Embitterment disorder: The latest from DSM-V

My regular readers know all about the DSM-V revision controversies (click HERE for more), and the efforts of some psychiatrists to make the manual ever-more-expansive, until just about nearly every human condition becomes a formal pathology.

But, really, folks. Post-traumatic embitterment disorder? Isn't that going a bit far?

The L.A. Times' Shari Roan has the story of how some psychiatrists want to create a formal label for embittered people bent on revenge. We all know them; now we'll have a handy-dandy acronym -- PTED -- by which to refer to them.

The article is part of Ms. Roan's ongoing coverage of the heated DSM debates at the American Psychiatric Convention in San Francisco. Today's coverage is here.

MORE DSM NEWS: A letter in the current New England Journal of Medicine on the pharmaceutical influence over the DSM-V development process, and the resultant "crisis of credibility" in psychiatry, is online HERE. The authors are Lisa Cosgrove, Ph.D., of the University of Massachusetts; Harold J. Bursztajn, M.D., of Harvard Medical School; and Sheldon Krimsky, Ph.D., of Tufts University.

Oops! Another accidental deportation

Getting arrested, even on a minor charge, can be hazardous in unexpected ways. Especially if you are mentally impaired and have brown skin and/or a Latino surname.

Remember Pedro Guzman, the cognitively handicapped Los Angeles man who was arrested on a minor trespassing charge and accidentally deported to Mexico, where he disappeared for months?

Now, it's happened again.

This time, a North Carolina native who speaks not a word of Spanish ended up on a cross-national odyssey after ICE scooped him up from a local county jail and shipped him off to Mexico. Perhaps fortunately, what with the swine flu and all, Mexico quickly deported him to the Honduras, which deported him to Guatemala. In all, Mark Lyttle bounced among Latin American prisons and homeless shelters for four months before the U.S. Embassy in Guatemala finally confirmed his U.S. citizenship.

Lyttle is mentally retarded and mentally ill. Although his surname does not hint at a Mexican nationality, he has dark skin, thanks to the Puerto Rican ancestry of his birth father. ICE claims Lyttle falsely identified himself as a native of Mexico, a claim Lyttle adamantly denies.

And just as Lyttle was finally making his way home again, you'll never guess what happened: immigration officials at the Atlanta airport tried to deport him yet again!

The Raleigh News & Observer has the story HERE. My blog posts on the 2007 case of Pedro Guzman are HERE.

NCIC critiques actuarial risk tools

The promise of violence risk prediction in corrections has "trumped actual performance," warns a report from the National Council on Crime and Delinquency.

Indeed, in its pell-mell rush to implement defensible, "evidence-based practice," the criminal justice field has abandoned clarity and parsimony in favor of a confusing hodge-podge of practices that lack proven reliability and validity, asserts the report, A Question of Evidence.

The report is authored by Christopher Blair, executive vice president of the NCCD, which is the oldest criminal justice research organization in the United States and a pioneer in evidence-based classification schemes in child protection and foster care.

The report critiques the sloppy use of buzzwords such as "criminogenic needs" and "protective factors." "These are important concepts, but ones that require a significantly deeper level of assessment than many risk models currently provide. As such, they can raise false expectations and lead to inappropriate case plans and services."

The NCIC is advocating that juvenile and adult corrections administrators step back and take a critical look at the actuarial tools, lest flawed instruments, approaches, and terminologies become so entrenched that they are impossible to change.

The report is available HERE.

Forensic Psychology Unbound

That's the clever title of a new website launched by a group of forensic psychologists promoting an online, open-access journal. The first issue of the Journal of Forensic Psychology is in the works, and editor Greg DeClue is encouraging interested professionals to submit manuscripts. The journal will be free and accessible to anyone with Internet access. This stands in stark contrast to most professional journals, which have long been critiqued for being extremely costly and inaccessible to professionals without a subscription or members of the public who don’t have access through academic databases.

The new journal features several of the same editorial board members as a more narrowly focused effort at an open-access forensic psychology journal, the Journal of Sexual Offender Civil Commitment, launched by psychologist Joseph Plaud in 2005. Board member R.K. McKinzey sponsors a third online, open-access forensic psychology site, Web Psych Empiricist, with a neuropsychology emphasis. The breadth of interest areas of editorial board members bodes well for the new journal.

Sponsoring the new project is Professional Resource Press, which was founded by psychologist Larry Ritt a few decades ago, and is a continuing education sponsor approved by the American Psychological Association.

You can help the project succeed by submitting manuscripts, taking the APA-approved Continuing Education offerings, or simply donating money -- online, of course. The home page sports a piggy bank which is not yet open for business.

Profiling the Drug Wars

Wouldn't it be a drag to get arrested for something you did not do based solely on the word of a lying, mentally ill drug addict?

That's what happened to Regina Kelly in rural Hearne, Texas in 2000. Ensnared in a mass arrest of suspected drug dealers at her housing project, the young single mother was charged with selling drugs in a school zone. Despite her insistence that she was innocent, her court-appointed attorney pressured her to accept a plea bargain to avoid many years in prison and the loss of her children. With no criminal record and no drugs found on or near her, she refused.

