At long last: New forensic specialty guidelines approved

After a 9-year revision process, the American Psychological Association has finally approved new Specialty Guidelines for Forensic Psychologists. The Guidelines will replace those established in 1991.

The Guidelines are intended for use not only by forensic psychologists, but by any psychologist when engaged in the practice of forensic psychology. Forensic psychology is defined as the application of any specialized psychological knowledge to a legal context, to assist in addressing legal, contractual, and administrative matters. The Guidelines are also meant to provide guidance on professional conduct to the legal system, and other organizations and professions.

Guidelines differ from standards, such as those in the APA’s Ethics Code, in that they are aspirational rather than mandatory. They are intended to facilitate the continued systematic development of the profession and facilitate a high level of practice by psychologists, rather than being intended to serve as a basis for disciplinary action or civil or criminal liability.

The revision committee, chaired by Randy Otto, included representatives of the American Psychology-Law Society (Division 41 of the APA) and the American Academy of Forensic Psychology. 

The Guidelines will be published shortly in the American Psychologist journal. In the meantime, a draft version is available HERE. I encourage all of you to read and learn its contents. Much of it will sound familiar to those with a working knowledge of the APA’s Ethical Principles of Psychologists and Code of Conduct. Although the Guidelines dance around some of the major controversies in our field, there is still plenty to be happy about. By way of whetting your appetite (hopefully), here is a random smattering:

2.05 Knowledge of the Scientific Foundation for Opinions and Testimony: Forensic practitioners seek to provide opinions and testimony that are sufficiently based upon adequate scientific foundation, and reliable and valid principles and methods that have been applied appropriately to the facts of the case. When providing opinions and testimony that are based on novel or emerging principles and methods, forensic practitioners seek to make known the status and limitations of these principles and methods.

2.08 Appreciation of Individual and Group Differences: Forensic practitioners strive to understand how factors associated with age, gender, gender identity, race, ethnicity, culture, national origin, religion, sexual orientation, disability, language, socioeconomic status, or other relevant individual and cultural differences may affect and be related to the basis for people’s contact and involvement with the legal system.

6.03 Communication with Forensic Examinee: Forensic practitioners inform examinees about the nature and purpose of the examination, … including potential consequences of participation or non-participation, if known.

10.01 Focus on Legally Relevant Factors: Forensic practitioners are encouraged to consider the problems that may arise by using a clinical diagnosis in some forensic contexts, and consider and qualify their opinions and testimony appropriately.

11.04 Comprehensive and Accurate Presentation of Opinions in Reports and Testimony: Forensic practitioners are encouraged to limit discussion of background information that does not bear directly upon the legal purpose of the examination or consultation. Forensic practitioners avoid offering information that is irrelevant and that does not provide a substantial basis of support for their opinions, except when required by law.

Leonard Rubenstein, a senior scholar at the Center for Human Rights and Public Health of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, writes in a Huffington Post column that the new Guidelines will prevent psychologists from participating in abusive government interrogations as they did at Guantanamo. I think that's a stretch. These guidelines are not enforceable. And, like all such professional guidelines, they will be subject to diverse interpretations.

Pretrial civil detention of sex offenders unlawful, judge rules

A New York law mandating that sex offenders be confined while awaiting civil commitment trials is unconstitutional, a judge has ruled. But the ruling may not make much difference to most sex offenders whom the state wants to civilly detain, because they are waiving away their rights to a trial.

Supreme Court Justice Colleen Duffy ruled that New York's 2007 Sex Offender Management and Treatment Act is unconstitutional because it does not allow for any less restrictive remedy such as supervised release. Under the law, if a court finds probable cause that a convicted sex offender remains a danger, the individual must be confined until a civil trial, which can take a year or more.

Ironically, if the sex offender is ultimately found to suffer from a "mental abnormality" that renders him potentially dangerous to the public, the court then has the option of ordering intensive community supervision rather than involuntarily confinement in a mental institution.

