Multiple personality excluded in Texas insanity case

A serial rapist’s attempt to claim insanity based on multiple personality disorder fell flat, as a judge ordered the expert's trial testimony stricken from the record as junk science.

Billy Joe Harris

Psychiatrist Colin Ross testified that Billy Joe Harris, the so-called "Twilight Rapist" who targeted elderly women, suffered from multiple personality disorder -- now known as dissociative identity disorder (DID) -- brought on by childhood abuse.

Ross, who runs the Colin A. Ross Institute that provides trainings on psychological trauma and dissociative identity disorder, testified that the condition’s presence in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) published by the American Psychiatric Association establishes it as a "real and valid disorder."

Ross testified that he gave the defendant three tests for DID. However, in a most unusual procedure, rather than personally administering the tests, he gave them to the defense attorney to administer. Thus, he has no way of knowing for sure who filled in the tests, or under what circumstances. 

Ross testified that the defendant's scores on a screening test, the Dissociative Experiences Scale, were so high that he questioned the test's validity. He also conceded that the defendant was "clearly telling stories that are not true" about other aspects of his life, for example falsely claiming to have served in Iraq when he was actually in Saudi Arabia. However, Ross testified that after getting a chance to talk personally with one of Harris's alters, "Bobby," he was convinced of Harris's claim of multiple personalities.

"I don't think he's faking the dissociative identity disorder," he testified. "I could be wrong."

The real culprit, David the Dog

The defendant, a former prison employee, also took the witness stand, "weaving tales of bestiality, aliens, transvestites and combat heroism," in the words of news reporter Sonny Long. Harris testified that he had three other personalities inside him, including a black Great Dane named David who committed the rapes.

A dramatic moment came during cross-examination, when prosecutor Bobby Bell asked to speak to the defendant's alter, also named Bobby. As Long described the scene:

Harris lowered his head momentarily, raised it back up, rolled his neck and declared in a deep voice to be "Bobby."

Several jurors stifled laughter during the subsequent give-and-take between Harris and Bell, according to Long's account in the Victoria Advocate.

But perhaps even more damaging to Harris's credibility was an audiotape played for the jury in which he talks to his girlfriend about having put on "a good show" in court one day. Earlier that day, he had fallen to the floor and twitched and shook until he was restrained. The girlfriend warned Harris that the telephone call was being recorded, to which Harris replied, "I know it."

Forensic psychologist Walter Quijano also testified for the defense. (If the name sounds familiar, he has been in the spotlight for using race as a risk factor in death penalty cases, as I recently blogged about.) He testified that when multiple personality popped up as an issue, he stepped back because that is not an area of expertise for him. However, he did testify that it is unusual for someone to begin a rape career so late in life. Harris is 54.

Mere presence in DSM doesn’t establish validity

After the defense rested, the prosecution called as a rebuttal witness a Minnesota psychologist and attorney who has made a crusade out of pushing so-called "junk science" out of the courts.

Robert Christopher Barden testified that dissociative identity disorder (aka multiple personality disorder) is a controversial condition looked upon with skepticism by the scientific mainstream. He cited several articles rejecting the condition as a viable diagnosis, despite its presence in the DSM.

"Because something is in the DSM doesn't mean it's reliable or should be allowed in a court of law," he testified, according to an article in the Victoria Advocate. "One of the ways to get junk science out of the legal system is you rely on the relevant scientific community. If something is controversial it means it's not generally acceptable."

Barden said the number of mental health professionals who tout dissociative identity disorder as viable are few and far between.

"There are a few pockets of people left who are doing this," he said. "The scientists I know condemn it to be the worst kind of junk science and dangerous to the public. Controversial and experimental theories should not be allowed to contaminate the legal system."

Concerning the tests given to Harris, Barden said, "There's no magic to these tests. It looks scientific. It looks professional, but when you get down into it, it's junk. It's unusual for a psychiatrist to interpret a psychological test and it's highly unethical for Mr. Cohen [the defense attorney] to give the tests."

After Barden’s testimony that the condition is not generally accepted by the scientific community, despite the fact that it is listed in the DSM, District Judge Skipper Koetter ordered Dr. Ross’s testimony on dissociative identity disorder stricken from the record.

Justice, Texas-style

In the end, the defendant’s overdramatization and courtroom theatrics likely did him in. During the trial, he trembled and twitched and sat in the courtroom with paper stuffed in his ears, which his attorney said was “to keep the voices from speaking to him."

