Police interrogations: AP-LS issues landmark white paper

Boy's "psychological torture" points to need for reform

In 1998, the Crowe family in Escondido, California awakened to their worst nightmare. Twelve-year-old Stephanie was lying in a pool of blood on her bedroom floor, dead from multiple stab wounds. Police quickly zeroed in on a suspect -- Stephanie's 14-year-old brother Michael. After a series of grueling interrogations, Michael ultimately admitted he may have killed his sister. He and two friends were arrested for murder.

Only through serendipity were the boys' charges dismissed more than a year later, when DNA evidence proved that a mentally ill transient had committed the murder. That man, Richard Tuite, was ultimately convicted of manslaughter.

Now, the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals has reinstituted the families' civil rights case against the police, dismissed by a federal judge several years ago. Writing for the three-judge panel, Justice Sidney R. Thomas described the shocking nature of the interrogations:

One need only read the transcripts of the boys' interrogations, or watch the videotapes, to understand how thoroughly the defendants' conduct in this case "shocks the conscience." Michael and Aaron [Houser] -- 14 and 15 years old, respectively -- were isolated and subjected to hours and hours of interrogation during which they were cajoled, threatened, lied to, and relentlessly pressured by teams of police officers. "Psychological torture" is not an inapt description.

"Psychological torture" and "brutal and inhumane" were descriptions given by a juror in the real killer's criminal trial after he viewed the videotaped interrogations. (I show the heartwrenching video, which is no longer available commercially, in my forensic courses.) Dr. Richard Leo, an expert in coerced confessions and author of Police Interrogation and American Justice (read my review HERE), echoed the juror's sentiments, describing Michael's interrogation as "the most psychologically brutal interrogation and tortured confession that I have ever observed." So did Dr. Calvin Colarusso, Director of Child Psychiatry Residence Training Program at the University of California, San Diego, who evaluated Michael and described the interrogation as "the most extreme form of emotional child abuse that I have ever observed in my nearly 40 years of observing and working with children and adolescents."

The appellate victory will allow the families' federal civil rights case to move forward to a jury trial or a settlement. In an interesting angle, the justices also reinstated the claim against a psychologist whom police consulted during the interrogation. The plaintiffs allege that Dr. Lawrence "Deadlift" Blum, a police psychologist, conspired with Escondido police, helping them formulate a "tactical plan" that they followed in their interrogation. Blum admitted in a deposition that he told a police detective that 15-year-old Aaron Houser, Michael's friend, was a "Charlie Manson wannabe."

The ruling coincides with publication of a landmark article sponsored by the American Psychology-Law Society (AP-LS) on the scientific status of coerced interrogations and false confessions. The article, written by leading scholars Saul M. Kassin, Steven A. Drizin, Thomas Grisso, Gisli H. Gudjonsson, Richard A. Leo, and Allison D. Redlich and published in this month's Law & Human Behavior after an extensive process of vetting and review, is only the second such paper authorized by AP-LS in its 42-year history. The first was a 1998 white paper on eyewitness identification. As William C. Thompson, criminology and law professor at the University of California at Irvine, notes in the introduction to the special issue:

That paper (Wells, Small, Penrod, Malpass, Fulero, & Brimacombe, 1998) proved extremely influential in subsequent policy debates about line-ups and other eyewitness identification procedures. By providing an intellectual framework for analysis of systemic factors that affect eyewitness accuracy, and by distilling specific policy recommendations from a broad array of research, it set the agenda for policy discussion and channeled those discussions in productive directions. The paper was the foundation for a subsequent National Institute of Justice policy paper. Many of its recommendations, such as procedures for composing line-ups and instructing witnesses, are beginning to be implemented nationwide.

The AP-LS hopes the current review article will have a similar effect on the field. After methodically reviewing the state of the science, the authors make a number of critical recommendations for reform aimed at reducing the number of false and/or coerced confessions. These include:

• Mandatory electronic recording of interrogations, with the camera angle focused equally on the suspects and detectives
• Limits on the duration of interrogations
• Limits on the presentation of false information and evidence
• Special protections for vulnerable suspects, including juveniles and those with cognitive and/or psychiatric impairments
• Scrutiny of "minimization" tactics, in which police pursue "themes" that minimize suspects' perceived moral, psychological, and/or legal culpability
  

Michael Crowe's exoneration came about as a result of what author Edwin Borchard described in a 1932 tome on wrongful convictions as "sheer good luck." The scholars who collaborated on this white paper hope that their recommendations will reduce the role of such serendipity, by giving police, prosecutors, judges, and juries the scientific information necessary to reduce egregious injustices like the one in Escondido 12 years ago.

Images: (1) Michael Crowe's interrogation, (2) Richard Tuite, the real killer, (3) Michael Crowe with his sisters; Stephanie is on the left.

