Insanity verdict for soldier with PTSD

Case heralded as landmark for traumatized veterans

Photos: Sargent Binkley before and after
In a potentially landmark case, a jury in the San Francisco Bay Area has acquitted a former Army captain who used a 9mm handgun to rob a pharmacy because he was addicted to painkillers.

The Santa Clara County jury found West Point graduate Sargent Binkley not guilty by reason of insanity after hearing testimony that he suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder as a result of his military experiences in Bosnia and Honduras. Binkley is still awaiting trial for a similar robbery in nearby San Mateo County.

Armed robbers are rarely found insane when their crimes appear rational, goal-directed, and premeditated. Additionally, California law does not allow for an insanity verdict based on addiction alone.

The defense argued that Binkley was traumatized by two events -- guarding a mass grave in Bosnia and shooting a teenager during a Honduran drug raid. His father testified that he became addicted to morphine-based painkillers after dislocating his hip in Honduras while running away from an alcohol-fueled fight over a woman.

The trial featured dueling psychiatric experts who agreed that Binkley suffers from PTSD, but disagreed on whether his symptoms were of sufficient magnitude as to render him insane, or incapable of knowing right from wrong at the time of the robberies.

Dr. Jeff Gould, originally appointed by the court in adjacent San Mateo County, testified for the prosecution that Binkley's PTSD did affect his judgment but did not render him insane.

Dr. Kenneth Seeman testified for the defense that Binkley manifested symptoms of psychosis, depression, suicidality, and anxiety in addition to PTSD and was incapable of knowing right from wrong.

Prosecutor Deborah Medved challenged Seeman on why he did not render any of these diagnoses in his original report, written a year prior to testimony. In his written report, according to news reports, Seeman opined that Binkley's insanity was due to his drug addiction. In California, addiction is barred as a basis for the legal defense of insanity. Seeman responded to the prosecutor’s challenge by saying his diagnoses had evolved over the course of his two subsequent evaluation sessions with Binkley.

In another unusual twist suggesting that the jury may have been motivated at least in part by sympathy for the defendant, the pharmacist whom Binkley robbed of Percocet testified for the defense.

The case has been the subject of web sites and petition drives pleading for leniency due to Binkley's status as a veteran. A group of military veterans had regularly attended Binkley’s court hearings. "It's a great day for our veterans who have come back suffering from PTSD to now know they can receive justice," said one, Vietnam veteran and West Point graduate Alan Lubke.

Binkley had faced a minimum term of 12 years in prison. Now, he will undergo a mental health evaluation aimed at determining whether he should be psychiatrically hospitalized or ordered into outpatient treatment.

"I am expecting the doctors will determine he has regained his sanity and is no longer a danger," said defense attorney Chuck Smith. "I hope he will be released relatively soon, like within the next six months."

San Jose Mercury News coverage is here. San Francisco Chronicle coverage is here.

Related resources:

• New York Times (Jan. 1, 2009): Focus on violence by Returning GIs
• Arizona Republic (Jan. 6, 2009): New court sought to aid vets charged with crimes

Report: Online threat to children overblown

The Internet may not be such a dangerous place for children after all.

A task force created by 49 state attorneys general to look into the problem of sexual solicitation of children online has concluded that there really is not a significant problem.

The findings ran counter to popular perceptions of online dangers as reinforced by depictions in the news media like NBC's "To Catch a Predator" series….

The panel, the Internet Safety Technical Task Force, was charged with examining the extent of the threats children face on social networks like MySpace and Facebook, amid widespread fears that adults were using these popular Web sites to deceive and prey on children.

But the report concluded that the problem of bullying among children, both online and offline, poses a far more serious challenge than the sexual solicitation of minors by adults.

So reports Brad Stone in today's New York Times. The news report is here. The full report is here.

Related articles from this blog:

• Experts debunk myths about online youth victimization
• More research debunking Internet predator myth
• Unintended consequences: Is predator hysteria fueling phobia of men?
• 'Predator' caught in its own trappings (Steven Winn essay)
• Cyberbullying verdict raises legal questions

Hat tip: Jane

Stalking: New crime victimization survey

The U.S. Justice Department's Bureau of Justice Statistics has released the largest-ever study of stalking, a category of crime that was not previously included in the National Crime Victimization Survey. According to the study, intended to document the scope and types of stalking, 3.4 million Americans identified themselves as victims of stalking during a recent one-year period. Most stalkers knew their victims, and the most frequent victims -- not surprisingly -- were young women.

Tomorrow’s USA Today has the story.

Epidemic of nomadic sex offenders worsens

New laws not exactly a blueprint for public safety

It's happening all around the country, from Georgia to Florida to Washington. But nowhere is the problem more acute than in California, which has seen an 800 percent increase in the past two years. As Karl Vick of the Washington Post reports:

LOS ANGELES -- Upon release from state custody, Ross Wollschlager began an intensive search for a home, one that abided by the restrictions imposed on convicted sex offenders in California -- and, in various versions, by about 30 other states. Obliged by law to return to Ventura County, the convicted rapist was forbidden to sleep within 2,000 feet of a school or a park.

