Forensic psychological testimony often ignored, psychologists claim

How much influence do forensic psychologists have on trial outcomes?

Not as much as we'd like, two prominent psychologists assert.

In one study, David Shapiro found that psychological testimony about a defendant's mental illness did not reduce the likelihood of a jury imposing a death sentence. Paradoxically, instead of feeling sympathy for the defendant, judges and juries may perceive mental illness as a threat warranting execution, Shapiro said.

An exception, he found, was testimony regarding prior abuse suffered by the defendant, which may create sympathy and understanding.

At the recent APA convention in San Francisco, psychologist Lenore Walker reported a similar pattern in child custody cases.

According to Walker, judges often ignore psychologists' testimony about who should get custody in high-conflict divorces, trusting their gut feelings over the opinions of experts.

The discounting of expert psychologists is especially likely, both psychologists agreed, in cases of dueling experts. Jurors and judges may have trouble weighing the competing evidence and so just discount all of it.

The psychologists called for greater outreach to courts regarding the potential utility of expert testimony, and how to differentiate good expert evidence from bad.

The full story, in the current issue of the American Psychological Association's news magazine, is available online.

Zero tolerance for hugging

I’ve noticed a rather sweet trend among high schoolers and middle schoolers lately. Students – especially the girls - are very affectionate, hugging each other hello and goodbye.

So what do the Zero Tolerance folks that I’ve been blogging about lately have to say about that?

No more hugging.

Take Percy Julian Middle School in Oak Park, Illinois. The school has just banned all hugging on school grounds.

Hug a friend, go to jail. Or at least, to the principal's office.

"Hugging is really more appropriate for airports or for family reunions than passing and seeing each other every few minutes in the halls," said school principal Victoria Sharts, who lamented that some students were forming "hug lines" in the hallways.

"The goal is always to promote safe and orderly hallways where everybody can get by, be safe, and be on time." (And, she didn't mention, to be an automaton.)

No knives and guns, I can see. But no hugs? Is that really the right message to be sending to youngsters?

Photo credit: Soulfull (Creative Commons license)

"Mass Incarceration in the United States: At What Cost?"

Unebelievably, that is the title of a Congressional hearing tomorrow morning.

Legislators, it seems, are finally noticing the staggering costs of mass incarceration, estimated at more than $200 billion per year.

The Joint Economic Committee wants to know why the United States has 25 percent of the world’s prisoners, when we are only 5 percent of the world's population. It plans to explore this question, as well as ways to address incarceration "that responsibly balance public safety and the high social and economic costs of imprisonment."

About time, huh? I sure hope this is part of the pendulum swing that I've been predicting here!

The JEC announcement, along with transcripts of the statements by some of the expert witnesses, is here. Senator Jim Webb of Virginia, who organized the hearing, has some good data, charts, and graphs at his website.

Hat tip to Sentencing Law & Policy for alerting me to this hearing.

Growing epidemic of criminal behavior among the wild

Human influence suspected in bizarre rampages by elephants, otters, and seagulls

When humans aren’t killing off other species, it seems that we are turning them into violent criminals.

Remember cute little Morgan the Sea Otter?

Abandoned as a pup, he was raised by naturalists at the Monterey Bay Aquarium and then released back into the wild. The motherless darling became a bizarre interspecies pedophiliac serial killer, terrorizing the Pacific coast. He raped dozens of baby seals, afterwards holding them underwater to drown them.

And how about those rogue elephants in India and Africa?

With their traditional, matrilineal culture destroyed by poachers and farmers, gangs of young males are terrorizing the countryside, raping and killing rhinoceroses, attacking villages, and goring humans to death in what appear to be premeditated assaults in which escape routes are blocked.

They don't wear red or blue colors, but their appearance is just as ominous. Hundreds of people have been killed in the widespread attacks. Scientists are describing this never-before-seen behavior as a species-wide emotional breakdown stemming from human interference.

Then there are the birds.

Right out of Hitchcock's horror thriller, "bird rage" has struck urban Great Britain. An 80-year-old man had a fatal heart attack after being swooped on by seagulls; a woman was rushed to the hospital with deep beak wounds to her head, and a pet dog was pecked to death. A preschool in Scotland even had to hire falconers armed with hawks to safeguard its children.

