Another fascinating disputed confession case

DNA catches real killer, but convicted men remain behind bars

Why read fiction, when real life is so much more compelling? Just in time for this week's University of Texas conference on confessions, I just read an expose on another fascinating case of multiple disputed confessions.

The Norfolk Four are Navy enlistees convicted and imprisoned in the 1997 death of a fellow enlisted man’s wife. The case could prove just as important as the Central Park jogger case in altering public perceptions about the reliability of confessions.

Indeed, the cases have major similarities. In both cases, multiple individuals confessed to a rape-murder after lengthy interrogations. And in each case, DNA evidence later tied the crime to a known sex offender who admitted acting alone. (Astonishingly, in the Norfolk Four case, police ignored the real killer despite the fact that he raped another young woman just 10 days later and a few hundred yards away.)

If the sailors' convictions are ultimately overturned or they succeed in their bid for gubernatorial clemency, this case may shine a welcome spotlight on the vulnerabilities of individuals with diminished mental capacities to coercive police interrogation. The enlisted man who was the focus of police suspicion, Joseph Jesse Dick Jr., is mentally slow, a factor that researchers have found to correlate with heightened susceptibility to falsely confess.

Prosecutors are fighting to uphold the convictions, and three of the men are still incarcerated.

A half-hour video on the case is available online, as is an excellent New York Times Magazine expose.

Hat tip to Jane for alerting me to this case.

The War on Drugs: "A 25-year quagmire"

Half a million Americans behind bars for drugs

The Sentencing Project has just released a scathing critique documenting the failures and unintended social consequences of the so-called War on Drugs. "A 25-Year Quagmire: The War on Drugs and Its Impact on American Society" assesses the strategy of combating drug abuse primarily with enhanced punishments at the expense of investments in treatment and prevention.

Among the findings:

• Drug arrests have more than tripled since 1980 to a record 1.8 million by 2005

• Four of five drug arrests are for possession offenses, more than a quarter involving marijuana

• Nearly 6 in 10 people in state prison for drug offenses have no history of violence or high-level drug selling

• A shortage of treatment options in many low-income neighborhoods contributes to the handling of drug abuse as a criminal justice problem instead of a social problem.

Ambiguous laws increase likelihood of racial profiling

The data are in, and – no surprise:

• Police do sometimes engage in racial profiling.
  

• People in general do sometimes engage in racist behaviors under ambiguous situations in which they can rationalize their decisions in some other way.
  

With those data in mind, here’s a great idea: Let's pass ambiguous new laws and see how they are enforced.

That's just what municipalities around the country are doing, in a recipe for increasing racially discriminatory arrest patterns.

Take "sagging."

Atlanta, the hip hop capital of the South and perhaps the world, is currently debating whether to follow other cities around the country that have enacted laws against wearing baggy pants that show one's undergarments. The ordinance would impose fines and even jail time for violators.

The ACLU of Georgia says that is unconstitutional. The issue is not just about baggy pants, but about the criminalization of young black men, says ACLU executive director Debbie Seagraves: "We are talking about creating one more ordinance, one more law that can be used to put more and more young black people into a system that is already eating them up."

Not so, says C.T. Martin, the 70-year-old city councilman who proposed the law.

"My legislation is designed to help young people, to enlighten them and help them understand," said Martin. "When the police pull you over, you can't say they are profiling you. You've already profiled yourself."

Would it surprise you to learn that Martin is a longtime African-American activist?

Not if you are familiar with the research on unconscious racism, which shows that African American police and probation officers, for example, are just as likely as anyone else to make racist judgments about black criminal suspects. What's ominous is that the underlying racist stereotypes are not conscious, so people don't even know they're relying on them.

Or, as another example of ambiguous laws, take anti-gang injunctions.

On the opposite side of the country from Atlanta, progressive San Francisco is enacting anti-gang injunctions that bar people named on a gang list from congregating, wearing gang symbols or clothing, or flashing gang signs in certain geographic areas. The injunctions, already in place but currently being expanded, also impose a 10 p.m. to sunrise curfew on these individuals, under penalty of jail.

Remember the research about racist behavior being most likely to occur under ambiguous circumstances in which it can be rationalized away?

Well, with gang signs and symbols constantly changing, police will be given the leeway to interpret which hand signals, clothing, or other symbols constitute evidence of membership in the Norteños and other gangs.

Criminal defense attorneys opposing the injunction argued in court that some of the people named on the list are not in gangs and are being targeted because they live in public housing or have rapped about gangster life.

Robert Amparán, who is representing four men on the list, went so far as to call the injunction "government-sponsored racial profiling" that gives police sweeping power to harass and arrest Latino men.

While that may be true, the social science data on modern racism predict that those involved will rationalize any racist conduct on other grounds. After all, no one in these modern times wants to be seen – or even to see themselves – as a racist.

Photo credit: "CR Artist" (Creative Commons license)

Attorney Neil Richards comments on the constitutionality of baggy-pants laws at the Concurring Opinions blog. The Chicago Tribune has a news analysis of those ordinances.

The San Francisco Chronicle provides coverage of the debacle over San Francisco's anti-gang injunctions.

Research data on unconscious racial stereotyping among police and probation officers includes: Graham, S., & Lowery, B.S. (2004). Priming Unconscious Racial Stereotypes About Adolescent Offenders. Law and Human Behavior, 28, 483-504.

Study: When criminal label closes doors, felons more likely to reoffend

I recently posted about a new book, Marked, that describes the employment consequences of a criminal conviction.

Now comes a large-scale study out of the College of Criminology and Criminal Justice at Florida State University with similar findings:

A convicted felon sentenced to probation for a violent, property or drug felony is more likely to re-offend within two years if he or she leaves court with an official "convicted felon" label and its barriers to employment and civil rights, according to a landmark study of nearly 96,000 probationers.

More information on the study, including a link to the article in the August issue of Criminology, is online.

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.

Report blames sick culture for preventable deaths in CA prisons

One in six deaths in California prisons last year may have been preventable, according to a report released yesterday, and much of the systemic failures stem from a sick attitude toward prisoners.

"Across the board we see delays in diagnosis and access to care and needed tests; misfiled, incomplete or illegible medical records; lack of space, sanitation and staffing; … failures by clinicians to recognize and evaluate 'red flag' symptoms, follow published guidelines, perform basic physical examinations, or respond to patient complaints," wrote the federal receiver who conducted the investigation.

"You can't expect clinicians to practice good medicine if they don't have good medical records, if they don't have lab results to help diagnosis, if they don't have a pharmacy system to support the right order of medications, if you don't have a culture within [the state prisons] that says, 'My goodness, these are human beings and they ought to be treated as human beings,' " the receiver told the Sacramento Bee.

Topping the list was deaths from asthma, which the receiver called "unconscionable" in 21st century California.

Other causes of preventable death included:

• Acute pancreatitis - medical staff disregarded a man's nine complaints over three days of severe abdominal pain, because they thought he was lying
  

• Heart ailment - a man reported chest pains in the middle of the night but didn't see the doctor for eight hours
  

• A hernia condition – a man with recurring stomach pain, vomiting and a history of hernias had a five-week delay in a referral to a specialist (a consistent pattern found in the investigation)
  

For more information, visit the federal receiver's website. More online coverage is also available at the Los Angeles Times, the Sacramento Bee, and the blog Witness L.A.

Also check out the receiver’s interesting slide show on medical care at San Quentin.