This blogger to give keynotes in Australia, UK

I am excited to announce that I will be delivering keynote addresses at forensic conferences in Australia and the United Kingdom later this year. I hope to be able to meet some of you in person at one or the other.

After the floods and cyclone -- join me on the Sunshine Coast

I will be giving both a keynote address and an all-day training at Australia's national forensic psychology conference, taking place from August 4-6 in Noosa, in the state of Queensland. Other keynote speakers are Australian forensic psychologists Paul Wilson, Don Thomson and Alfred Allan, and fellow Americans Tom Grisso and Leslie Morey.

This year's theme is "Diversity and Specialism in Forensic Psychology." If you think you have a good idea for a forensic talk or workshop, I would encourage you to submit a proposal. Be quick about it, though, as the deadline is the end of February.

Along with an exciting scientific program, the organizers are promising fun social functions and a chance to network "in a friendly and relaxed environment." Noosa is not too far away from the recent catastrophic flooding and Cyclone Yasi, but I'm sure flood waters will have receded by August. I'll be sharing more details in coming months.

Next up: Sexual violence conference in London

On September 8, I will be delivering another keynote at a Sexual Violence conference sponsored by the Forensic Psychological Services program at Middlesex University in London. My focus will be the role of culture and masculinity in multiple-perpetrator rape (the topic of my 2004 theoretical article). Again, stay tuned for more details.

I am excited to be a part of this program because of the organizers' cutting-edge efforts toward preventing sexual violence, especially rape by multiple perpetrators. The Forensic Psychological Services Program at Middlesex University sponsored similar conferences on hate crimes in 2008 and 2010, with an innovative focus on offender motivations and prevention.

You can get involved in this one, too. The organizers are inviting proposals for papers and debate panels pertaining to sexual violence, especially those based on empirical research and/or involving new and emerging topics. One of their major goals is to foster more exchange of ideas among practitioners, academics and policy makers. The deadline for submissions is April 15 (Tax Day, here on the other side of the Atlantic).

Parolees retain right to confidential therapy, court holds

"The SVP Act does not include its own special exception"

Ramiro Gonzales had no idea how far the news would travel, when he confided to his therapist that he had molested more children than those for which he had been convicted and served time in prison.

After all, confidentiality is the cornerstone of psychological treatment. Would you disclose information in therapy if you thought your darkest thoughts and most shameful misdeeds would be trumpeted to the world?

But in response to a subpoena, Mr. Gonzales's therapist handed over his entire treatment record to a prosecutor who was seeking to civilly detain him as a sexually violent predator (SVP), after a judge overruled a defense objection. The government's two psychologists then used the damaging admissions to bolster their trial testimony about future dangerousness, and a jury voted to civilly commit him.

Not so fast, an appellate court ruled last week. "The SVP Act does not include its own special exception" to established rules of patient-therapist confidentiality. Just like everyone else, a parolee is entitled to expect confidentiality in therapy, except as necessary to keep parole authorities informed about whether he is complying with any mandatory treatment requirements. Such information, the court added, must be as minimal as possible, and certainly does not include details of therapy or statements made in therapy.

Mr. Gonzales's admission was so highly prejudicial that the civil commitment must be overturned and he must get a new trial, the appellate court ordered, especially since the government's case overall was "not compelling." There was no evidence that he had molested any children since paroling from prison.

Mr. Gonzales, who is developmentally disabled due to spinal meningitis as a boy, was required to be in treatment as a condition of his parole. The state had already tried to civilly commit him upon his initial parole from prison, but a jury rejected that attempt. It was trying for the second time, after he violated parole by drinking alcohol and being around children, including his sister's children when they came over to visit his mother, where he lived.

The court clarified that people who have been civilly committed, as well as prison inmates, cannot expect the same level of privacy in therapy as parolees or probationers, because they have been found to be dangerous.

The ruling is good news for psychology ethics. Too many therapists seem to harbor the misimpression that a contract with a parole or probation agency trumps our professional ethics codes, giving them carte blanche to discuss their client's confidential business with authorities.

This ruling should serve as a vivid reminder: A subpoena is just a piece of paper filled out by an attorney. You aren't supposed to blindly obey it when it is improper. Indeed, you have an obligation to actively resist turning over confidential records of therapy. The therapist in this case should have voiced an objection, and brought her own attorney to court to fight the subpoena.