The jury took only 10 minutes to convict Harris, and another 10 minutes later in the month to sentence him to life in prison.

After the verdict, Barden said in a press release that the outcome demonstrates “the power of science-law teams in protecting the legal system from junk science testimony."

Barden has been involved in hundreds of lawsuits, criminal prosecutions and licensure actions across the United States over the past two decades, targeting not only multiple personality disorder but also quack therapists in the repressed memory and rebirthing therapy movements.

Judge Koetter's ruling is not the last word, of course, as it is just one trial judge's opinion. Appellate courts in other states have ruled differently. For example, in the 1999 case of State v. Greene (139 Wn. 2d 64), the Washington Supreme Court held that dissociative identity disorder was a generally accepted diagnosis because it was listed in the DSM-IV, and therefore met the Frye test for admissibility. But the Court went on to say that the applicability of this diagnosis to the issue of criminal responsibility was problematic and that testimony about DID was not "helpful" to the jury. (The Trowbridge Foundation has more information on this case HERE.)

The battle lines over dissociative identity disorder have heated up in the dozen years since that ruling, so who knows how an appellate court might rule today.

For those interested in learning more about the controversy, I recommend the chapter "Dissociative Identity Disorder: Multiple Personalities, Multiple Controversies" by Scott Lilienfeld and Steven Jay Lynn, in their book, Science and Pseudoscience in Clinical Psychology.

DSM: Paraphilia controversy escalating

Brouhaha hits Land Down Under

Last week, I reported on a scathing denunciation by Allen Frances, MD, chair of the DSM-IV Task Force, of the draft proposal for the 5th edition of the diagnostic manual. Frances was particularly critical of the proposed sexual disorders, calling pedohebephilia "one of the most poorly written and unworkable" proposals to surface.

Now, Kenneth Zucker, chair of the DSM-V Sexual Disorders Work Group, has fired back in a letter to the Psychiatric Times. Defending not only pedohebephilia but also the other two controversial diagnoses of Hypersexual Disorder and Paraphilic Coercive Disorder, Zucker accused Frances of shooting from the hip, and "fir[ing] off criticisms as quickly as his grandchildren might tweet to their friends."

Frances fired right back, reiterating critics' central concern that these disorders lend themselves to "a grave misuse of psychiatry by the legal system in the handling of sexually violent predators”:

Every new diagnosis suggested for DSM5 requires (but has not yet received) a searching risk/benefit analysis and a thorough forensic review. I am confident that none of the suggestions for new diagnoses made by the Sexual Disorders Work Group would stand up to such scrutiny.

Today, experts in the Land Down Under chimed in with concern over Paraphilic Coercive Disorder. "Fears proposed new illness will be misused in court by rapists," reads the headline in the Sydney Morning Herald.

The reemergence of a proposal that was soundly rejected as a diagnosis in the 1980s "has come as a surprise to some psychologists," Nick Miller reports.

Lisa Phillips, a senior lecturer in psychological sciences at the University of Melbourne, echoes Frances' concerns over the potentially far-reaching legal implications of pathologizing rape as a mental disorder. Reiterating the concerns of feminists back in the 1980s, she said it could be used by rapists to avoid criminal responsibility for their acts.

This point fits with an intriguing insight by the brilliant legal scholar Eric Janus, who has written and lectured extensively on sex offender civil commitment and psychology-law topics more generally for the past couple of decades.

In Failure to Protect: America's Sexual Predator Laws and the Rise of the Preventive State (a book I highly recommend), Janus argues that the "tabloid model of gender violence" epitomized in sexually violent predator laws has -- perhaps accidentally -- become a powerful force for the politically conservative agenda of dismantling hard-fought feminist rape reforms. Like the newly proposed diagnoses, these laws favors biological and psychological explanations over sociocultural ones, and supports the patriarchal rape myth that rapists "lack control" over their sexual impulses.

Imagine the dustup if feminist psychiatrists and psychologists take note of these ersatz diagnoses and link up in opposition with legal scholars and psychologists concerned about their pretextual uses in civil commitment proceedings. And that's before transsexuals, furious over the Work Group's Gender Identity Disorder proposals, join the vocal chorus.

