5th-grader suspended for vampire drawing

Perhaps I am too fixated on Halloween (I promise to stop now!), but I found this story out of Savannah, Georgia fascinating, with its hysterical and racist undertones. Of course, this 5th-grader's troubles were nothing compared to what happened to high schooler Tim Masters when he drew scary pictures.

Halloween drawing scares teacher, gets student in hot water

Fifth-grader Jordan Hood thought the bloody vampire he drew in art class was scary, but he had no idea it would elicit a horrifying response from one of his teachers.

Tuesday morning, Jordan was assigned to draw a scary Halloween mask in art class.

By the end of the day, Jordan was being told he could not return to Pooler Elementary School until he passed a psychological evaluation....

During art class Tuesday, Jordan drew a scarred vampire with bloodshot eyes and with blood dripping from its nose, mouth and down its cheeks. Art teacher Lloyd Harold helped the boy shade the sketched eyes to give the drawing an even creepier look.

"The assignment was to draw a scary mask or picture - basically a Halloween activity," Harold said.

As a final gory touch, Jordan used a red marker to write "I Kill For Blood" under his drawing.

The picture was not destined for the cover of Fangoria magazine, but it fulfilled the requirement for fifth-grade Halloween art.

However, when Jordan's homeroom teacher, Melissa Pevey, saw the drawing, she found it disturbing. Pevey was concerned enough to contact assistant principal Valerie Johnson and Campus Police.

But it wasn't blood and gore that bothered Pevey.

She believed the blood looked a lot like gang-related teardrop tattoos, and she thought the words "I Kill For Blood" could be tied to an infamous Los Angeles street gang known as The Bloods.

Jordan's mother, LaKisha Hood, was shocked to find that her son's art lesson had evolved into a gang investigation.

"They told me the droplets could actually be a gang symbol for the number of people he killed," she said.

Burnsed said the district has asked teachers to be wary of anything that might be harmful to students. He also said the district has provided gang-identification training.

He did not know whether classroom teachers were trained in gang symbolism.

"The teacher was concerned and referred it to the Campus Police," Burnsed said. "(Campus Police Capt. Joan) Sasser wasn't sure that it meant anything."

So they resolved the issue by requiring Jordan to undergo psychological testing with Gateway Mental Health.

Jordan's family didn't want him to miss school, so he went in for testing first thing Wednesday morning - getting him back to school in time for the fall dance that afternoon.

Although he only lost about two hours of instruction, his mother fears the incident also might cost him a bit of innocence and trust.

"He didn't know anything about gang symbols until the teacher accused him," she said. "We moved to Pooler thinking he'd be in a more diverse school with better opportunities.

"And so far, it hasn't been a pleasant experience."

The full story is here. I have previously highlighted the story of Tim Masters, who was convicted of murder in large part due to a series of "scary doodles."

Hat tip: The excellent blog, Don't taze me, Bro!

Movie recommendation: The Changeling

The Changeling is a powerful film. It tells the long-forgotten story of a working-class woman who brought down the corrupt establishment of Los Angeles 80 years ago.

Angelina Jolie gives a strong, Oscar-worthy performance as Christine Collins, a single mother and one of the first female supervisors at the phone company who refuses to bow down to corrupt police when her son vanished without a trace in 1928.

Los Angeles on the brink of the Great Depression was an epitome of corruption. The police chief, James "Two Guns" Davis, had an officially sanctioned "gun squad" that terrorized opponents with impunity. When Collins' son Walter vanished, the L.A. police were embarrassed by their inability to find him. To squelch public criticism, they tried to convince Collins that a young drifter was her son. When Collins protested, police Captain J.J. Jones labeled her as histrionic and delusional and had her locked in a "psychopathic ward."

Luckily for Collins, her plight came to the attention of Gustav A. Briegleb, a Presbyterian minister and community organizer who regularly lambasted police corruption on his radio show. It was through Briegleb's help that Collins was able to get a lawyer and tell her story. Indeed, although it is not mentioned in the movie, Collins' case led to passage of a law that prohibited police from incarcerating people in psychiatric facilities absent due process.