He ended up in a tent on the dry bed of the Ventura River.

Strict new laws aimed at keeping track of sex offenders after they leave prison appear to be having the opposite effect, encouraging homelessness in a population believed more likely to re-offend if cast into the streets without structure or family support, say prosecutors, police, parole officials and experts on managing sex offenders.

The issue is starkest in California, where the number of sex crime parolees registering as transient has jumped more than 800 percent since Proposition 83 was passed in November 2006. The "Jessica's Law" initiative imposed strict residency rules and called for all offenders to wear Global Positioning System bracelets for the rest of their lives.

Named for a 9-year-old Florida girl raped and murdered by a convicted sex offender, the provision passed by a wide margin that reflected the powerful public emotion that experts and law enforcement officials say in this instance trumped sound policy.

"The public definitely was sold a bill of goods on this one," said Detective Diane Webb, supervisor of the Los Angeles Police Department unit that tracks 5,000 sex offenders in Los Angeles County. "Unfortunately, it bodes well for politicians to support it because the public does have this false sense of security that this is somehow protecting them when it's not."

Locating legal housing for offenders has become so difficult in urban California that when parole officers find an apartment building beyond the exclusion zones, they often pile in as many offenders as the landlord will accept. When neighbors notice, the cluster spurs protests that prompt lawmakers to pass even tighter exclusion zones as Proposition 83 allows.

The informative Post story continues here.

Previous related posts:

• Punishment for homelessness: Life in prison
• Sex offenders must live as trolls
• A bridge as a last resort

Eye-plucking prisoner competent and sane

Andre Thomas plucked out his right eye in 2004. Now, he has plucked out his left.

The Texas death row inmate with a history of mental problems killed his wife and their two children and ripped out their hearts. He then walked into a police station and confessed.

None of that sounds all that sane. Indeed, Thomas has been diagnosed with schizophrenia and suffers from psychotic delusions and a preoccupation with death, religion, and suicide, sources say.

Nonetheless, he was found competent to stand trial, convicted, and sentenced to die for the death of his 13-month-old daughter.

The self-mutilation is unlikely to have any effect on his appeals, but at least they got him transferred to a psychiatric hospital for treatment.

The story is here.

Court strikes down federal civil commitment law

In a big blow to the federal Adam Walsh Act, an appellate court has upheld a challenge to the civil commitment portion of the law.

The opinion by the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals affirms a lower court ruling in the case, U.S. v. Comstock, which I blogged about back in September of 2007.

The challenge was brought by the North Carolina Federal Public Defenders on behalf of Graydon Comstock, who received a 37-month prison sentence for receiving pornography via computer. When his term ended two years ago, the government certified him as a "sexually dangerous person" and kept him in civil confinement, where he has remained ever since. The ruling will affect at least three other men also held at the Federal Correctional Institution at Butner, North Carolina.

This was the first appellate court to address the constitutionality of the civil commitment portion of the Adam Walsh Child Protection and Safety Act of 2006, which has divided trial courts around the nation.

The court held that the civil commitment portion of the law exceeds federal authority:

The Constitution does not empower the federal government to confine a person solely because of asserted 'sexual dangerousness' when the Government need not allege (let alone prove) that this 'dangerousness' violates any federal law….

Consistent with its role in maintaining a penal system, the federal government possesses broad powers over persons during their prison sentences. But these powers are far removed from the indefinite civil commitment of persons after the expiration of their prison terms, based solely on possible future actions that the federal government lacks power to regulate directly.

The federal government, the court wrote, does not have the power to "regulate all sexual violence, including acts which violate no criminal statute."

Congress’s perceived need for the sort of civil commitment statute at issue here does not create constitutional power where none exists. Congress must instead seek alternative, constitutional means of achieving what may well be commendable objectives.

The court noted that if federal authorities have "serious concerns" about a federal prisoner's future dangerousness, they may notify state authorities, "who may use their well-settled police and parens patriae powers to pursue civil commitment under state law." Federal authorities may even financially underwrite such actions, the court said.

At least 20 states have enacted such civil commitment procedures for Sexually Violent Predators over the past two decades.

In upholding the district court's 2007 opinion, the circuit court did not specifically affirm a second reason given by the lower court for striking down the civil commitment portion of the Adam Walsh law. The lower court had held that the legal standard of "clear and convincing" proof was too low, and that due process required that danger be proven "beyond a reasonable doubt" before a person was preemptively detained. By avoiding that issue, the circuit court appears not to disturb laws in some states that require a lower standard of proof.

Further resources:

4th Circuit Opinion, U.S. v. Graydon Earl Comstock Jr.

Federal court strikes down portion of Adam Walsh Act (blog post of Sept. 10, 2007)

"4th Circuit Got it Right in Comstock," analysis by law professor Corey Rayburn Yung