Federal judges question novel diagnoses used to civilly commit sex offenders

Federal judges in Wisconsin are raising their eyebrows over psychiatric diagnoses that some contend were invented or are being overused for the sole purpose of civilly incarcerating sex offenders after their criminal sentences have expired.

The diagnoses at issue are "Paraphilia Not Otherwise Specified-Nonconsent" and "Personality Disorder Not Otherwise Specified with Antisocial Features." Neither diagnosis is included in the psychiatric bible, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), nor are they typically invoked in mainstream psychology or psychiatry.

In the more alarming of the two court cases, the court in Brown v. Watters stated that the state's psychologist had invented the diagnosis he was using in the case, "Paraphilia Not Otherwise Specified-Nonconsent." Dennis Doren, who is well known in the sex offender industry, "acknowledged that the psychiatric community did not recognize the former disorder and that he had created it himself because he perceived a gap in the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual," according to the court's ruling.

A paraphilia is defined in the DSM as a chronic pattern of intense, sexually arousing fantasies, sexual urges, or behaviors generally involving nonhuman objects, suffering or humiliation, or children or other nonconsenting persons. Doren has expanded that definition to include habitual rapists.

The other case ruled on by the federal appellate court was McGee v. Bartow, involving a diagnosis of "Personality Disorder Not Otherwise Specified with Antisocial Features." Michael McGee claims that this is a "bogus disorder" invented by state psychologists to justify his continued confinement after he completed his sentence.

Neither ruling decided the merits of these challenges to the state’s Sexually Violent Predator (SVP) laws. They decided only that the issues raised enough concern that the appellants were entitled to another day in court.

The two cases, both in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Wisconsin, are Bruce Brown v. Steve Watters, Case No. 06C0753, 2007 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 53344, and Michael McGee v. Byran Bartow, Case No. 06-C-1151, 2007 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 24700.

POSTSCRIPT: For subsequent rulings in these cases, see my blog post of May 2, 2008.

Thanks to Tom Zander, JD., Psy.D., of Wisconsin for alerting me to these cases.

Also see Dr. Zander’s article, Civil Commitment Without Psychosis: The Law's Reliance on the Weakest Links in Psychodiagnosis, available online at the Journal of Sexual Offender Civil Commitment: Science and the Law.

Paraphilic coercive disorder: Contagious virus?

I posted last week about a proposal to create a new mental disorder in the DSM-V for preferential rapists. A shocking news story out of Australia makes me think that if Coercive Paraphilic Disorder exists, it must be contagious. Not just contagious, but virulently contagious in certain all-male environments.

Of the 198 students at St Paul's College at the University of Sydney, a large proportion were apparently infected with a highly contagious form of the virus. If Paraphilic Coercive Disorder makes it into the next Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, St. Paul's will be Ground Zero for the epidemic.

According to an article in today's Sydney Morning Herald, men at the elite, all-male college proudly set up a pro-rape Facebook group called "Define Statutory" that promoted sexual aggression against women. But the elite students did not stop with words. They fostered an alcohol-fueled climate in which rapes were common, most sexual assaults went unreported, and women students felt so unsafe that they quit school, the story reports.

Reporter Ruth Pollard documented a series of rapes and sexual assaults, including one incident in which about 30 drunk, naked men broke into a college and surrounded a young woman, touching and taunting her.

The good news is that, if it's a contagious illness, there could be an immunization like the one for the H1N1 virus. So, while the DSM developers are frenetically creating new diagnoses, let's not forget to work on finding some cures, too.

The Sydney Morning Herald article is HERE.

"The sausage-making of psychiatric care"

"The less you know about how mental health is defined, the better. Or perhaps it's the other way around."

In case you missed English professor Christopher Lane's excellent opinion piece in the L.A. Times last week, the Minneapolis Star Tribune ran it this Sunday. As the American Psychiatric Association gears up for DSM-V, we all need to keep it real when it comes to psychiatric diagnosis. Let's hope this media spotlight will encourage the APA to increase the transparency of the process and make sure only legitimate diagnoses get added to the manual.

The Star Tribune op-ed is online here.

Blogging jurors

Blogs take on a direction of their own. I have written far more about the DSM-V and sex offender issues than I ever thought I would when I started this blog 19 months ago. There's just a lot to say on those fronts.