In the case at hand, the judge noted that the state's Office of Mental Health had already determined that "Enrique T." would be a good candidate for strict, outpatient supervision rather than confinement. She ordered the immediate release of the detainee:

"Respondent is faced with a Morton's Fork -- he must either choose to enforce his right to a jury trial and continue to be detained for an unknown period of time in a psychiatric facility awaiting trial on this matter or surrender his right to trial and consent to a finding of mental abnormality so that he may be immediately released back to the community under [strict and intensive supervision and treatment]. Due process cannot countenance a statute that mandates such a choice."

Her decision follows a federal court decision earlier this year that came to the same conclusion, according to a report by John Caher in the New York Law Journal.

Sex offenders choosing not to fight commitment 

Unless these rulings result in complete scrapping of the state's civil commitment scheme, which is unlikely, it is unclear how many sex offenders whom the state seeks to detain will end up benefiting. For reasons that experts call "inexplicable," the majority of offenders are waiving their right to a jury trial, according to a separate report in the New York Law Journal. Reports John Caher:

Shortly after the Sex Offender Management and Treatment Act took effect in April 2007, authorities detected an unexpected and inexplicable phenomenon: Sex offenders targeted for civil confinement after serving their prison sentences were overwhelmingly waiving their right to a jury trial and consenting to confinement. Nearly 92 percent, 33 of 36, of the sex offenders civilly confined during the first year of the law's enactment had agreed to placement in a mental institution following release from prison. And while those numbers have tapered off in the last three years, a large portion of the sex offenders targeted for civil management continue to forego their right to a trial and consent to confinement, even though the most serious consequence of going to trial is confinement….

No one is sure why sex offenders are consenting to confinement and giving up their liberty when … they seemingly have nothing to lose. At trial after they have served a criminal sentence, the state has to prove by the high standard of clear and convincing evidence that the respondent suffers from a "mental abnormality" that predisposes him or her to commit sex crimes. A unanimous verdict is required, and if a unanimous verdict is not reached, the offender will likely go free since most have served the maximum sentence and are not on parole.

The success rate when offenders go to trial is fairly high, about 15 percent overall and more than 20 percent when they opt for a jury rather than a bench trial.

Theories offered by an assortment of experts and state officials to explain this unexpected trend include:

• Sex offenders believe that confinement is inevitable so choose to avoid the added humiliation and angst of trial.

• Sex offenders know they are dangerous and need help in order to not reoffend.

• Some offenders cannot find any doctor willing to testify on their behalf. 

• Some offenders are so marginalized and despised that they have no options for employment or housing in the community.

"A great deal of these folks have no social safety net," said defense attorney Thomas Callaghan. "Many of them are estranged from their families. Very few are married. They realize they can fight, but they really have no place to go."

Lesley M. DeLia, another legal services attorney, echoed this observation. She said some clients were initially eager to go to court, but balked as their trial date loomed closer:

"They know it is not a friendly world out there if they get out. They are scared about what life will be like ... and some of them just don't want to deal with it. There is no housing for them. They can't get jobs. Others are just so institutionalized they are afraid to go. We did have one fellow who said he knows he is not ready and does not want to get out and do it again."

"Kids-for-cash" judge gets 28-year prison term

Mother of a suicide victim confronts crooked judge

In what may be the longest federal prison sentence ever given in a U.S. political corruption case, a juvenile judge who earned millions of dollars by sending kids to private jails has received a 28-year sentence. A second judge, Michael Conahan, has not yet been sentenced.

As I blogged about in 2009 ("Evil lurked in Luzerne County"), Pennsylvania Judge Mark Ciaverella Jr. got kickbacks for sending children to the private lock-up. He even shut down the public juvenile hall so all minors would have to go to the new detention center. He sold children down the river for crimes as minor as writing a prank note or possessing drug paraphernalia.

Investigation of the so-called "kids for cash" scheme led to 4,000 juvenile convictions being overturned. Although 28 years sounds like a long time, if you do the math it's less than three days per juvenile case.

Gay panic defense: Slain boy accused of provocation

The closely watched murder trial of Brandon McInerney took an unfortunate turn this week, as a self-appointed expert testified that 15-year-old Larry King contributed to his own demise by flirting with his killer and by wearing makeup and women’s clothes, thereby disrupting the middle school where he was shot to death.