My review continues here (click to the Amazon page and then scroll down to the customer reviews; please click on "yes" if you find the review helpful).

Pendulum swing on Halloween hype?

In a counterpoint to my Halloween post yesterday, Grits for Breakfast has a roundup of critiques of the "annual, mostly fact-free media hype surrounding registered sex offenders and Halloween." Comedy shows such as Saturday Night Live and Jay Leno deserve some of the credit for lampooning the ridiculous restrictions and causing some officials to back down.

For example, after being the butt of jokes on Saturday Night Live, officials in Maryland backed off of their annual ritual of forcing registered sex offenders to post a bright orange sign on their doors, stating in capital letters: "NO CANDY AT THIS RESIDENCE."

"Laughing at stupid public policies is sometimes the best way to influence public opinion, so I'm glad to know the Saturday Night Live piece struck a nerve and many in the public apparently see through the hype. After all, trick or treaters are statistically much more likely to be hit by lightning than molested by a registered sex offender while soliciting candy," comments Scott Henson over at Grits.

Henson calls the farcical crackdowns an example of "security theater," or "hyping (and pretending to solve) a threat that in reality is extremely remote, even to the point of diverting resources from policing activities like DWI enforcement that would protect more people and save more lives."

Another sign that the pendulum may be swinging was a U.S. District Court judge's grant of temporary injunctions against two provisions of a Missouri law banning sex offenders from having any "Halloween-related contact" with children.

Judge Carol Jackson called the provisions unconstitutionally vague. According to the Wall Street Journal's law blog, the judge was concerned that sex offenders might be punished for engaging in Halloween-related activities with their own children, such as "carving a pumpkin in the privacy of your kitchen with your 5-year-old child." She questioned whether such parents might have to send their kids away on Halloween to avoid prosecution.

The challenge was brought by the ACLU of Eastern Missouri on behalf of four convicted sex offenders. As I reported on Tuesday, civil rights attorneys are devoting more and more of their resources to protecting the rights of society's most vilified citizens; these lawyers will deserve the lion's share of credit if the pendulum does begin to swing back toward rationality.

Speaking at last week's Association for the Treatment of Sexual Abusers (ATSA) conference in Atlanta, attorney Sarah Geraghty of the Southern Center for Human Rights said she never would have foreseen that her career would take this direction, but she is happy that it did because she thinks she has found her life's calling.

Grits for Breakfast has extensive coverage and links on the Halloween hysteria and responses.

Beware the Halloween bogeyman!

This Halloween, as vampires, ghosts, witches, and other fearsome creatures stalk the night, communities are gearing up for an even more horrendous monster, the most evil and terrifying of them all. It's .... eeeeeek .......

THE SEXUAL PREDATOR!

On Halloween, communities around the United States are taking drastic and unprecedented steps to keep vulnerable young children safe from this lurking menace:

• In Roanoke, Virginia, and Anderson, South Carolina, convicted sex offenders will be rounded up and held at a single location.
  

• In Tennessee, sex offenders are being forbidden from wearing costumes or handing out candy to trick-or-treaters.

• In Maryland, registered offenders are being required to post "No Candy" signs on their doors.

• In Harris County, Texas, sheriff’s deputies are cruising the streets, ready to arrest any sex offender with Halloween decorations on his home.

• In California and Illinois, paroled offenders must turn off all outside lights, stay in their homes from 5 p.m. to 5 a.m., and not answer their doors except to police.

The good citizens of Belleville, Missouri are going further this year. Not only are sex offenders prohibited from handing out candy, but normal teenagers are no longer allowed to trick-or-treat! A newly enacted city law bans anyone in the ninth grade or higher from trick-or-treating, unless they are a "special-needs" child accompanied by a parent or guardian. Even younger kids must stop trick-or-treating by 8:30 p.m. under penalty of arrest. The rules were prompted by citizen fear of menacing high schoolers.

