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)

More on the DSM-V controversy

"The new mental disorders?"

Inspired by last week's op-ed in the L.A. Times, Atlanta Journal-Constitution staff writer Richard Halickshas has a new piece questioning some of the strange new diagnoses being proposed for the DSM-V:

Sex addiction. Internet addiction. Compulsive buying disorder. All of these and more could become officially recognized mental disorders in the next few years. The American Psychiatric Association is creating the fifth edition of its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, or DSM-V, which defines mental disorders and adds new ones with each edition.

Christopher Lane, author of the book "Shyness: How Normal Behavior Became an Illness," complained last week that the new DSM, due out in 2011, is being put together in secret, a charge that DSM's editors denied.

In "Wrangling Over Psychiatry’s Bible," published in the Los Angeles Times, Lane also warned that the creation of new disorders where none currently exists may be "little more than a pretext for prescribing profitable drugs."

Here's a look at selected new ailments under consideration by the committees of experts writing DSM-V.

Sex addiction

Real, says Dr. Patrick Carnes, a leading researcher in the field. It's a "compulsive behavior that completely dominates the addict's life. Sex becomes the organizing principle of addicts' lives."

Not real, says Seattle therapist Roger Libby. Slate.com quotes Libby: "You cannot be addicted to yourself. You have to have a substance external to yourself like alcohol or drugs to be addicted."

Caffeine withdrawal disorder

Real, say Johns Hopkins University researchers. Withdrawing from the world's most-used drug causes headache, fatigue, irritability, depression, difficulty concentrating, even flulike symptoms.

Not real? Few seem to argue against this. It's in DSM-IV as a trial diagnosis and is up for official diagnosis designation in DSM-V.

Parental Alienation Syndrome

Real, says paskids.com: [PAS] "arises primarily in the context of child-custody disputes. Its primary manifestation is the child’s campaign of denigration against a parent, a campaign that has no justification."

Not real, says the National Organization for Women: "Parental alienation really is a dangerous and cleverly marketed legal strategy that has caused much harm to victims of abuse, especially women and children during and post-divorce."

Internet addiction

Real, says Dr. Jerald Block, writing in the American Journal of Psychiatry: "Internet addiction appears to be a common disorder that merits inclusion in DSM-V… . [It] consists of at least three subtypes: excessive gaming, sexual preoccupations and email/text messaging."

Not real, argues thelastpsychiatrist.com. "Internet addiction belongs in DSM-V… . And then let's rename the DSM The Book of Fantastikal Magickal Pixies and incorporate it into the Monster Manual."

As you see in the above coverage, the APA denies the charge by Lane and others, including none other than DSM-III Task Force Chairman Robert Spitzer, that the DSM-V revision process is occurring in secrecy.

But, as Spitzer points out in a letter to Psychiatric News, the secrecy is spelled out quite clearly in the contract that all DSM-V task force members must sign:

"I will not, during the term of this appointment or after, divulge, furnish, or make accessible to anyone or use in any way... any Confidential Information. I understand that 'Confidential Information' includes all Work Product, unpublished manuscripts and drafts and other pre-publication materials, group discussions, internal correspondence, information about the development process and any other written or unwritten information, in any form, that emanates from or relates to my work with the APA task force or work group."

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution article is online here. Spitzer's letter about the secrecy is here. My previous post on the DSM makeover controversy is here.

Locking the courthouse doors

I recently blogged about how the current economic crisis is affecting public defender services, creating a potentially unconstitutional situation in which indigent clients cannot get adequate legal help.

Now, at least one county is proposing to curtail essential court services in order to balance the budget.

That is also unconstitutional, says the presiding judge.

The judge of the King County (Seattle), Washington court, the state's largest court, is taking the unusual step of going public. In an opinion piece in the Seattle Times, he reminds the public of the county's duty to adequately fund not only the courts but also the prosecutor and the public defender -- "There is only so much that can be cut before the administration of justice is undermined."

Presiding Judge Bruce Hilyer also pointed out the penny-wise, pound-foolish nature of the wild budget slashing occurring these days.

For example, Seattle's Drug Court is a nationally recognized model that brings in $3.7 million biannually from the state. That money will be forfeited if the Drug Court shuts down. Taxpayers will also lose in the long run if more drug offenders are incarcerated rather than rehabilitated.

In responding to the county proposal to close the court for 10 working days next year, Judge Hilyer delivers a basic civics lesson:

A core principle of our system of government is three branches, each with authority independent of the other. The legislative branch sets policy, the executive branch implements it and the independent judiciary protects the rule of law and the rights of the individual against the other powers of the state…. The drafters of our state constitution foresaw the risk that one branch of government might force closure on another branch. To prevent this, our constitution provides that the superior court "shall always be open, except on nonjudicial days," which are weekends and holidays. …. Apart from weekends and holidays, the courts may be closed only in physical emergencies like snowstorms, floods or earthquakes….

King County faces some very hard choices. But no matter what they are, we cannot afford to suspend our citizens' access to justice by closing our courts.

The full article, "King County Superior Court cannot be closed," is online 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.