Against this ominous backdrop, it is no wonder that the story of a mere kleptomaniac has inspired so many chuckles across the blogosphere.

"Sam," a Seagull in Scotland, has stolen his way into celebrity status through his daily pilfering of cheese Doritos.

If you haven't yet seen the video, it's worth a look. Especially notice how he saunters in slowly, checking to see that the shopkeeper doesn't notice him, and then speeds up on the way out. If I was evaluating him in a forensic context, I'd take that as evidence that he is aware of his moral – if not legal - culpability.

Click on the thief's photo to see the video.

DNA exonerations heralding broad legal changes

The highly publicized exonerations of hundreds of convicts through DNA technology is leading to rapid and sweeping legal changes around the United States. Among the new laws being proposed and passed in states all around the country:

• New standards for the identification of suspects by eyewitnesses, which is far and away the largest cause of wrongful conviction. Experts suggest requiring sequential rather than simultaneous photo lineups, and "double-blind" systems in which the officer administering a photo lineup is kept ignorant of the identity of the true suspect.

• Laws requiring police to electronically record interrogations to ensure that police did not coerce suspects or provide them with the incriminating information contained in their confessions.
  

• Efforts to require independent corroboration of testimony from police informants, who are often unreliable.
  

• Commissions to expedite the cases of those who were wrongfully convicted and to consider changes to legal procedures.

As suggested by a prominent story in today's New York Times, the DNA exonerations have contributed to a rapid change in public opinion. In a recent Gallup Poll, for instance, 59 percent of Americans believed that an innocent person had been wrongly executed in the past five years; these skeptical people thought that about 1 out of 10 of people who are executed overall are actually innocent.

Experts on false confessions tend to agree that the numbers are far higher than previously thought. Convening in El Paso, Texas last week for a conference on this timely topic, experts repeatedly stated that those exonerated through DNA technology represent only the "tip of the iceberg."

In enacting legal reforms to address this problem, the United States is following in the footsteps of Great Britain, which implemented legal changes several years ago in the wake of a series of highly publicized wrongful conviction cases involving the Irish Republican Army and others.

Zero Tolerance: It's the American Way

Ever wonder how the concept of "Zero Tolerance" wormed its way into the mainstream of American culture? Here's a thought-provoking essay on the origins and the insidious spread of "ZT," which sets the tone for so much criminal justice policy these days.

Guest commentary by Richard Rapaport

Does it feel like nobody listens anymore? That everyone is tuned into their own channel? That people in your daily life are working from some secret script designed to degrade and disenfranchise you? Welcome to ZT America.

ZT, or Zero Tolerance, is the mind-set and rationale used these days to justify actions ranging from the expulsion of elementary school students for bringing alcohol-based mouthwash to school, to the sentencing of a Virginia mother to two years in prison for serving beer to her 16-year-old son and his classmates at a party.

Zero Tolerance has been invoked against a kaleidoscope of recent allegedly anti-social behaviors: Republican colleagues of Idaho Sen. Larry Craig clawed each other raw to declare Zero Tolerance for his alleged misdeeds in the men's room at Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport. Zero Tolerance was on the faces of University of Florida police as they Tasered student Andrew Meyer during a speech by John Kerry. Meyer's imbecilic behavior, in fact, illustrated his own Zero Tolerance for the time and opinions of others.

ZT is in the American political bloodstream. After Hurricane Katrina, President Bush declared Zero Tolerance for looters. Trying to defuse the crisis in California prisons, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger pronounced Zero Tolerance for "gang-related codes of silence." Mothers Against Drunk Driving avows to-the-death Zero Tolerance for underage drinking. The Defense Department proclaims ZT for sexual harassment.

Zero Tolerance has become a featured player in the American judicial pageant. Its tenets justify draconian overcharging and Methuselah-like jail terms. Zero Tolerance has helped transform American justice into an incarceration machine largely free from human interference or humane inference. ZT justice absolves officials from accusations of weakness on crime, while jailing people in record numbers. According to a recent Justice Department report, the United States now has the world's largest prison population and highest rate of incarceration, with 1 in 32 American adults enmeshed in the criminal justice system.

