa L. Smith, Ray Bull and Robyn Holliday

Abstract: The most widely accepted model of juror decision making acknowledges the importance of both the case-specific information presented in the courtroom, as well as the prior general knowledge and beliefs held by each juror. The studies presented in this paper investigated whether mock jurors could differentiate between evidence of varying strengths in the absence of case information and then followed on to determine the influence that case context (and therefore the story model) has on judgments made about the strength of forensic DNA evidence. The results illustrated that mock jurors correctly identified various strengths of evidence when it was not presented with case information; however, the perceived strength of evidence was significantly inflated when presented in the context of a criminal case, particularly when the evidence was of a weak or ambiguous standard. These findings are discussed in relation to the story model, and the potential implications for real juries.

Forensic Identification Science Evidence Since Daubert: Part II—Judicial Reasoning in Decisions to Exclude Forensic Identification Evidence on Grounds of Reliability

by Mark Page, Jane Taylor and Matt Blenkin

Abstract: Many studies regarding the legal status of forensic science have relied on the U.S. Supreme Court's mandate in Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals Inc., and its progeny in order to make subsequent recommendations or rebuttals. This paper focuses on a more pragmatic approach to analyzing forensic science’s immediate deficiencies by considering a qualitative analysis of actual judicial reasoning where forensic identification evidence has been excluded on reliability grounds since the Daubert precedent. Reliance on general acceptance is becoming insufficient as proof of the admissibility of forensic evidence. The citation of unfounded statistics, error rates and certainties, a failure to document the analytical process or follow standardized procedures, and the existence of observe bias represent some of the concerns that have lead to the exclusion or limitation of forensic identification evidence. Analysis of these reasons may serve to refocus forensic practitioners’ testimony, resources, and research toward rectifying shortfalls in these areas.

Additional free articles from the Journal of Forensic Sciences on a variety of forensic topics may be found HERE.

Violence risk in schizophrenics: Are forensic tools reliable predictors?

2011-09-14T07:30:00.000-07:00

The high-profile cases of Jared Lee Loughner and Anders Behring Breivik have contributed to high public demand for accurate prediction of violence potential among the mentally ill. While the number of risk assessment tools designed for this purpose has exploded in the past two decades, no systematic review has been conducted to investigate how accurate these tools are for predicting risk in individuals with schizophrenia.

But never fear: Jay Singh of the University of Oxford and colleagues (whose recent meta-review questioned overbroad claims about the accuracy of actuarials in risk assessment) have stepped into the breach, this time examining whether existing tools have proven efficacy for this task.

Reporting in this month's special issue of Schizophrenia Bulletin on violence and schizophrenia, the authors state that despite the existence of at least 158 structured tools for predicting outpatient violence risk, only two studies have measured instruments' predictive validity in discharged patients diagnosed with schizophrenia.

Instead of reporting on instruments' accuracy for specific patient groups, most studies report predictive validity estimates for heterogeneous groups of psychiatric patients. This forces clinicians and the public to assume that these group-level data apply to any individual diagnostic group.This assumption turns out to be a problem, due in part to the large differences in base rates of violence in psychiatric patients. We know, for example, that individuals with substance abuse disorders are more prone to violence, in general, than those diagnosed with major depression.

Examining the psychometric and predictive features of 10 widely used tools for assessing risk in mentally disordered offenders and civil psychiatric patients, the authors found "little direct evidence to support the use of these risk assessment tools in schizophrenia, specifically."

Overall, schizophrenics have low base rates of violence, with an estimated prevalence of between 10 and 15 percent. As I've discussed here in the context of sex offenders, the rarer a behavior is, the harder it is to successfully predict, leading to erroneous predictions of high risk in people who are not truly dangerous. The authors quote another research finding that in order to prevent one stranger homicide by a schizophrenic, governments would need to detain a whopping 35,000 patients.

That sounds to me like a black swan problem.

As in their previous meta-meta-analysis, the authors critique the almost exclusive use of the area under the curve (AUC) statistic to validate risk assessment instruments. Proponents of the AUC like it because it measures predictive utility independent of the base rate of the behavior in question. But this is as much a weakness as a strength, leading to a false sense of confidence in our ability to accurately predict the risk of individuals in heterogeneous groups of patients:

"High" AUC values for heterogeneous groups of psychiatric patients may have led researchers, clinicians, and policymakers to believe that instruments perform well for all diagnostic groups. However, it is problematic to suggest that structured instruments would be able to identify high-risk individuals with the same accuracy in groups with higher and lower base rates of violence.

In another interesting finding, Singh and colleagues found that the item content of violence risk tools varies markedly, with many tools including unique factors not contained in other instruments. This is a problem, unless these items are truly correlated with risk.

The authors call for updated reviews of the risk and protective factors underlying violence in different psychiatric groups -- including, for example, executive dysfunction in schizophrenics -- before additional risk assessment tools are constructed.

The review is available by contacting Dr. Singh (click HERE), who shortly will be coming to America to accept a post with the Mental Health Law and Policy Department of the University of South Florida.

Related blog post: Violence risk meta-meta: Instrument choice does matter (June 19, 2011)

Brick wall blocking progress on sexual violence

2011-09-11T08:50:00.000-07:00

Forty years after the women’s rights movement brought attention to the widespread nature of sexual violence, the overwhelming majority of offenses still go unreported. Even when a brave victim does come forward, prosecution is rare and conviction even rarer.

That unpleasant reality was the starting point for this week's international conference on sexual violence at Middlesex University in London. Delegates from around the world -- including from Europe, Turkey, Israel, Australia, Canada and the United States -- met to brainstorm next steps in the battle against this catastrophic pandemic.

The consensus among delegates seemed to be that the legal system -- despite the best of intentions of many within it -- is ill equipped to rectify the "justice gap" between sexual violence perpetrators and their victims.

The "brick wall" (in the words of criminologist Betsy Stanko of "the Met," London's Metropolitan Police) blocking progress is built of so-called "rape myths" that make women unwilling to come forward, and impede successful prosecution when they do.

Myth Number One is that only bad and/or crazy men rape. As I explored in my opening keynote address, the promotion of this fiction by a powerful sex offender treatment industry has had the paradoxical effect of making the everyday rapist and child molester even less recognizable than ever by jurors and judges.

Myth Number Two is that men cannot control their sexual impulses. The corollary of this is to blame women for rape: Why did she get drunk? Why did she go with him? Why did she act (or dress) that way? Women have internalized these messages and so - unlike, say, burglary victims -- feel deeply humiliated and ashamed when they are raped.


Conference organizers Jackie Gray, Miranda Horvath, and Susan Hansen (Photo credit: The Times)

These myths are so universal in Western cultures that even feminist women working at a women's health clinic communicate them in private, informal conversation, according to new research by one of the conference's organizers, Susan Hansen of Middlesex University. (The other two organizers were Miranda Horvath and Jackie Gray.)

Compounding the problem is the fact that rapists tend to target vulnerable women who do not fit the profile of a virtuous victim, so do not make good witnesses. In the "vast majority" of London cases tracked by the Met, around 85 percent, victims were (1) seriously intoxicated at the time of their assault, (2) involved in an intimate relationship with the perpetrator, (3) mentally ill, and/or (4) minors, Stanko reported. These are not ideal victims, from the standpoint of successful prosecution.

What to do?

As noted by long-time activist Liz Kelly, chair of the Child & Woman Abuse Studies Unit of London Metropolitan University, sexual violence exists on a continuum, from predatory leers, touches and verbal harassment -- to which virtually all women are subjected -- on up to illegal sexual assault. Direct confrontation of the male entitlement undergirding this entire spectrum of behaviors will be critical to meaningful progress against sexual violence, speaker after speaker emphasized.

In other words, delegates argued for reintroducing gender into the professional discourse. As Moira Carmody of the University of Western Sydney in Australia pointed out, gender-based analysis of sexual victimization is often perceived as too threatening. So it is replaced with gender-neutral discourse about interpersonal conflict, in which the gender of perpetrator and victim become interchangeable.

I had witnessed this dynamic in action the previous day, at the international consortium on multiple-perpetrator rape. As so frequently occurs in these types of professional gatherings, someone brought up the topic of female perpetrators, sidetracking discussion onto this tangential topic. I say tangential, because the reality is that group rape is an overwhelmingly male activity. Even on the exceedingly rare occasions in which women or girls are present, they are almost always auxiliaries, for example the wife of a sexual deviant, or a female gang member pressured to help her boyfriend procure a victim.