The case, People v. Ramiro Gonzales out of Santa Clara County, gives an excellent overview of both federal and California case law on confidentiality in forensic cases. It is online HERE.

Related blog posts:  

• Do sex offenders have right to confidential therapy? (Feb. 22, 2008)

• Confession to prison psychiatrist not confidential (Dec. 11, 2007)

• Treating therapist as police interrogator (Nov. 30, 2008)

• Abandon ethics, all ye who enter here: Special ethics exemption sought for SVP work (Oct. 6, 2010)

California training to feature confession expert

Dr. Richard Leo, Associate Law Professor at USF and a leading scholar in the area of false confessions, will be the keynote speaker at next month's conference of the Forensic Mental Health Association of California. His presentation is titled False Confessions: Causes, Characteristics and Solutions.*

The conference, "Mental Health and the Law: An In-Depth Look at the Evidence," will be March 23-25 in Seaside (just outside of picturesque Monterey).

The FMHAC has scored some other big names, too, including Richard Rogers and Robert Hare. Topics of interest include the effect of high-profile crimes on SVP laws in California, competency restoration treatment in county jails, malingering assessment, and lots more.

*My review of Dr. Leo's book, Police Interrogation and American Justice, is HERE.

Untattoo You

What happens when you cross the Avon Lady with a Neo-Nazi murder defendant?

Guest essay by Sam Sommers*

Several colleagues and students forwarded to me this story from the NY Times describing a criminal defendant in Florida whose attorney successfully petitioned the court to pay for a cosmetologist to help him cover up his swastika tattoos with makeup before trial each morning. The basis for the request was the defense's (quite reasonable) concerns that jurors would have a hard time remaining impartial as they sat in judgment of someone adorned by Neo-Nazi symbols.


The case raises a wide range of interesting questions involving the psychology of law, physical appearance, first impressions, and daily interaction–the very issues often at the heart of this blog. Questions such as:

Should the court have agreed? 

While the unusual nature of the request is what has rendered it newsworthy, similar issues arise in a wide range of cases. Defendants often change clothes before entering court in order to prevent them from having to appear in front of the jury in a prison jumpsuit. Similarly, defendants in custody may be unshackled outside of the presence of the jurors so as to avoid undue bias.

The question becomes, though, should such accommodation apply to tattoos? After all, the defendant in the Florida case presumably chose to decorate himself in Neo-Nazi images. Should the taxpayers foot the bill to cover up decisions that the defendant made of his own free will? Moreover, the prosecution alleges that the attacks in question were motivated by hate: one assault victim was attacked allegedly for associating with a Black man; the homicide victim was gay. Reactions to the case might be different had the defendant gotten the tattoos earlier in life and long since forsworn the ideology associated with them. This wasn't the case here.

Can the issue be reframed? 

Many people I've spoken with have suggested, as alluded to above, that since the defendant chose these tattoos, he should be stuck with the repercussions of that decision. But the issue becomes more complex when you consider that the question for the court was not simply whether the defendant should be allowed to cover his tattoos, but rather whether the court would pay for it. Because a tattooed defendant with the money for his own removal/cover-up would be free to do as he wished.

Most people I've talked to have trouble with the idea that the court would pay for a Neo-Nazi charged with hate crimes to cover up swastika tattoos. But when the same question is reframed, most of the same people agree that a poor defendant charged with capital crimes should be entitled to just as vigorous a defense as a wealthier defendant in the same situation. Pitched this way, the issue becomes more complicated.

Couldn't the judge just remind the jurors to stick to the evidence and ignore the defendant's appearance? 

Sure. And as the division director for the Florida attorney's office argues in the Times article, "We believe the jurors listen to judges' instructions."

But while I have no doubt that jurors often try to follow the rules they're given, examples to the contrary abound. For instance, years ago I published a few research studies indicating that evidence still impacts a jury even after it has been ruled inadmissible. Moreover, judicial instructions to avoid prejudice or partiality have not been sufficient to eliminate other forms of disparity, such as the increased likelihood that a defendant in a capital trial will be sentenced to death when his victim is White as opposed to non-White.

It remains the case that sometimes jurors decide they'd rather not hew to the letter of the judge's instructions. And other times, jurors aren't even aware in the first place of the biases that they're supposed to be avoiding.