Similarly, when jury consultant and trial lawyer Anne Reed started her excellent jury blog, Deliberations, she did not envision how many posts she would write about jurors who blog. But she has. And when she is quoted, interviewed, or asked to speak, social networking is the number one topic of interest.

I have a long list of topics that I never get around to, and blogging jurors is one that keeps going to the back burner. Since I haven't gotten around to writing about it yet, I've decided to point my readers to Anne Reed and let her tell you all about this interesting topic that trial lawyers in particular need to pay more attention to:

So here come two more online jurors this week, frightening lawyers everywhere. There's the Facebook juror in England who put a poll on Facebook to help her decide guilt or innocence. And there's the blogging juror here who knows she can't write about the case, but thinks that "doesn't mean I can't give people a a glimpse of the people I am dealing with," and so gives a great sketch of each person in the courtroom. ("The lead defense lawyer. When he is trying to make a point when questioning a witness he beats his hand on the jury box. "So you *wham* are telling me *wham* that blah blah blah blah blah BLAH! *WHAM*" ) The Facebook juror was dismissed; the word-sketch artist is still sitting, as far as we know.

Reed's advice to attorneys?

This is going to happen to you. It's going to happen to you. It's going to happen to you.

Four things to add to your trial task list:

1. Ask. Ask jurors in voir dire whether they write on line and if so where. If you get a "yes" to that question, you have several tools: (1) the judge can strongly impress on that particular witness that she is to write nothing about the trial, not even character sketches; (2) the lawyers can keep an eye on the juror's site during the trial; and (3) if there's time, you can jump on the juror's site before the jury is chosen to see if it contains anything of concern.

2. Look. Simply running searches by jurors' names -- before the jury is seated if possible, after if not -- you can find non-anonymous blogs, of which there are many.

3. Watch. Even if you've asked and looked, you can still have jurors writing about your trial that you didn't know about, on anonymous sites they did not disclose. If you have enough people, assign someone to set up standing searches to try to catch these, using terms the juror might choose -- the location of the court, and the type of case it is. It also makes sense to check on-line comments to news stories about the case, where you have the staffing to do it.

4. Relax. It's possible that none of these techniques will find the Facebook juror or the sketch artist on your trial. Does that mean we're in a frightening new world with intolerable new rules? I don't think so. Remember that in the old days, both jurors probably would have had talked about the case in the same way, but in conversations with their friends, not on line -- and you wouldn't have found out about those either. If anything, it's easier, not harder, to find chatty jurors than it was when they simply talked.

Click here to see her full post, with links to an entire series on blogging jurors and to her very practical Trial Lawyer's Guide To Social Networking Sites, which does the work for you inquisitive types by linking to all of the major (and many of the minor) social networking sites.

I hope all of you have a nice Thanksgiving holiday!

Photo credit: VintFalken (Creative Commons license)

Despondex: Is psych mania overreaching?

First, click the image above to watch this ad for Despondex, the first-ever prescription depressant. It brilliantly captures how the pharmaceutical industry pathologizes human conditions, mints formal diagnoses to label them, and markets lucrative medications to treat them.

Take bipolar disorder in children.

It has gone from a rare condition to a common diagnosis. In an 8-year period (1994-2002), the number of children diagnosed as bipolar increased by 4,000 percent. Yes, that's right. Four thousand percent. As with the ADHD craze a few years ago, with the diagnostic labeling has come medications for about two-thirds of the newly bipolar. Medications that cause severe long-term health consequences, such as obesity and diabetes.

Now, show me a child who doesn't have radical mood swings. As Christopher Lane describes in Shyness: How Normal Behavior Became a Sickness, the steps to creating a disorder are straightforward:

1. Conduct a study.
2. Discover a previously overlooked problem.
3. Label it.
4. Create a formal diagnosis.
5. Promote a treatment.
6. Marginalize the critics.

Through this process, the prevalence of a disorder can be made to "rise and fall as erratically as the stock market" (to quote Kutchins & Kirk from Making Us Crazy) through adjustments to the wording, symptom duration, and the number of criteria required for diagnosis.

Indeed, we are witnessing this manufacturing process in the current effort to create a bizarre new diagnosis of "pedohebephilia" for the DSM-V, as I have blogged about more than once.

But has the psychiatric-pharmaceutical juggernaut gone too far? I am probably being overly optimistic, but I find this past week's developments mildly encouraging.