In addition to addressing the gender hierarchies and other power imbalances that facilitate victimization, we need to empower young people so that they perceive of themselves as active agents who have choices and practical tools for negotiating complex social situations.

Stieg Larsson, the author of the popular Millennium trilogy, did not feel this power when he was 15 years old. Thus, he did not intervene during a group camping trip, as three of his friends raped a 15-year-old girl. "Her screams were heartrending, but … his loyalty to his friends was too strong," writes longtime friend and biographer Kurdo Baksi. "He was too young, too insecure." Larsson struggled with guilt for the rest of his life, even naming the heroine of his novels after the rape victim, Lisbeth.

To empower young people in these types of situations, Carmody has developed an educational program that trains participants both in how to behave ethically in their own sexual encounters, and how to be "ethical bystanders." The curriculum, funded by the Australian government, has been successfully introduced with boys, girls, men and women from a variety of backgrounds, from rugby players to Maoris in New Zealand to gay men and lesbians.

New Zealand is using this ethical bystander approach in an innovative public health campaign to combat an expected rise in sexual assaults during the Rugby World Cup. An eight-minute video, "whoareyou," pushes the idea that everyone is responsibility for the safety of those around them.

A first step in primary prevention, then, is teaching and training young people to behave ethically toward each other.

On a larger level, we will need to directly challenge the rape myths undergirding an entire spectrum of intimate intrusions by men and boys against those with less social currency. Only then will victims feel empowered to step forward, and will judges and jurors be able to recognize and condemn the everyday offender who stands before them.

Knocking down that brick wall will be no small task.

Group rape getting long-overdue spotlight

2011-09-07T00:25:00.000-07:00

Groups of men and boys have been raping lone, vulnerable girls and women since time immemorial. (Read Judges 19 in the Old Testament for one chilling account.) In fact, group rape is woven so tightly into the fabric of Western civilization that hardly anyone ever stops to think about it. Until now, that is.

When I did my first literature review of the topic back in 2003, for an article conceptualizing it as a theatrical production of hegemonic masculinity, I was astonished by the paucity of research. That is starting to change, thanks in large part to the tireless efforts of two prolific young scholars in the UK, Miranda Horvath of Middlesex University and Jessica Woodhams of the University of Birmingham.

Horvath and Woodhams secured funding from the British Psychological Society to put together an international consortium of researchers, academics and practitioners to further study the topic. We’re collaborating on an edited volume, which I’m pretty sure will be the first book in the history of the world on the topic of multiple-perpetrator rape. (It’s due out from Routledge in February 2013.)

I’m here in London giving a talk on the role of masculinity and culture in multiple-perpetrator rape, at the second of three research seminars. As I found in an analysis of international media coverage (which I will present in the upcoming book), Western societies display a cultural schizophrenia toward this phenomenon: Even as the public at large condemns group rape, contradictory messages permit and even reinforce it, fueling a cycle of masculine misconduct.

London after the riots

Piccadilly Circus, 2011 (by K. Franklin)

London is a fitting backdrop for a seminar on group violence. Even as the city frenetically prepares to host the 2012 Olympics, it struggles to regain equilibrium in the wake of last month’s severe and economically costly rioting.

Yesterday, I watched live BBC coverage of a government hearing into the police response to the rioting. Although the hearing covered a broad range of issues, Britain’s popular media latched onto a quote by Justice Secretary Ken Clarke, blaming the rioting on a "feral underclass." With coded racial language like that, it's no surprise that the rioting has led to increased racial prejudice and xenophobia among the British public, according to a just-released study. A greater number of respondents who felt that British society and culture were under threat are now expressing hostility toward Muslims, blacks and eastern Europeans.

London 2011 (K. Franklin)

Bolstering the racialized image in the public's mind is the much-ballyhooed statistic that three-quarters of those convicted of riot-related crimes had prior criminal records. Of course, as the police were the first to admit during yesterday’s hearing, those with prior criminal histories were easiest to find, and so were rounded up after the riots. In other words, if you weren’t a known criminal you were less likely to get arrested, thereby producing a misleading statistic.

More broadly, why would anyone be surprised that members of an unemployed and disenfranchised underclass would be the first to rise up in protest over a police killing? Or that the have-nots would seize any opportunity to steal from the haves? Britain's confronting the problem today, but the rioting should serve as a wake-up call to every nation with severe economic and social disparities.

Ironically, by seizing upon the isolated quote and statistic, the popular media distorted what the justice secretary and other government leaders were saying. They were actually promoting the concept of rehabilitation. Calling the penal system "broken," the Secretary commented:

It's no good just punishing them. We're failing to make sure that those that are capable of being reformed are reformed and are actually sorting out their drugs, their drink, given a slightly more sensible approach to the values of society so that at least fewer of them will start causing trouble again the next time they have a chance.

Next up: Sexual violence conference

Stay tuned: Tomorrow I will be giving the opening keynote at a conference on sexual violence prevention, also here at Middlesex University in North London. Time allowing, I'll have more to report from my visit.

Jury deadlocks in gay panic trial

2011-09-02T11:42:00.000-07:00

After a closely watched trial, a jury ultimately failed to agree on whether teenager Brandon McInerney should be punished for murder in the killing of classmate Larry King. The final vote was five for murder, and seven for the lesser crime of voluntary manslaughter.

The defense had played on gay panic, blaming 15-year-old King for being too provocative. Forensic psychologist Donald Hoagland, who spent 17 hours interviewing and testing McInerney, testified that when the cross-dressing victim said, “What’s up baby” to McInerney the day before the killing, it threw the 14-year-old into a fit of homicidal rage.

Hoagland further testified that when King said he was changing his name to Leticia, that triggered a dissociative state, causing McInerney not to realize what he was doing at the time of the shooting, according to the Ventura County Star.

The fatal flaw with that theory is that McInerney made advance plans to kill King. He acquired and loaded the gun, and announced his plan to several people the day beforehand, according to testimony during the eight-week trial. He shot King twice in the back of the head during a first-period class.

The only juror to speak to the media said that what really swayed the jury was not the gay panic defense, but the fact that the defendant was only 14 years old at the time of the 2008 crime. Prosecutors repeatedly rejected widespread pleas from the public -- including from a coalition of gay and lesbian groups -- to try the boy as a juvenile. He faced 51 years to life in prison if convicted in adult court.

Enough is enough, say the editors of the Star, which has provided excellent blow-by-blow coverage of the case since the outset; the prosecution needs to be reasonable:

That division among the jurors reflects the deep divide that also exists in the community at large regarding the appropriate way to punish a boy who committed an act of horrific violence that demands severe punishment, yet who had turned 14 just two weeks before the shooting, whose home life failed to provide the support and guidance that a child needs, and who was in a turbulent situation at school where there was equally little support evident.

The District Attorney's Office could refile murder charges against Brandon, but The Star believes the wisest course of action now is to take a sufficient amount of time for a good, hard look at the case that the prosecution presented and carefully consider what the jury's reactions revealed.

For starters, this trial showed it will be hard if not impossible to convince a jury that a sentence of 50 years to life in prison — which is mandatory for a first-degree murder conviction — represents justice in this criminal case, in which the defendant was prosecuted as an adult rather than in Juvenile Court.

Related blog posts:

Gay panic defense: Slain boy accused of provocation (August 10, 2011)

Don't ban gay panic defense (August 51, 2009)

What caused middle school tragedy? (June 10, 2008)

More on the McInerney antigay murder case (June 11, 2008)

Dangerous People: An international discourse

2011-08-28T10:00:00.000-07:00

Dangerous People marks an important moment in risk discourse. Leading scholars from around the Western world join together to discuss the problematic science, ethics and morality underlying contemporary approaches to populations deemed high risk. These include not only sex offenders (the focus of this week's New York Times op-ed) but also suspected terrorists, illegal immigrants, violent youth, and the mentally ill.

Not surprisingly, contradictions over risk prediction play out even within the pages of this international and interdisciplinary work. Consider these offerings:

Forensic psychologist David Cooke and statistician Christine Michie of Scotland issue their strongest warning yet about the fraud being perpetrated by proponents of “actuarial” risk prediction, whose illusion of scientific certainty camouflages predictions that are highly inaccurate and misleading:

At the heart of the matter is the fact that simple linear models cannot explain complex behavior…. Individuals are violent for different reasons: any one individual may be violent for different reasons on different occasions. This inherent complexity dooms simple-minded statistical prediction.... The only way to deal with this complexity is to think psychologically, not statistically.

Lorraine Johnstone, another Scot, warns that the actuarials' inaccuracies are dangerously magnified with juvenile offenders, who present a "moving target" because they are still in the process of developing.