"We believe that Halloween is for little children," said the town's mayor, Mark Eckert. "We just feel that we need to go that extra mile to protect the children."

And there's the rub. Fear and hype notwithstanding, there is not one single case on record of a child being sexually molested by a registered sex offender while trick-or-treating on Halloween.

In that regard, the current sex offender scare has much in common with the Halloween legend of tainted candy.

As Benjamin Radford of the Skeptical Enquirer pointed out about that enduring stranger-danger myth: "Despite e-mail warnings, scary stories, and Ann Landers columns to the contrary, there have been only two confirmed cases of children being killed by poisoned Halloween candy, and in both cases the children were killed not in a random act by strangers but intentional murder by one of their parents."

The sad part of both myths is that children are taught a message of fear: Strangers, or even their own neighbors, might try to poison or molest them.

The real danger facing children this Halloween is getting hit by a car while crossing a dark street.

That, and dental cavities.

Also see the essay by Benjamin Radford in LiveScience , "Halloween Hysteria: Phantom Fears and Sex Offenders."

Graphics credit: Zombophoto (Creative Commons license).

Note: This post is back by popular demand from last year's Halloween essay; the Belleville law is new, but all the rest of those listed above were in place last year. This year, you can bet that even more states and municipalities will have jumped on the bandwagon. Feel free to post new ones that you may know about in the "Comments" section.

The case for videotaping interrogations

Detective's candid call for reform

I've been a police officer for 25 years, and I never understood why someone would admit to a crime he or she didn't commit. Until I secured a false confession in a murder case.

So begins a Los Angeles Times opinion piece by Jim Trainum, a Washington DC police detective who runs a cold case unit and lectures on interrogations and false confessions and other police investigation topics.

Like most people, Trainum was firmly convinced that only the guilty confess to crimes. And, like most police, he believed his suspect's confession - obtained without threats or abuse - was "solid."

Even after an "ironclad alibi" forced dismissal of charges, the detective and others continued for years to think she was guilty: After all, she had confessed. And even her own attorney thought she was guilty of killing the man, who had been robbed, beaten, and dumped in a river.

Trainum's thinking underwent a dramatic change only years later, when he reviewed the videotape of the mid-1990s confession in light of more contemporary understanding of false confessions:

"We ignored evidence that our suspect might not have been guilty, and during the interrogation we inadvertently fed her details of the crime that she repeated back to us in her confession," he realized.

Trainum's op ed, focusing on the need to videotape interrogations, is here.

Georgia sex offender law unconstitutional

At last week's Association for the Treatment of Sexual Abusers (ATSA) conference in Atlanta, Sarah Geraghty of the Southern Center for Human Rights gave a compelling talk about the inhumanity of Georgia’s sex offender laws, the most draconian in the nation.

Blog readers may recall that Georgia is the state that made devoted mother Janet Allison a homeless, jobless leper simply for allowing her daughter's boyfriend to move into the family home after the daughter became pregnant. (See "Sex Offender Laws Gone Amok, April 10, 2007.)

In Alaska, as national news demonstrates, she might be congratulated. But not in Georgia.

The explicit goal of Georgia legislature was to force all sex offenders to leave the state. And no one was harder hit than the homeless. Homeless offenders were criminalized for not having a valid address to supply to the registry. The second such offense was punishable by life in prison. Yes, you read that right. Life in prison.

Almost as soon as the eloquent Ms. Geraghty left the ATSA podium, however, Georgia's Supreme Court struck down the homelessness provision of the law. In Monday's 6-1 decision, the court found the law unconstitutional because it fails to give homeless offenders a mechanism to comply.

Geraghty's group had brought the case on behalf of William James Santos, who was kicked out of a Gainesville homeless shelter and then arrested for failing to register with Georgia's sex offender list.

As reported in the New York Times, this is one of several challenges to the 2006 law.

Geraghty told the ATSA convention that it won't be the last. Around the nation, she is seeing signs of change; courts in several states have struck down various provisions of the new laws.

The case, Santos v. State, is online here.