If this defendant gets money to change how he looks, what about other defendants similarly disadvantaged by appearance? No good legal debate is complete without the proverbial slippery slope argument, so where do we go from tattoo guy? Should relatively unattractive defendants be allowed to ask for makeovers? Given stereotypes about overweight individuals and self-control, what about an obese defendant in a negligence case? Clearly, the slope isn't so slippery as to allow a defendant from a traditionally disadvantaged minority group to appear in court in whiteface, but where should the line be drawn?

When symphony orchestras wanted to reduce bias in the hiring of musicians, they had candidates audition behind a screen so that gender was not apparent. Accordingly, one of my students in class last week asked, why not do the same to mask the demographics and background of a criminal defendant? Not a proposal that you're likely to see anytime soon in a courtroom near you, but interesting fodder for discussion nonetheless.

So I now turn the question to you, dear readers... Court-sponsored tattoo cover-ups: misguided use of public funds or necessary protection of defendant rights?

Sam Sommers is an award-winning social psychology professor at Tufts University who has served as an expert witness on bias.

*This essay originally appeared on Dr. Sommers' Psychology Today blog, The Science of Small Talk. Reposted with the written permission of Sam Sommers.

Previous guest essay by Sam Sommers: On police, profiling, and Henry Gates (July 28, 2009)

Encephalon carnival: Psychology-neuroscience roundup

The Encephalon carnival is back!

Blog carnivals are an effort to streamline the blogosphere's massive resources through timely and topical online magazines. Encephalon is one such rotating carnival, featuring the blog's best neuroscience and psychology writing.

The 83rd edition, published today, is well worth checking out. There’s something for everyone, whether it's Neuroanthropology's look at prodromal psychosis, Dr. Shock's take on what makes a good bodyguard, Charbonnier's musings on confabulation and free will, Neurocritic's report on how Facebook affects the size of your amygdala, or the latest news and views on autism.

Hosting this month's carnival is Dr. Romeo Vitelli at Providentia (“a biased look at psychology in the world”), who is featuring his two-part series on the historical mystery surrounding Friedrich Nietzsche.

The complete edition is HERE.

Arizona rampage: Analyzing the analyzers

It's an endless loop tape, spinning us in a vortex of irrationality so all-encompassing it almost starts to seem normal.

After every high-profile crime, experts charge out of their corners with their pet solutions: Restrict high-capacity gun magazines. Increase mental health services. Revise school or workplace procedures.

Conservative media psychiatrist Sally Satel is even using the Arizona tragedy as a platform for laws requiring schools and businesses to report to authorities any student or employee who it "ejects or otherwise removes …. out of concern about behavior and dangerousness." Talk about a civil liberties nightmare!

Memorial crime control

Such opportunistic crime-control advocacy works best during moments of public crisis. When the hysteria reaches critical mass, politicians appease anxious constituencies through yet another feel-good law. Then, the latest crisis dies down and people get back to their normal lives. Watching Fox-TV, they remain blissfully shielded from the dark side of memorial crime control.

Rather than capturing the monsters of the public's imagination -- lunatic rampagers, sexual predators, and homicidal gangsters -- this inexorable web of draconian laws ends up ensnaring the most vulnerable, mainly young African American and Latino men from poor communities.

Do you recognize the name Rodrigo Caballero? Unlikely. He is just one tiny speck in a mass of captive and unknown dark bodies, a 16-year-old mentally ill California boy sentenced to 110 years in prison for attempted murder. Any cathartic efforts of memorial crime control are short-lived, while the costly and unanticipated social costs live on. Young Mr. Caballero isn't due out of prison until 2110, long after he and all of the rest of us will be dead.

No profile of would-be assassins

There will always be the next rare event to fuel this cycle of knee-jerk response, ostensibly aimed at protecting us from every remote contingency. Hindsight bias is a powerful heuristic that obscures an unfortunate truth: It is very hard to accurately predict -- much less prevent -- individual-level violence. As I wrote four years ago, after Cho Seung-Hui's deadly rampage at Virginia Tech:

Many people -- and especially many adolescent and young adult men -- are troubled. Many are severely depressed. Many express disturbing, violent fantasies. Fortunately, only a tiny fraction commit lethal acts against others. And unfortunately, those who do often do not stand out ahead of time.

This is what forensic psychologist Robert Fein found when he conducted a Secret Service study of all political assassins and would-be assassins in the United States over the past 60 years. Contrary to popular mythology, the assassins fit no singular "profile." They were neither monsters nor martyrs, Fein said:

The reality of American assassination is much more mundane, more banal, than assassinations depicted [in movies].