Yet, on the other side of the fence, law professor Christopher Slobogin of the USA continues in his vociferous campaign for preventive detention of a litany of groups -- including the mentally ill, enemy combatants, violent juveniles and persons who spread communicable diseases -- based on these very same faulty statistical methods.

Meanwhile, legal scholars Eric Janus and John La Fond continue to shine a spotlight on the United States' costly experiment with civil detention of sex offenders.

Janus's intriguing theory is that the Sexually Violent Predator (SVP) laws are a tool of conservative ideologues to roll back feminist gains in the struggle against sexual violence and gender inequality. He advocates for a return to an empirically guided, public-health approach as the sanest way to combat sexual violence while also safeguarding tax dollars from waste.

"Predictably," agrees La Fond, "the American SVP experiment has been an abysmal and costly failure. Other countries should learn from our terrible mistakes."

Overviews of practices in other Western nations -- including Australia, England and Canada -- suggest that despite this warning, various U.S.-style detention schemes based on remote future risks are gaining traction internationally.

Several chapters in the volume, however, focus on a somewhat different model out of Scotland, the Order for Lifelong Restriction (OLR). This order, rendered at the time of initial sentencing, involves the imposition of an indeterminate sentence to be followed by lifelong supervision. To maximize consistency, risk assessors are accredited by a special Risk Management Authority. Although Scotland abides by the European Convention on Human Rights, which contains a guarantee against arbitrary detention, concerns have been raised about lengthy detention and lifelong sentences for juveniles. Additionally, as the volume editors point out, "it is too early to say whether the Scottish system has been successful in reducing violent and sexual recidivism."

On a somewhat different note, Jennifer Skeem, Jillian Peterson and Eric Silver challenge the widespread assumption that mental illness is a direct cause of criminality in mentally ill offenders. Rather, they say, many mentally ill people may engage in criminal behavior because they are poor, and therefore exposed to contextual risk factors for crime. We should stop regarding mental illness as a master status, they argue, in favor of a more nuanced approach to mentally ill offenders.

Many of the chapters in this timely collection -- edited by Australian legal scholars Bernadette McSherry and Patrick Keyzer -- will no doubt prove prophetic. The current state of fear-based hysteria, like all social movements, will wane in time. Politicians and the public will realize how costly and ineffective are many of the currently cherished practices and will reverse course. As the editors conclude:

What is clear from many of the chapters in this book is that schemes for imprisoning or detaining people for what they might do are costly, likely to contravene international human rights obligations, and have not proven to be effective in reducing crime, particularly sex offences. Detaining more and more people gives rise to the risk that detention regimes will collapse under the weight of numbers.

Yet in the short term, those who most need to hear this collective discourse -- including politicians, judges, prison officials, and even our very own misguided forensic practitioners -- are not listening. Isolated within a like-minded community, they are too busy searching for the magic potion that will make the world safe and appease a frightened public.

My Amazon review is HERE. If you appreciate this review, please go to Amazon and click "Yes" (this review was helpful).

Trailblazing change in eyewitness ID rules

2011-08-25T08:43:00.000-07:00

NJ ruling may reduce wrongful convictions;

other jurisdictions likely to follow suit
x

As today's New York Times reports:

The New Jersey Supreme Court, acknowledging a “"troubling lack of reliability in eyewitness identifications," issued sweeping new rules on Wednesday making it easier for defendants to challenge such evidence in criminal cases.

The court said that whenever a defendant presents evidence that a witness's identification of a suspect was influenced, by the police, for instance, a judge must hold a hearing to consider a broad range of issues. These could include police behavior, but also factors like lighting, the time that had elapsed since the crime or whether the victim felt stress at the time of the identification.

When such disputed evidence is admitted, the court said, the judge must give detailed explanations to jurors, even in the middle of a trial, on influences that could heighten the risk of misidentification. In the past, judges held hearings on such matters, but they were far more limited.

The decision applies only in New Jersey, but is likely to have considerable impact nationally. The state's highest court has long been considered a trailblazer in criminal law, and New Jersey has already been a leader in establishing guidelines on how judges should handle such testimony.
Stuart J. Rabner, the court’s chief justice, wrote in a unanimous 134-page decision that the test for reliability of eyewitness testimony, as set out by the United States Supreme Court 34 years ago, should be revised.

The new rules come at a time of increased scrutiny of the eyewitness identification issue among lawyers, law enforcement officers and the scientific community. The opinion noted that task forces have been formed to recommend or put into effect new procedures to improve reliability.

The State Supreme Court's ruling was seen as significant because it was based in part on an exhaustive study of the scientific research on eyewitness identification, led by a special master, a retired judge, who held hearings and led a review of the literature on the issue. The special master, Geoffrey Gaulkin, estimated that more than 2,000 studies related to the subject had been published since the Supreme Court’s original 1977 decision, the court noted.

"Study after study revealed a troubling lack of reliability in eyewitness identifications," Chief Justice Rabner wrote. "From social science research to the review of actual police lineups, from laboratory experiments to DNA exonerations, the record proves that the possibility of mistaken identification is real.

"Indeed, it is now widely known that eyewitness misidentification is the leading cause of wrongful convictions across the country."

The decision listed more than a dozen factors that judges should consider in evaluating the reliability of a witness’s identification, including whether a weapon was visible during a crime of short duration, the amount of time the witness had to observe the event, how close the witness was to the suspect, whether the witness was under the influence of alcohol or drugs, whether the witness was identifying someone of a different race and the length of time that had elapsed between the crime and the identification.

The Times report continues HERE.

Hat tip: Jane

Steffan's Alerts #7: Neuromaging, juveniles, and perceptions of injustice

2011-08-24T09:00:00.000-07:00

Click on a title to read the article abstract; click on a highlighted author's name to request the full article.

Perceptions of wrongful convictions by criminal justice personnel

In a new issue of Crime and Delinquency, Brad Smith and colleagues surveyed attitudes of criminal justice participants in Michigan. According to their findings, defense attorneys perceived that wrongful convictions occur more frequently than did police, prosecutors, and judges. Of the professionals surveyed, only defense attorneys viewed this concern as warranting reforms in the justice system.

How important are graduated sanctions in reducing recidivism?

In another article in Crime and Delinquency, Kristin Johnson and coauthors indicate that incorporating graduated sanctions into predictions of recidivism diminishes the predictive utility of waiver to adult court. Their results draw attention to the role of graduated sanctions and treatment programming for juvenile offenders.

What do mock jurors make of neuroimaging evidence?

N.J. Schweitzer and colleagues presented neuroscience-based testimony and neuroimagery to jury-eligible participants in mock court experiments. As reported in a new issue of Psychology, Public Policy, and the Law, participants rendered opinions on criminal culpability and sentencing. Neuroimagery, the authors reported, affected jurors' judgments no more than verbal testimony based on neuroscience.

Is the Adam Walsh Act working with juvenile offenders?

Also in Psychology, Public Policy, and the Law, Ashley Batastini and colleagues report that the Act’s classification system failed to predict sexual or nonsexual reoffending among a small sample of juveniles who were followed over a two-year period. In addition to their exploratory study, they discuss key concerns in the application of the Act to juveniles.

Steffan's alerts are brought to you by Jarrod Steffan, Ph.D., a forensic and clinical psychologist based in Wichita, Kansas. For more information about Dr. Steffan, please visit his website.

New York Times op-ed: "The last pariahs"

2011-08-22T19:35:00.000-07:00

The chorus of dissent has been getting louder for a while now, but an anthropologist's cogent op-ed in the New York Times may increase mainstream attention to the problem of overly broad sex offender laws. The op-ed by Roger Lancaster is getting a lot of play on professional listservs. In case you missed it here's the conclusion:

Digital scarlet letters, electronic tethering and practices of banishment have relegated a growing number of people to the logic of "social death," a term introduced by the sociologist Orlando Patterson, in the context of slavery, to describe permanent dishonor and exclusion from the wider moral community. The creation of a pariah class of unemployable, uprooted criminal outcasts has drawn attention from human rights activists; even The Economist has decried our sex offender laws as harsh and ineffective.

This should worry us, in part because the techniques used for marking, shaming and controlling sex offenders have come to serve as models for laws and practices in other domains. Several states currently publish online listings of methamphetamine offenders, and other states are considering public registries for assorted crimes. Mimicking Megan’s Law, Florida maintains a Web site that gives the personal details (including photo, name, age, address, offenses and periods of incarceration) of all prisoners released from custody. Some other states post similar public listings of paroled or recently released ex-convicts. It goes without saying that such procedures cut against rehabilitation and reintegration.