The witness, family therapist Stephen Irshay, said he contacted McInerney’s defense team to offer his assistance after reading about the case in the newspaper. He said he got involved because he didn't think the defendant would have shot King without provocation.

The nature of Irshay’s expertise is not clear from the trial coverage in the Ventura County Star. He is a licensed marriage and family therapist (MFT) who was just appointed as assistant director of an MFT program at an online school, Touro University Worldwide. Expert witnesses must have special knowledge or experience to offer -- based on their education, training or experience -- that is beyond the realm of common knowledge.

The use of the gay panic defense is no big surprise, because the case is no whodunit. In front of 25 to 30 eyewitnesses, McInerney shot King twice in the back of the head during a first-period class on Feb. 12, 2008. The day before, he had told several people of his plan, acquired a gun and loaded it.

Prosecutors allege that the killing was a hate crime, and that white supremacist ieology played a role. McInerney's attorneys deny this. Rather, they say McInerney -- who had just turned 14 -- was pushed to the emotional breaking point by King's sexual harassment of him.

“This is a very troubled young man pushed to the edge," defense attorney Scott Wippert told the jury during his opening statement. "He was pushed there by a young man who repeatedly targeted him with unwanted sexual advances."

Despite his youth, McInerney is being tried as an adult. He faces 51 years to life in prison if convicted. He turned down a plea bargain that would have netted him a 25-to-life sentence. For a teenager, I'm sure, either option sounds like an equal eternity.

Ironically, his prosecution as an adult came in spite of a lobbying campaign by a coalition of 27 sexual minority groups. "We call on prosecutors not to compound this tragedy with another wrong,” wrote the coalition. "We support the principles underlying our juvenile justice system that treat children differently than adults and provide greater hope and opportunity for rehabilitation." The letter cites research by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention finding that children tried as adults are more likely to commit another crime than those tried as juveniles.

Does flirtation justify execution?

The gay panic defense plays on an antiquated cultural belief that a heterosexual male is justified in using violence to defend himself from flirtation by a gay man. In my own research with antigay hate crime perpetrators, I found that many noncriminal young men believed they had a right to physically assault gay men whom they perceived as flirting with them.

However, as some of the young women pointed out during my focus groups on antigay violence back in the mid-1990s, this logic is never used to justify a girl or woman violently attacking a flirtatious man.

In my research, I conceptualized antigay violence as existing on a continuum. At one end are verbal taunts that, sadly, remain socially acceptable among many adolescents. At the other end are severe acts of violence. These tend to be committed not necessarily by those with the most hostile attitudes toward gay people but, rather, by those with the most severe histories of violence or abuse.

McInerney's case fits this model. The defendant was raised in a chaotic and violent household and subjected to physical and sexual abuse. His father, now deceased, used to beat him for fun, defense attorney Wippert told the jury. The father shot McInerney’s mother, then married her and put bullets in her Christmas stocking as a joke.

According to reports back in 2008, McInerney was one among many students at the Southern California middle school who routinely teased and taunted King.

Gwen Araujo Justice for Victims Act

The gay panic defense is especially effective in cases where the victim was transgender, due to widespread societal revulsion against gender nonconformity. Use of the defense by the killers of Gwen Aurajo, a transgender teen, led to a backlash in California in the mid-2000s. The state passed the Gwen Araujo Justice for Victims Act. This law allows for a special instruction to jurors, reminding them not to allow bias based on sexual orientation or gender identity to affect their deliberations. The prosecutor in the McInerney case, Maeve Fox, said she will ask that this instruction be read to the jury.

The jury instruction is brilliant. Rather than seeking to ban the gay panic defense outright, a strategy that might be unconstitutional and would only serve to drive it underground, it helps to shine a spotlight on the underlying biases that the defense promotes.

This strategy is more effective than an outright ban, says legal scholar Cynthia Lee in a lengthy and well-reasoned 2009 treatise in the UC Davis Law Review.