Don’t blame me - AT&T did it!

(Or, my variation on the TODDI defense*)

Loyal subscribers may have noticed an absence of blog posts this week. It's true that I have been busy, but the dearth is partly the fault of AT&T, which shut me down earlier this week.

When I called to find out why my Internet service (and, more urgently, my incoming business telephone line!) was dead, they sent me on a wild goose chase to purchase new equipment.

It took dozens of phone calls, hours of time "on hold," and a two-day wait before they finally sent out a repair person. As it turns out, a technician working on a central terminal up the street had accidentally snipped off my line and spliced me into someone else's.

Accidents happen. And when I complained about the lengthy delay, the good folks at AT&T did compensate me -- to the tune of $16.79.

Sorry 'bout that, folks.

* The TODDI Defense -- The Other Dude Did It -- was one of the most common defenses I heard when I worked as a criminal investigator.

Wrangling over psychiatry's bible

Check out this opinion piece in today's Los Angeles Times. (It cites yours truly on the forensic angle.) The writer, Christopher Lane, is the author of an excellent book on the making of the DSM-III, entitled Shyness: How normal behavior became a sickness.

Los Angeles Times
November 16, 2008

By Christopher Lane

Over the summer, a wrangle between eminent psychiatrists that had been brewing for months erupted in print. Startled readers of Psychiatric News saw the spectacle unfold in the journal's normally less-dramatic pages. The bone of contention: whether the next revision of America's psychiatric bible, the "Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders," should be done openly and transparently so mental health professionals and the public could follow along, or whether the debates should be held in secret.

One of the psychiatrists (former editor Robert Spitzer) wanted transparency; several others, including the president of the American Psychiatric Association and the man charged with overseeing the revisions (Darrel Regier), held out for secrecy. Hanging in the balance is whether, four years from now, a set of questionable behaviors with names such as "Apathy Disorder," "Parental Alienation Syndrome," "Premenstrual Dysphoric Disorder," "Compulsive Buying Disorder," "Internet Addiction" and "Relational Disorder" will be considered full-fledged psychiatric illnesses.

This may sound like an arcane, insignificant spat about nomenclature. But the manual is in fact terribly important, and the debates taking place have far-reaching consequences. Published by the American Psychiatric Association (and better known as the DSM), the manual is meant to cover every mental health disorder that affects children and adults.

Not only do mental health professionals use it routinely when treating patients, but the DSM is also a bible of sorts for insurance companies deciding what disorders to cover, as well as for clinicians, courts, prisons, pharmaceutical companies and agencies that regulate drugs. Because large numbers of countries, including the United States, treat the DSM as gospel, it's no exaggeration to say that minor changes and additions have powerful ripple effects on mental health diagnoses around the world.

Behind the dispute about transparency is the question of whether the vague, open-ended terms being discussed even come close to describing real psychiatric disorders. To large numbers of experts, apathy, compulsive shopping and parental alienation are symptoms of psychological conflict rather than full-scale mental illnesses in their own right. Also, because so many participants in the process of defining new disorders have ties to pharmaceutical companies, some critics argue that the addition of new disorders to the manual is little more than a pretext for prescribing profitable drugs.

The more you know about how psychiatrists defined dozens of disorders in the recent past, the more you can appreciate Spitzer's concern that the process should not be done in private. Although a new disorder is supposed to meet a host of criteria before being accepted into the manual, one consultant to the manual's third edition -- they're now working on the fifth -- explained to the New Yorker magazine that editorial meetings over the changes were often chaotic. "There was very little systematic research," he said, "and much of the research that existed was really a hodgepodge -- scattered, inconsistent and ambiguous. I think the majority of us recognized that the amount of good, solid science upon which we were making our decisions was pretty modest."

Things are different today, the new consultants insist, because hard science now drives their debates. Maybe so, but still, I shudder to think what the criteria for "Relational Disorder" and "Parental Alienation Syndrome" will be. And I'm not the only one worrying. Spitzer is bothered by the prospect of "science by committee." Others, like forensics expert Karen Franklin, writing in American Chronicle, warn that advocacy groups are pressing for the inclusion of dubious terms that simply don't belong in a manual of mental illnesses….

My concern is the lack of proper oversight. If the proposed new disorders don't receive a full professional airing, including a vigorous debate about their validity, they will be incorporated wholesale into the fifth edition in 2012. Joining the ranks of the mentally ill will be the apathetic, shopaholics, the virtually obsessed and alienated parents. It's hard to imagine that anyone will be left who is not eligible for a diagnosis.

Christopher Lane, a professor of English at Northwestern University, is the author of "Shyness: How Normal Behavior Became a Sickness."

Lane's full opinion piece is online here.

As I have blogged about previously, one example of a proposed diagnosis with no established reliability or validity is "hebephilia." My response to the attempt to get that term added to the DSM-V was just published in the Archives of Sexual Behavior. You can see a free preview (the first page) of "The Public Policy Implications of 'Hebephilia' " here, but you need a subscription to get the entire article.

My blog post on the DSM-V revision process is here.