Our sex offender laws are expansive, costly and ineffective -- guided by panic, not reason. It is time to change the conversation: to promote child welfare based on sound data rather than statistically anomalous horror stories, and in some cases to revisit outdated laws that do little to protect children. Little will have been gained if we trade a bloated prison system for sprawling forms of electronic surveillance that offload the costs of imprisonment onto offenders, their families and their communities.

The author, Roger N. Lancaster, is a professor of anthropology and director of the cultural studies program at George Mason University. He is the author of a new book from UC Press, Sex Panic and the Punitive State.

The full article is online HERE.

Collateral consequences of juvenile conviction

2011-08-21T10:00:00.000-07:00

By the age of 17, Terence Hallinan had had several scrapes with the law, including a conviction for helping beat up three Coast Guardsmen in order to steal a case of beer. Yet he was able to put delinquency behind him, and become a successful attorney who served two terms as district attorney of San Francisco.

Such redemption stories were not so unusual back in his day. But today's world is much less forgiving of youthful indiscretions. A kid who gets into any type of legal trouble has a much harder time overcoming the stigma and going on to lead a productive life.

An astonishing two million juveniles are arrested each year in the United States. For many, their first priority is getting out of custody. They may be willing to plead guilty to a seemingly trivial crime, in order to accomplish this short-term goal. Little do they realize that pleading guilty to a crime may have long-lasting collateral consequences far worse than the initial punishment itself.

In an excellent overview of the juvenile justice system in the current issue of The Champion (published by the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers), Dr. Ashley Nellis, research analyst of The Sentencing Project, outlines some of these drastic consequences:

Zero Tolerance and Other School Push-out Policies

There is a public perception that African American and Latino students are quitting school in droves. But as explained on an episode of NPR’s Talk of the Nation last week, many of these students are actually the victims of PUSH-OUT policies disproportionately targeting students of color. Zero Tolerance policies spearheaded by the federal government are forcing some youngsters out of school even if an arrest does not lead to a conviction.

Employment Barriers

Contrary to what many people believe, children processed through the juvenile justice system do not automatically have their records destroyed (expunged) when they turn 18. Neither do juveniles transferred to the adult system. Having a criminal record creates sometimes insurmountable barriers to leading a successful life, by limiting options for housing, education and employment.

Eviction and Homelessness

Due to a law passed in 1996, under the Clinton administration, a juvenile conviction can lead to the eviction of an entire family from low-income housing. Youth re-entering their communities from out-of-home placement also struggle to achieve housing stability. This destabilization, naturally, increases risk for reoffending -- and the cycle continues.

Placement on a Sex Offender Registry

Despite their demonstrated lack of efficacy, and even their harmful effects, juvenile sex offender registries are gaining in popularity. In some states, children as young as nine are being placed on registries for childish misconduct or even consensual relations with other children. Ironically, children are the very people the laws were intended to protect, yet they are being disproportionately harmed by placement on registries.

After individuals have been added to the registry, they face strict limitations on where they can live, attend school, and work. Anytime registrants change residency they must notify the authorities and update their registration; failure to do so promptly can and frequently does result in incarceration…. Despite the law’s intent to make children and the community safer, it does the opposite. Young people face social stigma, branding as predators, housing bans, and exclusion from schools as a result of placement on the registry.

Dr. Nellis concludes with a series of recommendations to reduce the negative impact of collateral sanctions for juveniles, including:

Reverse counterproductive school-based policies such as "zero tolerance" that disengage youth from school.
Ensure expungement for juvenile records.
Prohibit inclusion of juvenile records on national and state offender registries.
Restrict non-relevant conviction questions from employment applications.
Revise and expand reentry services and supports for youth.

The full article, Addressing Collateral Consequences of Convictions for Young Offenders, can be downloaded HERE.

Hat tip: Bruce

At long last: New forensic specialty guidelines approved

2011-08-18T19:40:00.000-07:00

After a 9-year revision process, the American Psychological Association has finally approved new Specialty Guidelines for Forensic Psychologists. The Guidelines will replace those established in 1991.

The Guidelines are intended for use not only by forensic psychologists, but by any psychologist when engaged in the practice of forensic psychology. Forensic psychology is defined as the application of any specialized psychological knowledge to a legal context, to assist in addressing legal, contractual, and administrative matters. The Guidelines are also meant to provide guidance on professional conduct to the legal system, and other organizations and professions.

Guidelines differ from standards, such as those in the APA’s Ethics Code, in that they are aspirational rather than mandatory. They are intended to facilitate the continued systematic development of the profession and facilitate a high level of practice by psychologists, rather than being intended to serve as a basis for disciplinary action or civil or criminal liability.

The revision committee, chaired by Randy Otto, included representatives of the American Psychology-Law Society (Division 41 of the APA) and the American Academy of Forensic Psychology.

The Guidelines will be published shortly in the American Psychologist journal. In the meantime, a draft version is available HERE. I encourage all of you to read and learn its contents. Much of it will sound familiar to those with a working knowledge of the APA’s Ethical Principles of Psychologists and Code of Conduct. Although the Guidelines dance around some of the major controversies in our field, there is still plenty to be happy about. By way of whetting your appetite (hopefully), here is a random smattering:

2.05 Knowledge of the Scientific Foundation for Opinions and Testimony: Forensic practitioners seek to provide opinions and testimony that are sufficiently based upon adequate scientific foundation, and reliable and valid principles and methods that have been applied appropriately to the facts of the case. When providing opinions and testimony that are based on novel or emerging principles and methods, forensic practitioners seek to make known the status and limitations of these principles and methods.
2.08 Appreciation of Individual and Group Differences: Forensic practitioners strive to understand how factors associated with age, gender, gender identity, race, ethnicity, culture, national origin, religion, sexual orientation, disability, language, socioeconomic status, or other relevant individual and cultural differences may affect and be related to the basis for people’s contact and involvement with the legal system.
6.03 Communication with Forensic Examinee: Forensic practitioners inform examinees about the nature and purpose of the examination, … including potential consequences of participation or non-participation, if known.
10.01 Focus on Legally Relevant Factors: Forensic practitioners are encouraged to consider the problems that may arise by using a clinical diagnosis in some forensic contexts, and consider and qualify their opinions and testimony appropriately.
11.04 Comprehensive and Accurate Presentation of Opinions in Reports and Testimony: Forensic practitioners are encouraged to limit discussion of background information that does not bear directly upon the legal purpose of the examination or consultation. Forensic practitioners avoid offering information that is irrelevant and that does not provide a substantial basis of support for their opinions, except when required by law.

Leonard Rubenstein, a senior scholar at the Center for Human Rights and Public Health of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, writes in a Huffington Post column that the new Guidelines will prevent psychologists from participating in abusive government interrogations as they did at Guantanamo. I think that's a stretch. These guidelines are not enforceable. And, like all such professional guidelines, they will be subject to diverse interpretations.

Pretrial civil detention of sex offenders unlawful, judge rules

2011-08-15T21:54:00.000-07:00

A New York law mandating that sex offenders be confined while awaiting civil commitment trials is unconstitutional, a judge has ruled. But the ruling may not make much difference to most sex offenders whom the state wants to civilly detain, because they are waiving away their rights to a trial.

Supreme Court Justice Colleen Duffy ruled that New York's 2007 Sex Offender Management and Treatment Act is unconstitutional because it does not allow for any less restrictive remedy such as supervised release. Under the law, if a court finds probable cause that a convicted sex offender remains a danger, the individual must be confined until a civil trial, which can take a year or more.

Ironically, if the sex offender is ultimately found to suffer from a "mental abnormality" that renders him potentially dangerous to the public, the court then has the option of ordering intensive community supervision rather than involuntarily confinement in a mental institution.

In the case at hand, the judge noted that the state's Office of Mental Health had already determined that "Enrique T." would be a good candidate for strict, outpatient supervision rather than confinement. She ordered the immediate release of the detainee:

"Respondent is faced with a Morton's Fork -- he must either choose to enforce his right to a jury trial and continue to be detained for an unknown period of time in a psychiatric facility awaiting trial on this matter or surrender his right to trial and consent to a finding of mental abnormality so that he may be immediately released back to the community under [strict and intensive supervision and treatment]. Due process cannot countenance a statute that mandates such a choice."

Her decision follows a federal court decision earlier this year that came to the same conclusion, according to a report by John Caher in the New York Law Journal.