The myth of the deranged killer

Jared Loughner’s delusional ramblings, revealed to the world by intrepid Internet sleuths, are the only explanation some people need. But they are something of a red herring.

First, as advocates for the mentally ill are quick to point out, the link between psychosis and violence is far from settled. Most people with severe mental disorders do not become violent. Any increased risk is miniscule compared with the risk posed by use of alcohol or drugs, according to large-scale studies. As Vaughan Bell puts it in his lucid summary of this research:

Psychiatric diagnoses tell us next to nothing about someone's propensity or motive for violence…. It's likely that some of the people in your local bar are at greater risk of committing murder than your average person with mental illness.

But even when an assassin does harbor delusional beliefs, this is not sufficient explanation. Loughner's gender likely played a role, too, as men commit far more violence than women. Yet we would never think we had explained the Tucson rampage with the statement: "Loughner was a man."

In fact, the Secret Service study found that the assassins who were delusional -- about one-fourth of the total -- acted based on the same types of motivations as non-delusional assassins. As reporter Douglas Fox summarized:

Some hoped to achieve notoriety by killing a well-known person. Others wanted to end their pain by being killed by Secret Service. Still others hoped to avenge a perceived, idiosyncratic grievance unrelated to mainstream politics. Some hoped, unrealistically, to save the country or call attention to a cause. And some hoped to achieve a special relationship with the person they were killing.

Selecting one's lens: Micro or macro?

In our professional role, forensic psychologists use a micro lens, focusing on the individual level of analysis. But when commentators focus solely on individual-level factors, they divert the public from contextual factors that may be more amenable to prevention.

In other words, at the micro level there is no question that Loughner is a troubled young man. But at the macro level, his choice of targets certainly reflects the political tensions in the United States and especially in Arizona, which even the local sheriff described as a "Mecca for prejudice and bigotry."

Sarah Palin is able to evade responsibility for her violent rhetoric by strategically refocusing on the culturally entrenched myth of the dangerous schizophrenic, and calling Loughner "deranged" and "evil."

Ironically, it is the mentally unstable like Loughner who are most vulnerable to extremist rhetoric, and other memes floating around in our cultural ethos. As prominent forensic psychologist and law professor Charles Patrick Ewing noted:

These influential politicians and commentators who use violent rhetoric and images -- such as putting a member of Congress in the crosshairs, telling supporters that it is time to 'reload' and suggesting that voters unhappy with Congress resort to 'Second Amendment remedies' -- must realize that they have an incredibly wide audience. At least some members of that audience (both sane and insane) will view their inflammatory statements as an invitation to violence…. The blame for these killings does not lie with the perpetrator alone."

"Stochastic terrorism" is the term invoked by one professor of communications to describe this phenomenon, of "use of mass communications to stir up random lone wolves to carry out violent or terrorist acts that are statistically predictable but individually unpredictable."

What if Abdul had done it?

That the micro lens is a deliberate choice becomes clearer if we ask ourselves how media coverage might be different if a Muslim from the Middle East had shot U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords. Would the focus still be on individual pathology? Or would it be on his political affiliations and the content of his rhetoric?

The din of rhetoric about mental illness drowns out the voices of those framing Loughner's attempted assassination as an act of political terrorism. People like Jesse Muhammed, Sahar Aziz, and Cenk Uygur, who asks incredulously:

Is this a joke? He shot a politician in the head. He called it an "assassination." What part of that was unclear? … [W]hy does the act have to be either psychotic or political? It's obviously both.… The conservative hate-mongers don't create psychos…. [But] they channel their fear, anger and paranoia…. They load them up with violent imagery, whether it's talk of cross-hairs or second amendment remedies or the tree of liberty being refreshed with blood. Then when they get a violent reaction they pretend to be surprised and outraged that anyone would suggest they were the least bit culpable. The reality is that it is a simple formula -- violent imagery in, violent results out.

In the final analysis, the causes of violence are multifaceted and difficult to disentangle. And it is impossible to predict which troubled, angry and alienated young man will engage in lethal violence. But one thing is certain: More laws are not the answer. They cast too wide a net, and distract from the search for deeper solutions.

Related blog posts:

Loughner update: Skirmishing over competency (March 22, 2011) 

Can school shootings be prevented? (April 19, 2007)
Systems failure or black swan? New frame needed to stop memorial crime control frenzy (Oct. 19, 2010)
Backlash growing against criminal profiling (Sept. 14, 2010)