First came the research study published in the June 17 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association, announcing flaws in the much-touted 'Depression Risk Gene' study upon which so much of our popular culture's notion of mental illness rests.

That followed exposes, such as one in the Miami Herald, of pharmaceutical drugmakers' use of ghostwriters to produce ''a huge body of medical literature that society can't trust.''

Just today came two more entries in the series of critical articles about psychiatric diagnosis and the pharmaceutical industry, in newspapers on separate continents -- the London Times and the San Francisco Chronicle.

The Chronicle's lead story focused on the diagnosis of bipolar disorder among children. The London Times article promotes a new book by the brilliant Richard Bentall (whose 1994 book, Madness Explained, deservedly won the British Psychological Book Of The Year award).

Doctoring the Mind: Is Our Current Treatment of Mental Illness Really Any Good? pulls no punches: It "paints a stark picture of a mental health system riddled with corruption and incompetence, in which shrinks live it up on pharmaceutical company cash while patients are disrespected, dehumanised and drugged to the eyeballs."

Bentall isn't some foaming-at-the-mouth anti-psychiatry extremist. He offers rational argument and scientific evidence to back up his claims about the ineffectiveness of modern psychiatric "treatment" and the weaknesses in its underlying biomedical model.

Bentall is not optimistic about change, though, because psychiatry and drug companies "have a vested interest in keeping things are they are."

I am afraid he may be right. Even in the midst of critiques pointing out the long-term harm, more people than ever are popping pills and allowing their children to pop them too. The latest rage, bipolar disorder, has so inundated popular and youth culture that it's even become an aggressive verb on the playground, as in:

"You don't watch out, man, I'm gonna go bipolar on you!"

If we don't watch out, that will be the newest mental defense to violent crime.

Photo credit: Mike "Dakinewavamon" Kline (Creative Commons license)

Sex offender roundup

So much being generated on the sex offender front that it's hard to keep up. Here, in no particular order, are just a few choice items:

The Atlantic: Overzealous sex offender laws harm public

As the tide begins to turn, The Atlantic magazine has joined the backlash, with a well-written and insightful piece by associate editor Conor Friedersdorf that begins like this:

On the Texas registry for sex offenders, Frank Rodriguez's crime is listed as "sexual assault of a child." If I lived in his neighborhood and had young children, I'd be frightened upon seeing that. Safe to assume that some of his neighbors discovered his status and became alarmed. Needlessly so, as it turns out. Delving into his story, journalist Abigail Pesta has discovered that Rodriguez was arrested for having sex with his high school girlfriend. He was 19. She was 15. They've now been happily married for years, and he has fathered four girls.

The anecdote is part of a larger story about America's sex offender registries and the people on them who don't belong there. It's a timely subject. This month, some state governments are racing to bring themselves into compliance with the Adam Walsh Child Protection and Safety Act in order to avoid losing federal funds. As a result, the sex offender dragnet may pull in even more people. Says Pesta, "Each of the 50 states now has at least one grassroots group dedicated to getting young people -- many high school age, but some under the age of 10 -- off the registry."

So perhaps the backlash will grow too.

The article continues HERE.

Juvenile registries harmful, study finds

Dovetailing nicely with the Atlantic piece, a leading researcher and national expert on sex offender policy has found that placing the names of juveniles on sex offender registries does nothing to make society safer, and has harmful unintended effects on youth and on juvenile case processing.

Based on her research, Elizabeth Letourneau of the Medical University of South Carolina is calling for an end to notification requirements for juveniles.

A summary of her research is HERE.

California releases audit of SVP program

The State Auditor’s Office has issued its long-awaited report on the practical implementation of California’s civil commitment scheme for sex offenders. It isn’t as hard-hitting as I would have liked, but there are a few interesting tidbits.

One I found interesting was the statistic that out of all of the sex offenders who were NOT civilly committed and who were released into the community between 2005 and 2010, only ONE was later convicted for a new sexually violent offense. Talk about a low base rate!

The report also details the program’s meager bang for the buck. From 2005 to 2010, the state paid nearly $49 million in evaluation costs alone to a small group of privately contracted evaluators. Some of these psychologists earned upwards of $1 million per year. And for what return? Last year, the SVP program screened 6,575 prisoners for possible civil commitment. And guess how many were committed? THREE (much less than 1 percent)!

Just think about how much primary prevention work to reduce sexual violence all of those waste millions could have funded.  