Sex offenders choosing not to fight commitment

Unless these rulings result in complete scrapping of the state's civil commitment scheme, which is unlikely, it is unclear how many sex offenders whom the state seeks to detain will end up benefiting. For reasons that experts call "inexplicable," the majority of offenders are waiving their right to a jury trial, according to a separate report in the New York Law Journal. Reports John Caher:

Shortly after the Sex Offender Management and Treatment Act took effect in April 2007, authorities detected an unexpected and inexplicable phenomenon: Sex offenders targeted for civil confinement after serving their prison sentences were overwhelmingly waiving their right to a jury trial and consenting to confinement. Nearly 92 percent, 33 of 36, of the sex offenders civilly confined during the first year of the law's enactment had agreed to placement in a mental institution following release from prison. And while those numbers have tapered off in the last three years, a large portion of the sex offenders targeted for civil management continue to forego their right to a trial and consent to confinement, even though the most serious consequence of going to trial is confinement….

No one is sure why sex offenders are consenting to confinement and giving up their liberty when … they seemingly have nothing to lose. At trial after they have served a criminal sentence, the state has to prove by the high standard of clear and convincing evidence that the respondent suffers from a "mental abnormality" that predisposes him or her to commit sex crimes. A unanimous verdict is required, and if a unanimous verdict is not reached, the offender will likely go free since most have served the maximum sentence and are not on parole.

The success rate when offenders go to trial is fairly high, about 15 percent overall and more than 20 percent when they opt for a jury rather than a bench trial.

Theories offered by an assortment of experts and state officials to explain this unexpected trend include:

Sex offenders believe that confinement is inevitable so choose to avoid the added humiliation and angst of trial.

Sex offenders know they are dangerous and need help in order to not reoffend.

Some offenders cannot find any doctor willing to testify on their behalf.

Some offenders are so marginalized and despised that they have no options for employment or housing in the community.

"A great deal of these folks have no social safety net," said defense attorney Thomas Callaghan. "Many of them are estranged from their families. Very few are married. They realize they can fight, but they really have no place to go."

Lesley M. DeLia, another legal services attorney, echoed this observation. She said some clients were initially eager to go to court, but balked as their trial date loomed closer:

"They know it is not a friendly world out there if they get out. They are scared about what life will be like ... and some of them just don't want to deal with it. There is no housing for them. They can't get jobs. Others are just so institutionalized they are afraid to go. We did have one fellow who said he knows he is not ready and does not want to get out and do it again."

"Kids-for-cash" judge gets 28-year prison term

2011-08-12T08:36:00.000-07:00

Mother of a suicide victim confronts crooked judge

In what may be the longest federal prison sentence ever given in a U.S. political corruption case, a juvenile judge who earned millions of dollars by sending kids to private jails has received a 28-year sentence. A second judge, Michael Conahan, has not yet been sentenced.

As I blogged about in 2009 ("Evil lurked in Luzerne County"), Pennsylvania Judge Mark Ciaverella Jr. got kickbacks for sending children to the private lock-up. He even shut down the public juvenile hall so all minors would have to go to the new detention center. He sold children down the river for crimes as minor as writing a prank note or possessing drug paraphernalia.

Investigation of the so-called "kids for cash" scheme led to 4,000 juvenile convictions being overturned. Although 28 years sounds like a long time, if you do the math it's less than three days per juvenile case.

Gay panic defense: Slain boy accused of provocation

2011-08-10T21:57:00.000-07:00

The closely watched murder trial of Brandon McInerney took an unfortunate turn this week, as a self-appointed expert testified that 15-year-old Larry King contributed to his own demise by flirting with his killer and by wearing makeup and women’s clothes, thereby disrupting the middle school where he was shot to death.

The witness, family therapist Stephen Irshay, said he contacted McInerney’s defense team to offer his assistance after reading about the case in the newspaper. He said he got involved because he didn't think the defendant would have shot King without provocation.

The nature of Irshay’s expertise is not clear from the trial coverage in the Ventura County Star. He is a licensed marriage and family therapist (MFT) who was just appointed as assistant director of an MFT program at an online school, Touro University Worldwide. Expert witnesses must have special knowledge or experience to offer -- based on their education, training or experience -- that is beyond the realm of common knowledge.

The use of the gay panic defense is no big surprise, because the case is no whodunit. In front of 25 to 30 eyewitnesses, McInerney shot King twice in the back of the head during a first-period class on Feb. 12, 2008. The day before, he had told several people of his plan, acquired a gun and loaded it.

Prosecutors allege that the killing was a hate crime, and that white supremacist ieology played a role. McInerney's attorneys deny this. Rather, they say McInerney -- who had just turned 14 -- was pushed to the emotional breaking point by King's sexual harassment of him.

“This is a very troubled young man pushed to the edge," defense attorney Scott Wippert told the jury during his opening statement. "He was pushed there by a young man who repeatedly targeted him with unwanted sexual advances."

Despite his youth, McInerney is being tried as an adult. He faces 51 years to life in prison if convicted. He turned down a plea bargain that would have netted him a 25-to-life sentence. For a teenager, I'm sure, either option sounds like an equal eternity.

Ironically, his prosecution as an adult came in spite of a lobbying campaign by a coalition of 27 sexual minority groups. "We call on prosecutors not to compound this tragedy with another wrong,” wrote the coalition. "We support the principles underlying our juvenile justice system that treat children differently than adults and provide greater hope and opportunity for rehabilitation." The letter cites research by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention finding that children tried as adults are more likely to commit another crime than those tried as juveniles.

Does flirtation justify execution?

The gay panic defense plays on an antiquated cultural belief that a heterosexual male is justified in using violence to defend himself from flirtation by a gay man. In my own research with antigay hate crime perpetrators, I found that many noncriminal young men believed they had a right to physically assault gay men whom they perceived as flirting with them.

However, as some of the young women pointed out during my focus groups on antigay violence back in the mid-1990s, this logic is never used to justify a girl or woman violently attacking a flirtatious man.

In my research, I conceptualized antigay violence as existing on a continuum. At one end are verbal taunts that, sadly, remain socially acceptable among many adolescents. At the other end are severe acts of violence. These tend to be committed not necessarily by those with the most hostile attitudes toward gay people but, rather, by those with the most severe histories of violence or abuse.

McInerney's case fits this model. The defendant was raised in a chaotic and violent household and subjected to physical and sexual abuse. His father, now deceased, used to beat him for fun, defense attorney Wippert told the jury. The father shot McInerney’s mother, then married her and put bullets in her Christmas stocking as a joke.

According to reports back in 2008, McInerney was one among many students at the Southern California middle school who routinely teased and taunted King.

Gwen Araujo Justice for Victims Act

The gay panic defense is especially effective in cases where the victim was transgender, due to widespread societal revulsion against gender nonconformity. Use of the defense by the killers of Gwen Aurajo, a transgender teen, led to a backlash in California in the mid-2000s. The state passed the Gwen Araujo Justice for Victims Act. This law allows for a special instruction to jurors, reminding them not to allow bias based on sexual orientation or gender identity to affect their deliberations. The prosecutor in the McInerney case, Maeve Fox, said she will ask that this instruction be read to the jury.

The jury instruction is brilliant. Rather than seeking to ban the gay panic defense outright, a strategy that might be unconstitutional and would only serve to drive it underground, it helps to shine a spotlight on the underlying biases that the defense promotes.

This strategy is more effective than an outright ban, says legal scholar Cynthia Lee in a lengthy and well-reasoned 2009 treatise in the UC Davis Law Review.

Suppression of gay panic claims, like suppression of bad speech, will not eliminate the underlying stereotypes and assumptions that make such claims persuasive. Open discussion and debate is a better way to combat those assumptions.

The law can and should play a role in mediating th[e] cultural dispute [over the status of homosexuality] – not by dictating what jurors can and cannot consider, but by making sure jurors are cognitively aware of what exactly is at stake when a gay person is the victim of fatal violence, and the person who killed him claims he did so in response to an unwanted sexual advance.

We won't have to wait long to hear whether the defense will help young McInerney or, more likely, backfire. The case is expected to go to the jury in about two weeks.

Related blog posts:

What caused middle school tragedy? (June 10, 2008)
More on the McInerney antigay murder case: Defense may use emerging science of adolescent brain development (June 11, 2008)
Don’t ban Gay Panic Defense (Aug. 5, 2009)

The Ventura County Star has detailed trial coverage and a timeline of the drawn-out legal machinations.

Hat tip: John L.