Like water hyacinth, the pestiferous houseplant invading Southern lakes and streams, Zero Tolerance is taking over the national fishpond, choking out once-treasured values like compassion, discretion and inventiveness. Over the past four decades, Zero Tolerance has metastasized from drug enforcement, to policing, into the court system, the public schools and now, perhaps worst of all, into the American social mainstream.

The institutionalization of Zero Tolerance policies signals the triumph of a bureaucratic mind-set more obstinately retrograde than the once-derided French or German models. I mean, have you been at the counter inside a Barnes & Noble, in line at the Century 20 ticket kiosk, or checking into a doctor's office, and asked for a slight bending of the house rules? Not this time, chump.

Nor does it take a genius to explain why Zero Tolerance is transforming America into "The Land Mercy Forgot." Zero Tolerance is, after all, the logical and syntactical equivalent of Total Intolerance. How unfortunate that there was no warning that we toiled under a system that has sanctioned total intolerance across the breadth of national life.

Originally culled from the engineering lexicon, Zero Tolerance first saw light in 1971, a PR slogan promulgated by New York public health officials who failed to detect tainted baby food in an upstate processing plant. In 1973, as Watergate's noose tightened, Nixon Justice Department officials appropriated Zero Tolerance as a tough-on-crime anodyne. In the early 1980s, the Navy adopted Zero Tolerance to add puissance to a purge of seagoing potheads. From there, it entered civilian drug enforcement and then spilled over into the general justice system, prospering as that ZT subspecies, Zero Tolerance for Crime, periodically trotted out to induce voters into backing law-and-order candidates.

In ZT America, God save the judge finding redemptive qualities in law-breakers. Creampuff sentencing is the Zero Tolerance equivalent of the scarlet "S," for Soft on Crime. Today, "victim's rights" organizations are twitching to replace "activist judges" with those favoring sentences that would have made Saddam Hussein blush. Having created a courtroom forum for victims and families, television now brings us a daily parade of the unmerciful, tasteless and overwrought, without seemingly a thought to the fading of John Adams' epochal instruction for "a nation of laws and not of men."

Discretion, once a tool of intelligent policing, has given way to drawn guns, takedowns and automatic arrest. Does anyone remember a time when a local cop might simply drive a tipsy taxpayer home? Not if MADD has anything to say about it. Zero Tolerance enforcement also sponsors a growing culture of entrapment that encourages the setups and stings that vacuum into the already full-to-bursting criminal justice system not the truly dangerous, but rather the merely stupid and weak.

The unhappiest consequence of Zero Tolerance, however, may be the rise of Generation ZT, children born beginning in the Reagan/Bush '80s, now the sacrificial lambs of Zero Tolerance and, paradoxically, as they have entered the workforce, its most loyal servants.

For these children of ZT, physiology is destiny: They are pudgy, raised indoors during the '90s Polly Klaas child-snatching hysteria. They are myopic, recipients of too much homework assigned too early. They walk hunched, from bulging book bags hefted after administrators sealed school lockers as potential drug magazines. Forbidden to explore local woods and instead accessories to parent-supervised play dates, they have little taste for solitude.

They are, however, anything but stupid. Beset on all sides, Generation ZT learned that a jesting lunchroom threat, a comb that looks like a switchblade, or a stick of caffeinated Jolt gum offered to a classmate could terminate Ivy League aspirations.

How much easier, then, to stifle the impulse to toilet-paper the assistant principal's car, or challenge the history teacher's lame Civil War interpretation. These days, however, any perceived act of resistance might bring the local police SWAT team charging through school's corridors. How much more practical to play it sly, pass through class without being the stuck-out nail pounded in by the hammer of Zero Tolerance. Yet, how sad to trim youthful sails to the winds of ZT at the age when gaudy mistakes are best made, the status quo mocked and hell generally raised.

Generation ZT has done few of those things. Having learned to love the subjugating rules required for success in the un-brave new world of Zero Tolerance, you can bet that their ascension up the American socio-economic ladder will mean an increasingly intolerant ZT eye cast on the often-unruly lives of the rest of us.

From the San Francisco Chronicle of Sept. 30; reprinted with the author's written permission.