Hat tip: Adam Alban

Brian David Mitchell will pursue insanity defense

In the wake of last week's competency finding, a date of Nov. 1 has been set for Brian David Mitchell's federal trial in the kidnap-rape of Elizabeth Smart of Utah. The defense has indicated it plans to mount an insanity defense. As reported by the Associated Press today, a parallel case in state courts has stalled over the question of Mitchell's competency.

I'm still wading through Judge Kimball's 149-page ruling on competency, which I highly recommended to any of you who do competency work. In describing Mitchell as a cunning malingerer, the decision has plenty of implications for the insanity trial as well.

Latest hebephilia critiques: Point-counterpoint

I've just updated my Hebephilia and the DSM-5 Controversy resources page with two new articles in the Archives of Sexual Behavior critiquing the proposed diagnosis of pedohebephilia.

Green: Moral standards masquerading as science

In his boldly titled "Sexual Preference for 14-Year-Olds as a Mental Disorder: You Can’t Be Serious!!," prominent psychiatrist and sexologist Richard Green pulls no punches. Green, who teaches at the Imperial College of London, served on the Gender Identity Disorders subcommittee for DSM-IV. Back in the 1970s he was a forceful advocate for removing homosexuality from the manual of mental illnesses, a struggle he references in his current critique:

The parody of science masquerading as democracy made a laughing stock of psychiatry and the APA when it held a popular vote by its membership on whether homosexuality should remain a mental disorder. Decreeing in a few years time that 19-year-olds who prefer sex with 14-year-olds (5 years their junior) have a mental disorder … will not enhance psychiatry’s scientific credibility.

As he points out, the age of legal consent in several European countries falls within the range that the proposed pedohebephilia disorder would make pathological for the older participant:

If the general culture is accepting of participation by the younger party, but psychiatry pathologizes participation by the older party, then the mental health profession pronounces a moralistic standard and, if successful, becomes an agent of social control.

Green goes on to catalog "biased terms" and "logically frail arguments" in the proposal. In this, he joins a growing chorus of voices sounding the alarm about myriad problems with the proposed pedohebephilia diagnosis.

O'Donohue: Let's go even further

Coming at it from the opposite angle of most critics is William O'Donohue, a psychology professor at the University of Nevada at Reno and co-editor of the second edition of the widely consulted text Sexual Deviance.

O'Donohue argues for keeping it simple: "any sexual attraction to children … is a pathological, abnormal condition." His proposed diagnosis reads as follows: "The person is sexually attracted to children or adolescents under the age of 16" as evidenced by (1) self report, (2) laboratory findings, and/or (3) past behavior. Whether the person has acted on his or her attractions would not matter. The number of victims would not matter. And internal distress would not be required.

O'Donohue expresses a lack of concern over the inevitable false positive errors that such a broad net would ensnare. He argues that we should be more concerned about false negative errors -- pedophiles who escape diagnosis when the criteria are too narrow, for example when more than one known victim is required. And he applauds the move to expand pedophilia to include hebephilia, or attraction to pubescent minors.

Prosecution-retained evaluators in U.S. civil commitment cases will be salivating at the prospects for this one. But consider the source. O'Donohue is the psychologist who has argued for subjecting gay and lesbian parents to special scrutiny in child custody evaluations. (Respected child custody experts Jonathan Gould, David Martindale, and Melisse Eidman wrote an outstanding counterpoint, summarizing the empirical research as indicating that "sexual orientation is not a pertinent factor when considering the best psychological interests of children." In the interest of full disclosure, I share that view, as I wrote in an article published in the same journal a few years earlier.)

And, despite his support for diagnostic expansion, even O'Donohue concedes that the psychometric properties of the proposed diagnosis remain unknown. In other words, neither its reliability nor its validity have been empirically established. A wee problem, that.

A list of published articles on the hebephilia debate, with links to the publisher's web pages, is HERE. For the newest additions, look for the "NEW" icon towards the bottom of the page.

Stalker slain -- "WWBD?"

You evaluate a man who engaged in repetitive stalking of a high school girl. He spied on her, followed her around (rationalizing it as “for her own good”), and even climbed in her bedroom window at night and watched her sleep. He acknowledges a powerful desire to kill her.

Ominous, right? When we encounter men like this, they raise our hackles.

But in pop culture -- movies, music, and videos -- this possessive, condescending, and downright creepy behavior is often glorified as "true love." Such is the case with Edward in the blockbuster Twilight movie series, marketed with great fanfare to young teenage girls.

Appalled by the sexually predatory behavior modeled by Edward in Twilight, freelance Web designer Jonathan McIntosh of Rebellious Pixels asked himself, "What would Buffy do?" Buffy, of course, being the strong woman heroine of the popular TV series Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

If you haven’t seen the resultant video mashup, stop whatever you're doing and take the six minutes to watch it.