Forensic conference in idyllic Queensland setting

2011-08-05T18:23:00.000-07:00

Hell's Gate, Noosa coastline (Photo credit: Kathleen)

For the indigenous Gubbi Gubbi people of southern Queensland, the Noosa area was a mecca and gathering place. Being here, I can certainly see why. The site of Australia’s Forensic Psychology National Conference is an idyllic tropical rain forest alongside a gorgeous coastline.

Even aside from the spectacular locale, the conference so far has been rewarding beyond my wildest expectations. Conference organizers and delegates alike have been overwhelmingly friendly and welcoming. They strike me as a serious and thoughtful bunch, communicating a solid commitment to ethical professional practice. Both my keynote -- on the subterranean tensions between technocratic and humanistic visions for our field -- and my all-day training workshop on forensic diagnosis were very well received.

The vast continent of Australia has only 331 psychologists who are registered with the national government as forensic specialists (under the nationalization scheme that just went into effect), and it seems that most of them are here. Also in attendance are several other Americans invited to give keynote talks and all-day training workshops, including forensic guru Tom Grisso, Les Morey (the developer of the Personality Assessment Inventory) and John Edens, a prominent forensic psychologist from Texas A&M.

Blogger with Paul Wilson and conference chair Gavan Palk

A highlight for me was to get a chance to meet Paul Wilson, an internationally renowned criminologist and human rights activist. Paul (here, we all go by first names and forego the hierarchical ribbons and badges sported by speakers and officers at the typical psychological conference in the USA) is a prolific scholar and practitioner. He has been involved in many high-profile forensic cases, including on the effects of solitary confinement and of the forced removal of indigenous Australians from their ancestral homes. His latest book is Erasing Iraq: The Human Cost of Carnage, which -- as the title implies -- details the cost in human suffering of the war.

Paul's keynote focused on the role of forensic psychologists in miscarriage of justice cases. He has significant personal experience in this area, including involvement in Australia’s most infamous case of wrongful conviction, the so-called “Dingo Case" (made into a Hollywood movie starring Meryl Streep). That was the case in which Lindy Chamberlain was convicted of murder after her infant daughter disappeared while the family was camping at the famous Ayer’s Rock. It wasn’t until six years later that the baby’s clothing was found in a nearby dingo lair, proving that the mother was telling the truth when she said she saw a dingo carry off her baby.

Blogger with a new friend

It hasn’t been all work for me here in Queensland. I took the opportunity to see a bit of the Sunshine State, visiting first Cairns in tropical north Queensland and then Brisbane, the state’s biggest city. In Cairns, we journeyed out to the Great Barrier Reef for a little snorkeling, and also took in the local wildlife. We were lucky enough to spy the reclusive platypus in a creek in the Atherton Tablelands, as well as the much more abundant and visible kangaroos.

Further south, Queensland’s major city of Brisbane looks to have recovered quite nicely from the catastrophic flooding last January. Just goes to show what's possible in a country with a more rational social policy and a decent economy.

Brisbane is an attractive, up-and-coming city with lots of cool neighborhoods. As soon as we arrived, we were lucky enough to stumble across a vibrant organic food fair. We got to nibble and sip oodles of lovely locally produced treats -- fresh produce, dairy products, meats, sauces and wines.

Swimming enclosure, St. Helena Prison

While in Brisbane, we also toured an old prison on St. Helena Island in the Moreton Bay. It reminded me a bit of McNeil Island in Washington, where I worked for a spell. Operational from the 1860s to the 1930s, St. Helena went through several phases. Sometimes, it housed the Queensland prison system’s troublemakers and the criminally insane. At other times, it was a model prison farm reserved for well-behaved prisoners. At the end, it held aged and infirm convicts. To discourage escape during the harsh old days, prison warders attracted sharks by dumping cow offal along the beaches. Prisoners who wanted to swim after a day of back-breaking labor in the fields, sugar mill or factory could do so only in a small offshore area enclosed by long poles. (See photo.) But during our visit to the ruins, the fearsome predators were long gone and the setting was serene and idyllic. Just us, the guide who ferried us across on a small boat, and a few wallabies, shorebirds, and grazing cattle belonging to the national park service.

For me, Australia has been well worth the long airplane ride to get here; I hope to come back again to see Sydney, Melbourne, and Western Australia and to visit with some of my newfound colleagues in Australia's wonderful community of forensic psychologists.

Crime after crime: Battered woman’s struggle for justice

2011-07-28T10:00:00.000-07:00

Debbie Peagler was 15 when she met and fell in love with a charming young man named Oliver Wilson. Unfortunately for her, Wilson was a pimp and drug dealer who ferociously abused her over the next six years. He beat her with a bullwhip, prostituted her, forced her to perform oral sex in front of his friends, put hot ashes on her hands and made her eat his feces, according to witnesses. When she said she would leave, he threatened to kill her.

On May 27, 1982, she asked him to drive her to a park. Waiting in ambush were two friends of her mother, neighborhood gang members who killed him. The prosecution maintained that Peagler hired the men. Peagler claimed she never discussed killing Wilson.

Threatened with the death penalty, Peagler pled guilty to first-degree murder and went to prison. And there she would have remained for the rest of her life, if not for a little serendipity.

After California enacted a law in 2000 to ensure fair trials for battered women who killed their abusers, the California Habeas Project selected Peagler as someone who might be eligible for relief. A local law firm, Bingham McCutchen, agreed to take the case pro bono. Two rookie land-use attorneys, Joshua Safran and Nadia Costa, began collecting new evidence to substantiate Peagler’s abuse.

Peagler’s story had deep personal meaning for Safran. As a 9-year-old boy, he helplessly cried through the night as an abusive boyfriend pummeled his mother. Eventually, he and his mother escaped, and he learned to channel his simmering rage into legal advocacy.

Over the course of several years, the attorneys found long-lost witnesses, learned of allegedly perjured evidence, and got new statements from the men who had killed Wilson.

For her part, Peagley was a model prisoner. She had spent her decades behind bars tutoring illiterate women, leading a gospel choir, earning two college degrees, and participating in a battered women’s support group.

Eventually, the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office agreed that Peagley should have been convicted of voluntary manslaughter, which at the time carried a sentence of only two to six years. Prosecutors signed a statement agreeing to Peagley’s immediate release from prison.

But that happy ending was not to be. After a political backlash in his office, the district attorney reneged on the deal, and Peagley’s petition for release was denied. Meanwhile, the case took on a new urgency when Peagley was diagnosed with advanced lung cancer.

Costa and Safran continued to petition for Peagley’s release on numerous grounds: Her guilty plea was coerced, false evidence was introduced against her, and the original prosecution would have differed had there been expert testimony on battering.

Although the courts failed her, she was finally paroled from prison in August 2009, thanks in part to an international grassroots campaign. She currently lives in Carson, CA.

Sadly, Bay Area private investigator Bobby Buechler, who gathered exculpatory evidence and was involved in the crusade to free Peagley (and whom I happened to know), died unexpectedly shortly before her release.

Filmmaker Yoav Potash spent five years filming the story as it unfolded, both in and out of prison. CRIME AFTER CRIME is the award-winning documentary of this dramatic saga. The film is currently playing around the United States; check HERE for more information and to find a venue near you.

Hat tip: Martin

Tweeting the news

2011-07-24T08:00:00.000-07:00

For those of you who aren't (yet) on Twitter, here are some of the news stories I’ve tweeted this week. Click on a story to go to the original piece. To subscribe to my Twitter feed, click HERE.

Tunnel vision: How L.A. police relentlessly targeted wrong man in Dodgers Stadium assault; parolee/gang member didn't even like baseball

(. . . a bit similar to how the initial blame for Oslo blasts fell on Muslims; L.A. suspect Giovanni Ramirez was lucky to have a top-notch lawyer)

NPR: Violence at California mental hospitals: The new norm

NPR: Prisoners’ hunger strike puts focus on California prison conditions

California Watch: Prison audit finds 'high potential for fraud'

Texas study raises questions about impact of school discipline

Washington Post: Supreme Court ruling, rising police presence in schools spur Miranda concerns in interviewing children

Worldwide incarceration tops 10 million

2011-07-22T16:57:00.000-07:00

Photo credit: Richard Ross, Architecture of Authority collection

More than 10.1 million people are held in penal institutions throughout the world according to the latest edition of the World Prison Population List (WPPL), published this week by the International Centre for Prison Studies in London. Rates vary considerably between different regions of the world, and between different parts of the same continent.

The United States' prison total constitutes a rate of 743 per 100,000 of the national population, making it pro rata by far the biggest user of prison in the world. The overall world prison population rate is 146 per 100,000.