The full report is online HERE.

More on the social costs of civil detention 

Unlike the California auditors, who seem to have bought into the promise of the Static-99 as an “actuarial” technique capable of predicting future behavior, law professor Tamara Rice Lave of the Miami School of Law has just published an article in New Criminal Law Review claiming that the Static has little utility in SVP determinations not only because it is inaccurate, but also because it does not link dangerousness to mental illness as U.S. laws require. Here is the abstract of her article, “Controlling Sexually Violent Predators: Continued Incarceration At What Cost?”

Sexually violent predator (SVP) laws are inherently suspicious because they continue to incarcerate people not because of what they have done, but because of what they might do. I focus on three major criticisms of the laws. First, I use recent recidivism data to challenge the core motivation for the SVP laws—that sex offenders are monsters who cannot control themselves. Second, I situate the laws theoretically as examples of what Feeley and Simon call the “new penology.” I argue that the SVP laws show the limited promise of the new penology—that we can use science to predict risk accurately—because the actuarial instruments used in SVP determinations make many mistakes. In making this argument, I focus particularly on the most commonly used such instrument, the Static-99. Finally, I argue that the Static-99 fails to meet the constitutional criteria laid out by the U.S. Supreme Court in Kansas v. Hendricks because it does not link an individual’s mental illness to his dangerousness.

Her full article is available online HERE.

Government SVP reports off target, says Allen Frances

Allen Frances, the chair of the DSM-IV Task Force, has been dabbling with SVP cases as an expert witness for the past year. After reviewing almost 100 cases, he is  – to put it mildly – under-impressed by the reports of government experts:

In not one case did the sexual offender qualify for anything remotely resembling a DSM-IV diagnosis of Paraphilia. And this is in an enriched sample of offenders who have been carefully screened and are presumed to have Paraphilia. Certainly state evaluators are wildly over-diagnosing Paraphilia and the courts are sanctioning unjust psychiatric incarceration based on their misguided opinions.

The evaluators all misinterpreted DSM-IV in just the same way. They routinely equate the act of committing a sex crime with having a mental disorder. Their reports gave remarkably detailed descriptions of the offender's criminal behavior, but provide little or no rationale or justification for a diagnoses of Paraphilia. The write-ups are all long and thorough -- but completely off point and generic. Although written by dozens of different evaluators, they have a rote quality and all repeated exactly the same mistakes.

His full post, at his “Couch in Crisis” blog at the Psychiatric Times, is HERE.

Is porn "driving men crazy"?

Last but not least, the prolific and insightful blogger Vaughan Bell deconstructs a CNN article by social crusader Naomi Wolf, who claims that pornography is “rewiring the male brain” and “causing [men] to have more difficulty controlling their impulses.”

According to her article, … “some men (and women) have a 'dopamine hole' – their brains’ reward systems are less efficient – making them more likely to become addicted to more extreme porn more easily.”

Wolf cites the function of dopamine to back up her argument and says this provides “an increasing body of scientific evidence” to support her ideas.

Porn is portrayed as a dangerous addictive drug that hooks naive users and leads them into sexual depravity and dysfunction. The trouble is, if this is true (which by the way, it isn’t, research suggests both males and females find porn generally enhances their sex lives, it does not effect emotional closeness and it is not linked to risky sexual behaviours) it would also be true for sex itself which relies on, unsurprisingly, a remarkably similar dopamine reward system.

Furthermore, Wolf relies on a cartoon character version of the reward system where dopamine squirts are represented as the brain’s pleasurable pats on the back....

The full post is HERE.

And after all of this if you're still in the mood for further browsing, I highly recommend the wide-ranging Mind Hacks blog; the topics are always fascinating (at least to me).

Sex offender news roundup

Because my subscriber base is diverse, in my daily scans for blog topics I try to balance multiple areas of forensic practice. But these days, news pertaining to sex offender policy is so pervasive that I must consciously work to keep it from overwhelming the blog.

After all, even those of you who work with sex offenders probably want a diversion sometimes. When you initially trained for your profession, I'll bet you weren't thinking, "This will be so fantastic! I'll get to spend lots of quality time with sex offenders, absorbing all of the intimate details of their warped atrocities against women and children!"

No? I didn't think so.

