Canada: How false confessions occur

Yesterday's Toronto Star, in the latest in a series of excellent articles on criminal justice issues, features an analysis of false confessions. The article, "Pressure of interrogation imperils even the innocent" by Tim Moore, discusses how police bias toward guilt and resultant high-pressure interrogation techniques can coerce innocent people to confess:

The recent [Canadian] Supreme Court decision in R v Singh, in which the court upheld the conviction of a man who confessed after police continued to question him despite his repeated assertions of his right to remain silent, has attracted renewed attention to the protection that the right to silence is supposed to afford….

There is a substantial body of research on the psychology of confessions. We now know that depending on how they are interrogated, actual innocence may put innocent people at risk. Police cautions are imperfectly understood in the first place, especially by young people or adults with cognitive impairments.

Some innocent suspects waive their right to silence because they perceive innocence to be protective and believe that their blamelessness will soon be self-evident. Unrealistically, they anticipate they will be able to explain to investigators the error of their ways. Regrettably, the ensuing interrogation risks eliciting a false confession from an innocent person, possibly contributing to a false conviction.

The article continues here.

Expert witness controversy spreads

Wrongfully convicted woman can sue expert

Last week, I reported on the brewing controversy in England over unfettered reliance on expert witnesses. Now, the Toronto Star has an article focusing on the controversy in Canada, as well as elsewhere in the world.

It's a fascinating look at some of the high-profile cases that have led to the current attitude of skepticism toward expert scientific and medical witnesses.

As the article explains, the adversarial system is premised on an equal fight between
the accused and the government. Yet the criminally accused typically do not have the funds or expertise to obtain their own experts to challenge the government's expert witnesses, who often wear sterling credentials.

In reaction to a series of convictions based in large part on the testimony of a government pathologist, Canada has reformed its civil laws to allow people to sue an overzealous expert over his findings. The case was brought by Louise Reynolds against forensic pathologist Dr. Charles Smith, whose testimony led to her conviction in the death of her 7-year-old daughter. It later turned out that the girl was mauled to death by a dog. (See my previous blog post on the judicial inquiry into Dr. Smith's expert findings.)

Such tort law is "a first for the common-law world," according to the Star.

Tasers face growing opposition

U.N. Committee calls it "torture"

In the wake of the deaths of six people in just one week and a videotaped incident at an airport in Canada in which a man died after being tased, calls for the restriction or ban of shock-inducing tasers are becoming increasingly urgent.

On Friday, the controversy grew when a United Nations Committee Against Torture called taser use a form of torture. The comment was embedded in a larger report on the committee’s activities, and focused on the use of tasers in Portugal.

Although public criticism focuses on taser use by police, much more out of sight the weapons are widely used as weapons of control in U.S. prisons and juvenile detention facilities. Such widespread tasering of prisoners is documented in the BBC documentary, "Torture: America's Brutal Prisons."

A CBS news report is online here. An Amnesty International report on taser use is here.

Death penalty: Theory vs. practice

Newsweek magazine has an interesting summary of the state of capital punishment in the United States today. The remarkable disconnect between theory and practice seems like another example of today's cultural schizophrenia. Consider these two competing facts:

• Popular support for capital punishment remains fairly strong, at about 65%.

• Front-line decision makers - judges, juries, and even prosecutors - are less and less willing to impose the ultimate punishment.

The reasons for this disconnect? The Newsweek writers pose a few possibilities, including highly publicized cases of wrongful conviction, increased attention to "mitigating circumstances" (such as child abuse) by the defense, and the skyrocketing legal costs of prosecuting death cases.

A new breed of prosecutor is another factor. As an example, Newsweek gives us Craig Watkins, the District Attorney of Dallas, Texas, the hang-'em-high state. Watkins is African American, a Democrat, and a former defense attorney. "In the near future, we will see the death penalty rarely," Watkins said. An even starker example not mentioned in the Newsweek article is Kamala Harris, the District Attorney of San Francisco, who has taken a public position against the death penalty.

For these and possibly other reasons, "what is acceptable in theory seems less and less tolerable in practice," the Newsweek authors comment. The article, entitled "Injection of Reflection," is online here.

Although it isn't mentioned in the Newsweek article, an intense debate is currently underway about whether capital punishment deters crime. The issue has resurfaced thanks to a series of research studies by economists, suggesting that the death penalty may deter crime. Other scholars, most of them non-economists, are highly critical of the studies. Adam Liptak of the New York Times summarized the competing positions in a Nov. 18 article.