The fact that there are now over ten million men, women and children in prisons around the world should be a matter of grave public concern. A small proportion of these are a threat to public safety and there is no question that they need to be detained. However, in many countries the majority of prisoners come from minority and marginalised groups, or are mentally ill, or are drug and alcohol abusers. Sending such people to prison is inappropriate, does not improve public safety and is very expensive. There are indications in a number of countries that current economic difficulties are at last forcing politicians and public commentators to acknowledge that prisons cannot continue to expand in the way they have done in recent years.

The WPPL provides up-to-date information on the global prison population based on official government data from 218 countries and territories.

The current report is HERE.

Sex offender roundup

2011-07-20T21:21:00.000-07:00

So much being generated on the sex offender front that it's hard to keep up. Here, in no particular order, are just a few choice items:

The Atlantic: Overzealous sex offender laws harm public

As the tide begins to turn, The Atlantic magazine has joined the backlash, with a well-written and insightful piece by associate editor Conor Friedersdorf that begins like this:

On the Texas registry for sex offenders, Frank Rodriguez's crime is listed as "sexual assault of a child." If I lived in his neighborhood and had young children, I'd be frightened upon seeing that. Safe to assume that some of his neighbors discovered his status and became alarmed. Needlessly so, as it turns out. Delving into his story, journalist Abigail Pesta has discovered that Rodriguez was arrested for having sex with his high school girlfriend. He was 19. She was 15. They've now been happily married for years, and he has fathered four girls.

The anecdote is part of a larger story about America's sex offender registries and the people on them who don't belong there. It's a timely subject. This month, some state governments are racing to bring themselves into compliance with the Adam Walsh Child Protection and Safety Act in order to avoid losing federal funds. As a result, the sex offender dragnet may pull in even more people. Says Pesta, "Each of the 50 states now has at least one grassroots group dedicated to getting young people -- many high school age, but some under the age of 10 -- off the registry."

So perhaps the backlash will grow too.

The article continues HERE.

Juvenile registries harmful, study finds

Dovetailing nicely with the Atlantic piece, a leading researcher and national expert on sex offender policy has found that placing the names of juveniles on sex offender registries does nothing to make society safer, and has harmful unintended effects on youth and on juvenile case processing.

Based on her research, Elizabeth Letourneau of the Medical University of South Carolina is calling for an end to notification requirements for juveniles.

A summary of her research is HERE.

California releases audit of SVP program

The State Auditor’s Office has issued its long-awaited report on the practical implementation of California’s civil commitment scheme for sex offenders. It isn’t as hard-hitting as I would have liked, but there are a few interesting tidbits.

One I found interesting was the statistic that out of all of the sex offenders who were NOT civilly committed and who were released into the community between 2005 and 2010, only ONE was later convicted for a new sexually violent offense. Talk about a low base rate!

The report also details the program’s meager bang for the buck. From 2005 to 2010, the state paid nearly $49 million in evaluation costs alone to a small group of privately contracted evaluators. Some of these psychologists earned upwards of $1 million per year. And for what return? Last year, the SVP program screened 6,575 prisoners for possible civil commitment. And guess how many were committed? THREE (much less than 1 percent)!

Just think about how much primary prevention work to reduce sexual violence all of those waste millions could have funded.

The full report is online HERE.

More on the social costs of civil detention

Unlike the California auditors, who seem to have bought into the promise of the Static-99 as an “actuarial” technique capable of predicting future behavior, law professor Tamara Rice Lave of the Miami School of Law has just published an article in New Criminal Law Review claiming that the Static has little utility in SVP determinations not only because it is inaccurate, but also because it does not link dangerousness to mental illness as U.S. laws require. Here is the abstract of her article, “Controlling Sexually Violent Predators: Continued Incarceration At What Cost?”

Sexually violent predator (SVP) laws are inherently suspicious because they continue to incarcerate people not because of what they have done, but because of what they might do. I focus on three major criticisms of the laws. First, I use recent recidivism data to challenge the core motivation for the SVP laws—that sex offenders are monsters who cannot control themselves. Second, I situate the laws theoretically as examples of what Feeley and Simon call the “new penology.” I argue that the SVP laws show the limited promise of the new penology—that we can use science to predict risk accurately—because the actuarial instruments used in SVP determinations make many mistakes. In making this argument, I focus particularly on the most commonly used such instrument, the Static-99. Finally, I argue that the Static-99 fails to meet the constitutional criteria laid out by the U.S. Supreme Court in Kansas v. Hendricks because it does not link an individual’s mental illness to his dangerousness.

Her full article is available online HERE.

Government SVP reports off target, says Allen Frances

Allen Frances, the chair of the DSM-IV Task Force, has been dabbling with SVP cases as an expert witness for the past year. After reviewing almost 100 cases, he is – to put it mildly – under-impressed by the reports of government experts:

In not one case did the sexual offender qualify for anything remotely resembling a DSM-IV diagnosis of Paraphilia. And this is in an enriched sample of offenders who have been carefully screened and are presumed to have Paraphilia. Certainly state evaluators are wildly over-diagnosing Paraphilia and the courts are sanctioning unjust psychiatric incarceration based on their misguided opinions.

The evaluators all misinterpreted DSM-IV in just the same way. They routinely equate the act of committing a sex crime with having a mental disorder. Their reports gave remarkably detailed descriptions of the offender's criminal behavior, but provide little or no rationale or justification for a diagnoses of Paraphilia. The write-ups are all long and thorough -- but completely off point and generic. Although written by dozens of different evaluators, they have a rote quality and all repeated exactly the same mistakes.

His full post, at his “Couch in Crisis” blog at the Psychiatric Times, is HERE.

Is porn "driving men crazy"?

Last but not least, the prolific and insightful blogger Vaughan Bell deconstructs a CNN article by social crusader Naomi Wolf, who claims that pornography is “rewiring the male brain” and “causing [men] to have more difficulty controlling their impulses.”

According to her article, … “some men (and women) have a 'dopamine hole' – their brains’ reward systems are less efficient – making them more likely to become addicted to more extreme porn more easily.”

Wolf cites the function of dopamine to back up her argument and says this provides “an increasing body of scientific evidence” to support her ideas.

Porn is portrayed as a dangerous addictive drug that hooks naive users and leads them into sexual depravity and dysfunction. The trouble is, if this is true (which by the way, it isn’t, research suggests both males and females find porn generally enhances their sex lives, it does not effect emotional closeness and it is not linked to risky sexual behaviours) it would also be true for sex itself which relies on, unsurprisingly, a remarkably similar dopamine reward system.

Furthermore, Wolf relies on a cartoon character version of the reward system where dopamine squirts are represented as the brain’s pleasurable pats on the back....

The full post is HERE.

And after all of this if you're still in the mood for further browsing, I highly recommend the wide-ranging Mind Hacks blog; the topics are always fascinating (at least to me).

Historic hunger strike by Supermax prisoners continues

2011-07-15T20:00:00.000-07:00

Gangs are bad, right? And prison gangs are worse?

Yet, when members of California prison gangs try to retire, California punishes them. They are shipping to a solitary housing unit (SHU) at Pelican Bay, one of the worst prisons in the state. They are locked in isolation cells for months or even years while being forced to undergo lengthy “debriefings” where they must snitch on other prisoners. Many become mentally ill.

The conditions of extreme isolation and deprivation are so severe that they violate the U.S. Constitution and international laws on torture, according to prisoners who on July 1 began a hunger strike in protest.

The prisoners were supported by up to 6,600 prisoners at 13 other prisons around the state. But even with some of the strikers reportedly nearing death this week, prison officials adamantly refuse to sit down at the table and negotiate. In fact, they are putting an evil spin on the strikers by claiming they are being coerced by prison gangs.

The prisoners' demands include an end to long-term solitary confinement, expansion of constructive activities and privileges (such as phone calls and the right to take one photo of themselves per year), and abolition of the prison’s gang debriefing policy.

One of the striking prisoners is Hugo Pinell, an African American organizer who has been imprisoned since 1971 for his role in the San Quentin uprising that led to George Jackson's death. Pinell has been at the Pelican Bay SHU for 20 years.

This is at least the third in a series of protests by U.S. prisoners in recent months. Last December, thousands of prisoners in Georgia used mobile phones to organize what has been called the largest prison labor strike in U.S. history, in at least six prisons across the state. Prisoners on death row in Ohio then went on a hunger strike and won some changes in their conditions, according to a lengthy report by Al Jazeera.

Al Jazeera has more background on the strike (HERE). To get involved by contacting state officials or taking other supportive action, visit the blog of Prisoner Hunger Strike Solidarity.