But, sigh, that's the reality these days. Rare monsters in the United States and elsewhere -- such as John Couey in New Jersey and Earl Shriner in Washington State -- drive social policy. Aggrieved family members fire up a local community, politicians jump on an easy bandwagon, and -- voila -- the rest is history. As New York Times reporter Michael Cieply perceptively noted, in reference to the Roman Polanski case, the landscape has changed dramatically in the last three decades:

Manners, mores and law enforcement have become far less forgiving of sex crimes involving minors in the 31 years since Mr. Polanski ... fled rather than face what was to have been a 48-day sentence after he pleaded guilty to unlawful sex with a minor. But if he is extradited from Switzerland, Mr. Polanski could face a more severe punishment than he did in the 1970s, as a vigorous victims' rights movement, a family-values revival and revelations of child abuse by clergy members have all helped change the moral and legal framework regarding sex with the young.

Of course, we must guard against myopia. It is not just in the sex offender arena that we see zero tolerance policies gone wild. Look what is happening in the schools, for example. A 3rd-grade girl got expelled for a year because her grandmother sent a birthday cake to school for her. The problem wasn't the birthday cake, but the knife dear grandma sent to cut it with.

Anyway, on to this quick (I hope) roundup of sex offender-related developments.

Child victim decries conditions for sex offenders

Consequences of extreme social policies are so at odds with the original intents that even many who lobbied for the laws are having second thoughts. The Palm Beach (Florida) Post ran a remarkable story about a child sexual abuse victim whose victimization led to a legislative crusade against sex offenders. Lauren Book, whose child abuse saga began at age 11 at the hands of a caregiver, runs a nonprofit agency aimed at educating the public about child sexual abuse. Now, she is campaigning against the unintended consequences of the very residency restrictions that she helped inspire. Touring the sex offender encampment under the Julia Tuttle freeway in Florida, which I have previously blogged about, she said she has come to realize "that forcing predators to live in inhumane conditions will not protect children; in fact, she fears it may do the opposite":

"You can't really understand what it's like unless you go there. You can't capture it in words or pictures. Being there, hearing it, seeing it, smelling it - it's all part of understanding the situation…. It's a terrible situation under there, it is awful. I don't think them living under a bridge or absconding keeps children safe. I don't want them so desperate that they go out and find a child.''

The perils of a naked pumpkin

Elsewhere, legislators and judges are taking small steps to limit the consequences to youth of overinclusive sex offender registration requirements.

I mean, how would you feel if your kid was branded for life as a registered sex offender just because he had participated in Boulder, Colorado's popular "Naked Pumpkin Run" or "World Naked Bike Ride"?

To circumvent this scenario, Boulder is drafting a public nudity ordinance that would exclude arrests for nudity-related pranks from the registration laws. Commenting over at Grits for Breakfast, Scott Henson hopes this signals a growing public awareness that sex offender registries are too broad. "But a better fix would be for the legislature to remove indecent exposure and other petty crimes from the registry list. IMO we don't need more laws on this issue so much as better ones."

And in Michigan, a judge just ruled that putting a juvenile on the state's sex offender registry would constitute cruel and unusual punishment, prohibited by the U.S. Constitution.

The case involved "T.D.," a 15-year-old boy who touched the breast of a 15-year-old classmate in school. His name would have appeared on the registry for 25 years, until he was 43 years old. That would be unfair, ruled Judge Darlene A. O'Brien, because T.D.'s offense was "more akin to a juvenile prank than predatory, perverted, criminally deviant sexual conduct likely to be repeated." In her well-reasoned ruling, she too addresses the unintended consequences of the laws:

Requiring this rehabilitated juvenile offender to register for a total of 25 years upon reaching adulthood is likely to become a self-fulfilling prophesy -- if TD cannot get through school or get jobs because of community notification and public shunning, he is likely to become marginalized and, in fact, more likely to commit crimes as a result.

Prosecutors are appealing the decision, so an appellate court will get a chance to clarify whether juveniles must submit to public registration even when their offenses are mild and they present little risk of recidivism.

Challenges mounting on religious front

In at least the second pending case, a convicted sex offender in North Carolina is challenging a law that restricts his ability to attend church services. Police arrested James Nichols after he attended a Sunday service at a church that offers day care. As reported in the New York Times, "many of the three dozen states that establish zones where sex offenders cannot live or visit do not provide exemptions for churches." A similar lawsuit is pending in federal court in Georgia. Also in the South, in the city of Louisville, Kentucky, a Pentecostal church has snubbed its nose at the punitive climate against sex offenders by unapologetically ordaining a convicted sex offender as a pastor.