Georgia court overturns sex offender law

I haven't found time yet to read or analyze yesterday's ruling on sex offender laws, but this overturning of residency restrictions looked important enough to immediately pass along to my readers. The full opinion in Mann vs. the Georgia Department of Corrections is here; Greg Bluestein of the Associated Press reports on it as follows:

ATLANTA (AP) - Georgia's top court overturned a state law Wednesday that banned registered sex offenders from living within 1,000 feet of schools, churches and other areas where children congregate.

"It is apparent that there is no place in Georgia where a registered sex offender can live without being continually at risk of being rejected,'' read the opinion, written by presiding Justice Carol Hunstein.

The law had been targeted by civil rights groups who argued it would render vast residential areas off-limits to Georgia's roughly 11,000 registered sex offenders and could backfire by encouraging offenders to stop reporting their whereabouts to authorities.

State lawmakers adopted the law in 2006, calling it crucial to protecting the state's most vulnerable population: children.

While many states and municipalities bar sex offenders from living near schools, Georgia's law, which took effect last year, prohibited them from living, working or loitering within 1,000 feet of just about anywhere children gather - schools, churches, parks, gyms, swimming pools or one of the state's 150,000 school bus stops.

It also led to challenges from groups like the Southern Center for Human Rights, which argued that it would force some offenders to live in their cars or set up tents or trailers in the woods, and undermine other efforts to keep track of offenders.

The Georgia Supreme Court ruling said even sex offenders who comply with the law "face the possibility of being repeatedly uprooted and forced to abandon homes."

It also said the statute looms over every location that a sex offender chooses to call home and notes while the case in question particularly involves a day care center, "next time it could be a playground, a school bus stop, a skating rink or a church.'"

Serial killers stalking South Africa

The darker side of international "necrocapitalism"?

Serial killers are trendy. They are the topic of an ever-increasing array of movies, books, and TV shows. One theorist has gone so far to suggest that they are the "gothic double" of the zombie-like consumers wandering the malls of a "necrocapitalist" world, in perpetual quest for another purchase. Indeed, argues Brian Jarvis in "Monsters Inc.: Serial killers and consumer culture," the commodification of violence is an integral aspect of the violence inherent in commodification.

If that is so, then it is no surprise that the United States – where millions of consumers stagger under crippling loads of credit card debt – would lead the world in serial murders. Although I don’t know of a central repository of such data, that is what I've always heard (with Russia following closely on our heels).

How, then, to explain South Africa's claim of passing us by as the world's largest producer of serial killers, surpassing both the United States and Russia?

For one thing, South Africa has a much higher overall murder rate than do either the United States or Russia.

But perhaps a more precise answer will come out of the largest-scale research project on serial murders in the world. The research is being conducted by the specialized Investigative Psychology Unit (IPU) – the South African equivalent of the FBI's Behavioral Sciences Unit – and the John Jay College of Criminal Justice from the City University of New York.

The IPU was established in 1994 by investigative psychologist Micki Pistorius, who became notorious in South Africa and earned praise from legendary FBI profiler Robert Ressler (see my blog essay on profiling). According to a news story this month in South Africa's Daily Star, however, "her methods raised eyebrows in some quarters, and may have contributed to the common public perception that serial killer profiling involves more 'mumbo jumbo' than scientific compilation and analysis of data."

Pistorius theorized that interruption of the normal stages of psychosexual development as posited by Freud could generate a serial killer. She was well known for spending time at the scene of a murder in order to experience the residual energy field the killer left behind.

"I want to retrace the steps of the killer, and it is a place where I can get into his mind. These are the places where they act out their most secret fantasies and I believe the atmosphere is still laden with emotion, waiting for me to tap into it," she once said.

It may have been her emotional approach that caused her to develop post-traumatic stress disorder a few years ago. Such vicarious traumatization is not uncommon among professionals whose work brings them close to trauma survivors and perpetrators.

The brisk business of serial killing in South Africa is keeping the new head of the IPU, psychologist and criminologist Gérard Labuschagne, quite busy. In addition to handling two dozen serial murder investigations over the past six years, he conducts research and provides training to others in South Africa and around the world.

Profiling in South Africa is based not on hunches or emotions but on science and research, taking into account the uniquely South African perspective, Labuschagne insists.

"Our situation is unique in terms of socio-economic and cultural factors," he told the Daily News. "Our high unemployment rate, for instance, makes it easy for killers to lure victims with promises of work."

For a different, and very intriguing, perspective on serial killers, I recommend anthropologist Elliott Leyton's class-based analysis, Hunting Humans: The Rise of the Modern Multiple Murderer. (My review of the book is on its Amazon page.)

Hat tip to Psychology & Crime News for alerting me to the "Monsters Inc." article, which (along with thousands of other articles) is available for free from Sage Publications through the end of November.