Suppression of gay panic claims, like suppression of bad speech, will not eliminate the underlying stereotypes and assumptions that make such claims persuasive. Open discussion and debate is a better way to combat those assumptions.

The law can and should play a role in mediating th[e] cultural dispute [over the status of homosexuality] – not by dictating what jurors can and cannot consider, but by making sure jurors are cognitively aware of what exactly is at stake when a gay person is the victim of fatal violence, and the person who killed him claims he did so in response to an unwanted sexual advance.

We won't have to wait long to hear whether the defense will help young McInerney or, more likely, backfire. The case is expected to go to the jury in about two weeks.

Related blog posts:

• What caused middle school tragedy? (June 10, 2008)
• More on the McInerney antigay murder case: Defense may use emerging science of adolescent brain development (June 11, 2008)
• Don’t ban Gay Panic Defense (Aug. 5, 2009)

The Ventura County Star has detailed trial coverage and a timeline of the drawn-out legal machinations.

Hat tip: John L.

Forensic conference in idyllic Queensland setting

Hell's Gate, Noosa coastline (Photo credit: Kathleen)

For the indigenous Gubbi Gubbi people of southern Queensland, the Noosa area was a mecca and gathering place. Being here, I can certainly see why. The site of Australia’s Forensic Psychology National Conference is an idyllic tropical rain forest alongside a gorgeous coastline.

Even aside from the spectacular locale, the conference so far has been rewarding beyond my wildest expectations. Conference organizers and delegates alike have been overwhelmingly friendly and welcoming. They strike me as a serious and thoughtful bunch, communicating a solid commitment to ethical professional practice. Both my keynote -- on the subterranean tensions between technocratic and humanistic visions for our field -- and my all-day training workshop on forensic diagnosis were very well received. 

The vast continent of Australia has only 331 psychologists who are registered with the national government as forensic specialists (under the nationalization scheme that just went into effect), and it seems that most of them are here. Also in attendance are several other Americans invited to give keynote talks and all-day training workshops, including forensic guru Tom Grisso, Les Morey (the developer of the Personality Assessment Inventory) and John Edens, a prominent forensic psychologist from Texas A&M.

Blogger with Paul Wilson and conference chair Gavan Palk

A highlight for me was to get a chance to meet Paul Wilson, an internationally renowned criminologist and human rights activist. Paul (here, we all go by first names and forego the hierarchical ribbons and badges sported by speakers and officers at the typical psychological conference in the USA) is a prolific scholar and practitioner. He has been involved in many high-profile forensic cases, including on the effects of solitary confinement and of the forced removal of indigenous Australians from their ancestral homes. His latest book is Erasing Iraq: The Human Cost of Carnage, which -- as the title implies -- details the cost in human suffering of the war.

Paul's keynote focused on the role of forensic psychologists in miscarriage of justice cases. He has significant personal experience in this area, including involvement in Australia’s most infamous case of wrongful conviction, the so-called “Dingo Case" (made into a Hollywood movie starring Meryl Streep). That was the case in which Lindy Chamberlain was convicted of murder after her infant daughter disappeared while the family was camping at the famous Ayer’s Rock. It wasn’t until six years later that the baby’s clothing was found in a nearby dingo lair, proving that the mother was telling the truth when she said she saw a dingo carry off her baby.

Blogger with a new friend

It hasn’t been all work for me here in Queensland. I took the opportunity to see a bit of the Sunshine State, visiting first Cairns in tropical north Queensland and then Brisbane, the state’s biggest city. In Cairns, we journeyed out to the Great Barrier Reef for a little snorkeling, and also took in the local wildlife. We were lucky enough to spy the reclusive platypus in a creek in the Atherton Tablelands, as well as the much more abundant and visible kangaroos.

Further south, Queensland’s major city of Brisbane looks to have recovered quite nicely from the catastrophic flooding last January. Just goes to show what's possible in a country with a more rational social policy and a decent economy.

Brisbane is an attractive, up-and-coming city with lots of cool neighborhoods. As soon as we arrived, we were lucky enough to stumble across a vibrant organic food fair. We got to nibble and sip oodles of lovely locally produced treats -- fresh produce, dairy products, meats, sauces and wines.