Related blog post:

Supermax: Hell on earth ... or not so bad

Loughner case shines spotlight on forced meds practices

2011-07-10T07:45:00.000-07:00

Under what circumstances may the U.S. government drug a captive against his will?

A round of high-profile court skirmishes over the forcible medication of attempted assassination suspect Jared Loughner may help resolve legal ambiguities on this issue.

Two decades ago, in the landmark case of Washington v. Harper, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that convicted prisoners may be forcibly medicated without a judicial hearing, if prison officials deem them dangerous to themselves or others. All that is needed is an informal administrative hearing behind the walls, a proceeding that many liken to a kangaroo court.

But pretrial detainees – who are presumed innocent – have greater rights when it comes to forced medications to restore their competency to stand trial. In the 2003 case of U.S. v. Sell, the high court specified certain conditions that must be met before someone may be forced to take medications designed to render him or her trial competent:

The Constitution permits the Government involuntarily to administer antipsychotic drugs to render a mentally ill defendant competent to stand trial on serious criminal charges if the treatment is medically appropriate, is substantially unlikely to have side effects that may undermine the trial’s fairness, and, taking account of less intrusive alternatives, is necessary significantly to further important governmental trial-related interests.

Government "end run"?

In the Loughner case, defense attorneys accused the government of trying to make an end run around these legal requirements by claiming that Loughner was dangerous. The incidents of alleged dangerousness claimed by the government included cursing and throwing a plastic chair on March 14, spitting and lunging at his lawyer, Judy Clarke, on April 4, and throwing chairs in his cell on May 28.

All of these incidents took place at the prison hospital in Springfield, Missouri where Loughner was sent after being diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia and determined to be incompetent to stand trial. Loughner’s attorneys said they were denied access to their client, and only found out after the fact that the prison had held a hearing on June 14 and unilaterally decided to forcibly administering antipsychotic medication. Loughner is taking the oral antipsychotic Risperidone under threat that if he refuses, he will be forcibly injected with the potent drug Haldol.

In an emergency motion filed June 24 seeking to force a halt to the medications, the defense team said three isolated instances of misconduct during five months in custody are hardly sufficient to show present dangerousness. They accused prison staff of administering the antipsychotic not to reduce Loughner’s danger, but to restore him to competency, in violation of Sell. They asked that the prison be ordered to use other means of reducing Loughner’s danger if necessary, such as restraints, isolation, or minor tranquilizing drugs.

Courts must remain mindful that the dangerousness rationale and its purported justifications don’t become muddled with the attempt to administer psychotropic medications for purposes of treatment and restoration of competency…. To permit the prison to make these treatment decisions without Sell’s guidance and protections not only jeopardizes a significant liberty interest, it jeopardizes a fair trial.

They cited the landmark case of Riggins v. Nevada. In that case, the U.S. Supreme Court held that a Nevada man was deprived of a fair trial by being forcibly medicated to keep him competent during trial. The medications interfered with the content of his testimony and his ability to follow proceedings and communicate with counsel; they also impacted his outward appearance such that he no longer appeared insane, despite the fact that he was claiming insanity at the time of his crime.

"I didn’t go to medical school"

A federal judge summarily denied the defense motion, saying he did not want to second-guess the prison clinicians.

"I defer to medical doctors," U.S. District Judge Larry A. Burns said at an emergency hearing requested by the defense. "I have no reason to disagree with doctors. I didn't go to medical school."

But because the issue of whether forced drugging is permissible is a legal issue, not a clinical one, this seems like improper deference.

Luckily, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals had more sense, issuing an emergency order July 2 to halt the medications until the issue could be fully litigated.

The appellate court pointed to its 2005 ruling in of United States v. Rivera-Guerrero, holding that forced administration of medications to pretrial detainees is of “clear constitutional importance.” In that case, the 9th Circuit ruled that in federal cases that such orders are too important even to be issued by lower magistrate judges, as opposed to district court judges.

Should pretrial detainees get greater deference?

At a hearing before a three-judge panel on Thursday, the appellate justices focused on the distinction raised by Loughner’s defense team between forcibly medicating a convicted prisoner and medicating a pretrial detainee.

“Why should someone presumptively innocent not be treated with greater personal deference” than a convicted prisoner, asked Judge Alex Kozinski, chief judge of the 9th Circuit, according to the Wall Street Journal.

"Is the goal of rendering the defendant competent different from medicating him for dangerousness?” asked Judge Kim McLane Wardlaw, touching on another area of murkiness. "Are these different goals? How do you separate them out?"

Loughner’s attorneys argue that not only will their client's fair-trial rights be affected, but he could also suffer irreparable harm from the strong drugs because they alter the chemical balance in the brain and can have serious, even fatal, side effects.

With the immediate urgency out of the way, the appellate panel did not give a date for their ruling on the medication issue.

Where is this heading?

This skirmish holds the promise of clearing up confusion over when the government may forcibly drug a captive without a formal court hearing. But, no matter which way this skirmish ends, Loughner will likely never be released from custody. His case may take one of several directions.

One likely next step is that he will be granted a Sell hearing, as his attorneys seek. If so, it seems likely that forced medications will be authorized. After all, if ever there was a compelling government interest in seeing that a defendant goes to trial, it is here. The 22-year-old Arizona man faces 49 felony charges in a Jan. 8 shooting rampage that killed six people and wounded 13, including U.S. Representative Gabrielle Giffords.

If he is given antipsychotic medications, Loughner will most likely be rendered competent to stand trial, probably within a year. The standard for competency to stand trial requires only that a defendant have a factual and rational understanding of the proceedings and an ability to rationally assist his attorney in his own defense.

Once Loughner is found mentally competent, his attorneys will likely raise the defense of insanity. In order to be found insane, his mental disorder must have prevented him from knowing that his actions were wrong at the time he committed them. If he is found insane, he will be committed to a locked psychiatric hospital.

In contrast, if he is found guilty he faces the death penalty. However, there is a good chance that attorneys will negotiate a plea deal that spares his life. This is what happened in the case of Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber. Such a resolution has the advantage of avoiding the internationally embarrassing spectacle of the U.S. government trying and executing someone who was floridly psychotic at the time of his crimes.

There is also the remote possibility that Loughner will not be restored to competency and so will never face trial. This could happen either if his attorneys succeed in fighting forced medications (a highly unlikely event), or in the event that medications do not work to restore his sanity. In either of these circumstances, prosecutors could seek to have him civilly committed to a psychiatric hospital.

Bottom line, he will never be released back into the community.

I have made the June 24 defense motion available HERE. My previous essay on the Loughner case, “The Arizona rampage: Analyzing the analyzers,” can be found HERE. My other prior coverage of legal wrangling in this case is HERE.

Steffan's Alerts #6: Tattoos, bias, homicides and death penalty attitudes

2011-07-02T09:04:00.000-07:00

Professional biases in diagnosing child sexual abuse

In a new issue of Child Abuse and Neglect, Mark Everson and Jose Miguel Sandoval surveyed 1,106 child maltreatment professionals in order to explore personal biases and attitudes that might account for how professional judgments of child sexual abuse differ based on the same evidence.

Does information about the death penalty alter attitudes?

In a new issue of Crime and Delinquency, Scott Camp and colleagues report data suggesting that the answer is "yes" but the extent of the effects depends on personal characteristics.

Branding of the criminal lifestyle through tattoos

Alicia Rozycki Lozano and colleagues examine the connection between prison tattoos and criminality in their new article in the International Journal of Offender Therapy and Comparative Criminology. As a group, offenders with prison tattoos are at higher risk for recidivism and incur more institutional infractions than do offenders with non-prison tattoos or no tattoos, the authors report.

Risk assessment among homicide offenders

Several articles in the new issue of Homicide Studies might pique your interest:

Amy Nivette reports on the limitations of using cross-national research to identify predictors of homicide.

Sharon Smith and colleagues of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention used qualitative analyses to derive four categories that they hope will improve understanding of sexually motivated homicides.

Melanie-Angela Neuilly and colleagues present a classification tree analysis, based on 320 homicide offenders in New Jersey, that they contend is useful in predicting recidivism.

Jeff Gruenewald compared homicides committed by extremists with those perpetrated by other types of persons in the United States. He found both similarities and differences.

Click on a title to read the article abstract;
click on a highlighted author's name to request the full article.

Steffan's alerts are brought to you by Jarrod Steffan, Ph.D., a forensic and clinical psychologist based in Wichita, Kansas. For more information about Dr. Steffan, please visit his website.