Instead, with the help of the American Civil Liberties Union she filed a class action suit, Regina Kelly v. John Paschall. Since the case settled four years ago, the local drug task force has been disbanded.

As it turns out, bogus statements by "snitches" trying to curry favor with police are a leading cause of wrongful convictions (along with faulty eyewitness evidence and wrongful confessions). In the U.S. Drug Wars, this especially affects those who, like Kelly, are poor and Black. Texas seems like an unlikely leader in the campaign to reform such practices. But, prompted by the Hearne case and another mass drug arrest the year before in Tulia, the Lone Star State became the first in the United States to enact legislation requiring that the statements of confidential informants be corroborated by other evidence.

The case was reported by PBS' cutting-edge Frontline back in June 2004; a similar documentary was made about the more infamous bust in Tulia, Texas. But now, a fictionalized version of Kelly's story is set to reach a broader, mainstream audience. Co-director Bill Haney says that when he heard about Kelly's case on National Public Radio as he was driving along, it so moved him that he pulled his car over to the side of the road and cried.

In American Violet, "Dee Roberts" (Nicole Beharie) is the plaintiff in a class-action case over racial discrimination in drug enforcement. Tim Blake Nelson plays David Cohen, the ACLU lawyer who sues racist district attorney Calvin Beckett (Michael O’Keefe) on her behalf.

Kelly says the film is "90 percent accurate." The depositions, the courtroom scene in which she fights to retain custody of her children, and many other scenes are word-for-word accounts.

"I'm hoping that somehow, this film is going to get the message out there for someone to look in on this town and other towns that go through the same thing that we go through," Kelly told the Chicago Tribune. "Because something has to happen, and this has to stop."

With this film, Kelly may get her wish. Like Clint Eastwood's magnificent The Changeling (see my review HERE), this tale of a defiant woman's struggle against corrupt law enforcement strikes a universal chord. But unlike The Changeling, American Violet also addresses present-day criminal justice themes of racial profiling and coerced plea bargaining.

Get out and catch it.

The L.A. Times has an informative review HERE. Grits for Breakfast has compiled a list of links to other media reviews. For more information on the true case, see Kelly's website. Or, you can watch Kelly on YouTube. My prior posts on confidential informants are HERE.

DNA science on trial

My least-favorite crime show is CSI. And my least-favorite line in that show is "The science never lies." Talk about a whopper!

With all of the revelations lately about faulty science -- from handwriting identification to fingerprint evidence, ballistics, arson investigation, and even bite marks -- it is reassuring that at least one type of scientific evidence rests on a solid foundation.

That's DNA, of course. After all, as I have heard DNA experts testify many times in court, the likelihood of a wrong DNA match is something along the lines of one in 1.1 million, or less.

But what if that's just one way to run the math? What if you can run it another way, and the odds of a wrong match rise to a whopping one in three? And what if the FBI knows this, and is working feverishly to keep such information hidden from the public and out of the courts?

That is the alarming cover story by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Edward Humes in this month's California Lawyer magazine.

As Humes cogently explains, the problem is not so much with the matching of crime scene DNA to a known suspect. The problem is with the cold cases, when a database spits out a match to an offender who is not already identified as a suspect. The larger the databases get, the greater the odds of a wrong match by pure chance. Especially if the crime scene DNA is degraded, and fewer than the ideal 13 loci (DNA locations) are available for comparison.

This problem was confirmed by a technician at a DNA lab in Arizona back in 2001. Running an experiment by comparing all 60,000 offenders in her state's database, she was shocked to find about 90 coincidental matches. The FBI, unhappy over her disclosure, "began threatening sanctions against crime labs that shared such information with anyone outside of law enforcement," Humes reports.

Experts maintain that wrong matches are becoming more and more inevitable, given the increasing sizes of DNA databases. In California, for example, with the third-largest DNA databank in the world, a new policy of profiling everyone arrested for -- not just convicted of -- a felony is enlarging the database by 35,000 profiles per month.

Donald Kennedy, a former Food and Drug Commissioner who contributed to the recent National Research Council report critiquing the management of government forensic labs, confirmed that the science "is being shut out of court."

That may be forced to change, depending on the outcome of several appeals around the United States. For example, a 71-year-old wheelchair-bound man convicted of a 1972 rape-murder in San Francisco is appealing his conviction on the grounds that the jury was not allowed to hear the alternate statistics. Although John Puckett had other sex offense convictions, only a cold hit to some badly degraded DNA at the crime scene tied him to this one. There were no eyewitnesses, footprints, fingerprints, or confessions. (The case is People v. Puckett, No. A121368, Cal.Ct.App., 1st District, May 1, 2008.)

The National Research Council is calling for change. In their February report, they recommend improving reliability and transparency by taking the databases out of the hands of law enforcement and prosecutors entirely.

In the meantime, jurors -- hearing only the cheerleading version of the science -- will keep believing the CSI mantra that the science never lies.

Edward Humes's report in the California Lawyer is online HERE.