The brilliant and hilarious video has been translated into 16 languages and watched by millions of people worldwide. As reported in the L.A. Times, Buffy v. Edward reveals Edward’s supposed charm for the creepy stalker behavior it is:

[T]he Slayer has little patience for the expertly coifed Edward, dazzling or otherwise. "Being stalked isn’t a big turn-on for girls," Buffy tells him. When Edward tries to explain that he's on "a special diet," Buffy replies, "What are you doing? Here, at this table, talking to me like we're some kind of talking buddies?"

McIntosh's essay explaining his project is HERE.

Study: Actuarials fail to predict sexually violent recidivism

In a new prospective study out of Austria, none of the actuarial instruments commonly used to predict sex offender recidivism were able to predict sexually violent recidivism among a group of sex offenders released from prison after treatment.

The interesting study, just published in the International Journal of Offender Therapy and Comparative Criminology, was designed to validate German versions of commonly used actuarial tools, including the Static-99, RRASOR, SORAG, and SVR-20. It followed about 400 Austrian prisoners for an average of three years in the community.

The main problem obtaining significant results was that recidivism was so rare. Obviously, the less likely an event is to occur, the harder it is to accurately predict. Only seven offenders in the entire sample committed a new hands-on offense during the followup period, and most of those were extrafamilial child molesters. Recidivism base rates were especially low for rapists and incest offenders.

The results echoed findings in two other recent studies in which the actuarials failed to demonstrate good predictive validity for predicting sexually violent reoffending.

Most of the instruments did better when recidivism was defined more broadly, to include all sexual reconviction, even hands-off offenses such as voyeurism or exhibitionism that is not typically defined as sexually violent under civil commitment laws. Even including these lesser offenses, the overall base rate for all sexual recidivism among this sample was still quite low, 4.3% (12% among extrafamilial child molesters, 1.7% among rapists, and about 1% among incest offenders).

When extrafamilial child molesters -- the group most likely to reoffend -- were examined separately, all of the instruments except the RRASOR had some predictive utility, with the SVR-20 doing the best. Still, neither the Static-99 (the most widely used actuarial tool) nor the RRASOR could significantly predict sexually violent reoffenses even for that relatively higher-risk group.

"From the results of these studies and of the present study, the actuarial prediction of some reoffence categories in at least some offender subtypes is less accurate than generally assumed,” the authors concluded. "One major aim of most criminal justice systems is to calculate risk by predicting the probability of severe sexual crimes. This goal obviously is not yet achieved satisfactorily by actuarial risk assessment, because results are far from ideal, especially when time-at-risk periods are relatively short."

An important implication of this study is that evaluators need to consider offender subgroups separately, rather than lumping all types of sex offenders together. Recidivism varies tremendously by type of offender (e.g., rapists versus child molesters) and by how recidivism is defined, with the various instruments doing better at some types of predictions than others. Furthermore, so little outcome research exists on certain groups (such as hands-off offenders, juveniles, the intellectually disabled, and offenders with only adult male victims) that the actuarials may be inappropriate to use at all.

The study is:

Rettenberger, M., Matthes, A., Boer, D.P., & Eher, R. (2010). Prospective Actuarial Risk Assessment: A Comparison of Five Risk Assessment Instruments in Different Sexual Offender Subtypes. International Journal of Offender Therapy and Comparative Criminology, 54 , 169-186.

Hat tip: Jeffrey Singer

FURTHER READING: For those of you interested in the actuarials, I also recommend "More prejudicial than probative?," a stastical critique by David J. Cooke, a forensic psychology professor in Glasgow who is an expert scholar and trainer on violence risk assessment. Cooke argues that the actuarials are compelling because they are simple to use by paraprofessionals and have a scientific veneer, but "the scientific basis for actuarial scales, as applied to individuals, may be more illusory than real." The article, in the journal of the Law Society of Scotland, is available online. It also includes useful references to other sources.

Furor over France’s "pornographic" anti-smoking ads

A French anti-smoking campaign comparing smoking to sex slavery is being accused of everything from dissemination of pornography to insensitivity to child sexual abuse victims.

The ads -- set to be published in newspapers and posted in bars -- feature teens smoking cigarettes in such a way that they look like they might be performing oral sex on a man in a suit. The caption reads, "Smoking means being a slave to tobacco."

"Traditional advertisements targeting teens don't affect them. Talking about issues of health, illness or even death, they don't get it," a spokesperson for the Association for Nonsmokers' Rights told AP in explanation. "However, when we talk about submission and dependence, they listen."

The 16-year-old who alerted me to the controversy thought it was quite a hoot. But the family minister of France is not laughing. She is calling for a ban on the ads as "indecent exposure" and "an affront on public decency." Likewise, a child welfare group called the ads cruel and insensitive toward young child abuse victims. Tobacco company representatives are also incensed at being compared to pedophiles. "It's no longer prevention, but out of place provocation," one tobacco association said on its web site.

Ironically, the advance uproar is giving the anti-smoking campaign so much publicity that it will make the formal ad campaign unnecessary.

Hat tip: Greg