Voice stress analysis upheld

At the same time that these types of fissures are developing in the larger systems, other agencies are imposing additional restrictions on sex offenders. For example, a federal judge has ruled that sex offenders can be required to submit to computerized voice stress analysis as part of their post-release supervision, just as many are already required to undergo testing with polygraphs and penile plethysmography under the "containment approach" to recidivism.

The federal judge in the Northern District of New York ruled that debates about the scientific reliability of the technique do not "bear much on the therapeutic value of the tool" as a lie-detection incentive.

The attorney for Ethan Gjurovich, who was convicted of child pornography charges, said this is the first case he knows of in which a federal court has endorsed voice stress analysis requirement on a parolee. He likened it to the psychological pressure of a "lie-detecting dog" -- "If you don't tell the truth, he's going to bite you."

Paraphilic coercive disorder proposal critiqued

On a parting note, I encourage you to check out an interesting critique of the Paraphilic Coercive Disorder diagnosis being proposed for the DSM-V, over at the Asexual Explorations blog. The blog -- as its title implies -- is devoted to the emerging issue of asexuality. But its author was so astounded upon learning about some of the wacky diagnoses being proposed for the upcoming Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders that felt compelled to detour from his main topic.

. . . And, speaking of pumpkins, be sure to tune in for a repeat of the ever-popular Halloween post,
BEWARE THE HALLOWEEN BOGEYMAN.

Asperger's ruling: Judge should have allowed experts

In the latest of several recent forensic cases involving Asperger's, an appellate court has ruled that a judge committed a reversible error in excluding expert evidence on the condition.

The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals overturned seven counts of arson against a California physicist who with his buddies had vandalized and torched more than 130 vehicles back in 2003.

William "Billy" Cottrell is described in news accounts as a talented young physicist who was diagnosed with Asperger's, a high-functioning form of autism, during his 2004 trial for arson and conspiracy.

In its ruling, the appellate court let stand a conviction for conspiracy. But the court held that aiding and abetting of arson requires a specific intent in that Cottrell must have knowingly participated in the crimes and tried through his actions to make them succeed. Thus, it was reversible error not to allow expert evidence of a mental condition that might have impacted the defendant's subjective judgments.

The defense had proposed a theory in which Asperger's prevented Cottrell from understanding what his friends were up to until it was too late; once he figured it out, he supposedly tried to stop them.

Local mental health professionals quoted in the Pasadena Star-News differed as to whether an Asperger's defense might have succeeded in mitigating Cottrell's culpability.

On the one hand, psychologist Bruce Hirsch said Asperger's could have reduced Cottrell's ability to understand the situation, as people with the condition often cannot tell when they are being lied to.

"What you're really talking about is a social naivete and, yes, people with Asperger's can be very socially naive," Hirsch is quoted as saying. "They are so bound to the truth that the concept of lying doesn't even exist in their mind. Somehow the social reasoning of people with Asperger's is very concrete, very black and white, and they don't get that people tell lies."

On the other hand, marriage and family therapist Amy Keller said the defense theory of Asperger's does not take into account the rigid morality of most Asperger's patients.

"I find that, after working with a lot of Asperger's patients, that they are so stubborn," Keller told the newspaper. "They're not that easily influenced. If anything, they're very clear about right and wrong."

Either way, the appellate reversal will not have a practical import on Cottrell. Prosecutors decided not to retry him, because it would not have impacted his 100-month federal prison term.

Cottrell will soon be taking the bus back to the Arizona federal prison where he teaches physics and cosmology classes to fellow prisoners.

The unpublished opinion in U.S. v. William Cottrell is HERE; the most recent Pasadena Star-News story is HERE.

Hat tip: Ken Pope

Further resources:

• Asperger’s: Here today, gone tomorrow: Would erasure from DSM impact forensic use? (Nov. 3, 2009 blog post)
• The short life of a diagnosis (Nov. 9, 2009 New York Times op-ed by Simon Baron-Cohen)
• Forensic aspects of Asperger's Syndrome, Barry-Walsh, J.B., & Mullen, P.E., Journal of Forensic Psychiatry, 2004, Volume 15, pages 96-107.