Swimming enclosure, St. Helena Prison

While in Brisbane, we also toured an old prison on St. Helena Island in the Moreton Bay. It reminded me a bit of McNeil Island in Washington, where I worked for a spell. Operational from the 1860s to the 1930s, St. Helena went through several phases. Sometimes, it housed the Queensland prison system’s troublemakers and the criminally insane. At other times, it was a model prison farm reserved for well-behaved prisoners. At the end, it held aged and infirm convicts. To discourage escape during the harsh old days, prison warders attracted sharks by dumping cow offal along the beaches. Prisoners who wanted to swim after a day of back-breaking labor in the fields, sugar mill or factory could do so only in a small offshore area enclosed by long poles. (See photo.) But during our visit to the ruins, the fearsome predators were long gone and the setting was serene and idyllic. Just us, the guide who ferried us across on a small boat, and a few wallabies, shorebirds, and grazing cattle belonging to the national park service.

For me, Australia has been well worth the long airplane ride to get here; I hope to come back again to see Sydney, Melbourne, and Western Australia and to visit with some of my newfound colleagues in Australia's wonderful community of forensic psychologists.

Crime after crime: Battered woman’s struggle for justice

Debbie Peagler was 15 when she met and fell in love with a charming young man named Oliver Wilson. Unfortunately for her, Wilson was a pimp and drug dealer who ferociously abused her over the next six years. He beat her with a bullwhip, prostituted her, forced her to perform oral sex in front of his friends, put hot ashes on her hands and made her eat his feces, according to witnesses. When she said she would leave, he threatened to kill her.

On May 27, 1982, she asked him to drive her to a park. Waiting in ambush were two friends of her mother, neighborhood gang members who killed him. The prosecution maintained that Peagler hired the men. Peagler claimed she never discussed killing Wilson.

Threatened with the death penalty, Peagler pled guilty to first-degree murder and went to prison. And there she would have remained for the rest of her life, if not for a little serendipity.

After California enacted a law in 2000 to ensure fair trials for battered women who killed their abusers, the California Habeas Project selected Peagler as someone who might be eligible for relief. A local law firm, Bingham McCutchen, agreed to take the case pro bono. Two rookie land-use attorneys, Joshua Safran and Nadia Costa, began collecting new evidence to substantiate Peagler’s abuse.

Peagler’s story had deep personal meaning for Safran. As a 9-year-old boy, he helplessly cried through the night as an abusive boyfriend pummeled his mother. Eventually, he and his mother escaped, and he learned to channel his simmering rage into legal advocacy.

Over the course of several years, the attorneys found long-lost witnesses, learned of allegedly perjured evidence, and got new statements from the men who had killed Wilson.

For her part, Peagley was a model prisoner. She had spent her decades behind bars tutoring illiterate women, leading a gospel choir, earning two college degrees, and participating in a battered women’s support group.

Eventually, the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office agreed that Peagley should have been convicted of voluntary manslaughter, which at the time carried a sentence of only two to six years. Prosecutors signed a statement agreeing to Peagley’s immediate release from prison.

But that happy ending was not to be. After a political backlash in his office, the district attorney reneged on the deal, and Peagley’s petition for release was denied. Meanwhile, the case took on a new urgency when Peagley was diagnosed with advanced lung cancer.

Costa and Safran continued to petition for Peagley’s release on numerous grounds: Her guilty plea was coerced, false evidence was introduced against her, and the original prosecution would have differed had there been expert testimony on battering.

Although the courts failed her, she was finally paroled from prison in August 2009, thanks in part to an international grassroots campaign. She currently lives in Carson, CA.

Sadly, Bay Area private investigator Bobby Buechler, who gathered exculpatory evidence and was involved in the crusade to free Peagley (and whom I happened to know), died unexpectedly shortly before her release.

Filmmaker Yoav Potash spent five years filming the story as it unfolded, both in and out of prison. CRIME AFTER CRIME is the award-winning documentary of this dramatic saga. The film is currently playing around the United States; check HERE for more information and to find a venue near you.

 
Hat tip: Martin