CNN features San Quentin education project

As part of its "Black in America" series, CNN has an upbeat story about education efforts in one of California's most famous prisons:

Lt. Sam Robinson, a 27-year veteran of San Quentin, gave a tour of 27 vocational programs run by about 3,000 volunteers as part of the Prison University Project, a nonprofit education program that offers many black men an opportunity to earn an associate of arts degree. It helps give those eligible for parole the intellectual tools to compete in a vastly changing job market.

Advocates say that many black men imprisoned across America, particularly nonviolent drug-related offenders, have enormous potential to become productive, law-abiding members of society through higher education in prison.

University of California at Berkeley professor Rebecca Carter volunteers as a biology instructor at San Quentin. During her first semester, she was startled by what she discovered. "I've been teaching on the Cal campus and teaching at the prison at the same time, and they were significantly more engaged when I was in the prison," Carter told CNN's Soledad O'Brien. "Not always more in command with the subject matter but more engaged, doing the homework, asking questions because they were passionate about learning."

The full CNN article is here, accompanied by video and photographic footage of the prison university.

Hat tip: Douglas A. Berman, Sentencing Law & Policy blog

Imprisoning LeFevre a costly, senseless ritual

Guest essay by Daniel Macallair*

Few examples better illustrate the vindictive nature of the American criminal justice system than the case of Susan LeFevre.

On April 24, LeFevre was arrested by federal marshals at her San Diego home 32 years after she walked away from a minimum security prison for nonviolent offenders in Michigan. At the time of her escape, she had just begun serving a 10- to 20-year sentence after she and a male companion pleaded guilty to charges of attempting to sell $200 worth of heroin to an undercover police officer.

Despite having no criminal record, the 19-year-old college student faced a crusading judge and the first wave of harsh drug laws. For a crime that may have resulted in probation in a neighboring jurisdiction, LeFevre received the maximum possible prison sentence.

Now a 52-year-old law-abiding mother and housewife, LeFevre has returned to Michigan where justice and corrections officials have stridently vowed that she will face the wrath of the criminal justice system.

While walking away from a prison sentence is never justified, the case raises troubling questions about the American criminal justice system and the purpose of imprisonment.

According to a recent study by the Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice, the U.S. has the highest imprisonment rate in the world. With just 5 percent of the world's population, we have 25 percent of the world's prisoners.

Even more startling, the U.S. jail and prison population for drug offenses (458,131) exceeds the European Union's jail and prison population for all offenses (356,626).

The reason why the United States imprisons 740 out of every 100,000 citizens compared to Europe's rate of 110 per 100,000 is the size of its prison establishment and the acceptance of imprisonment as a sentence for both violent and nonviolent offenders. Other countries choose to use prison sentences very sparingly on the understanding that prisons are cruel and brutalizing places that should be reserved for only the dangerous. Instead, European countries prefer to rely on penalties such as day fines that are tied to the individual's income....

LeFevre's imprisonment will cost the state of Michigan more than $300,000 during the next 10 years. This does not include any additional periods of imprisonment imposed for her earlier escape. Many in the prison establishment will argue that requiring LeFevre to serve her sentence is necessary to demonstrate the criminal justice system's resolve and to deter others from similar actions. Others argue that special treatment for LeFevre cannot be justified since special considerations are not extended to other inmates.

Effective criminal justice systems measure their success by the number of people successfully returned to the community, not the number of inmates maintained in prison. Incarcerating individuals such as LeFevre who pose no danger to society and who are forced to leave behind children and spouses simply renders her punishment a costly and senseless ritual.

In this instance, society would be best served by allowing LeFevre to return home, leave the past behind and continue her productive life.

*Reprinted with the written permission of the author. Originally posted on the Saginaw (Michigan) News online edition. Daniel Macallair is executive director of the Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice and teaches criminal justice at San Francisco State University.

Bizarre verdict: Both sane and insane

Kier Sanders was a severely psychotic and delusional 21-year-old when he shotgunned his grandparents to death in Tupelo, Mississippi back in 1985. Amazingly, he wandered the streets of America for two decades before finally being apprehended in 2005 and put on trial for double murder.

The defense, insanity, was no surprise.

The verdict, both guilty and not guilty, was.

Apparently worried that the 43-year-old Sanders might be released if they found him not guilty by reason of insanity, jurors acquitted him in the death of one grandparent, but found him guilty of murder in the other.

After deliberating for 45 minutes, the jury sent a note to the judge asking when Sanders might be released if they found him NGI. The judge, following the law, ordered them not to consider that issue. The strange verdict came four hours later.

The judge sentenced Sanders to life in prison, noting that if he was ever paroled he would then be committed to the state hospital as NGI. The verdict and sentence will be appealed, Sanders' attorney said.

Psychologist John McCoy of Memphis, who treated Sanders in 1983 and who testified for the defense that Sanders was not malingering, reported on the case for the National Psychologist. His article, along with contact information for him, is here.

Sex offender news roundup

Florida sex offenders may possess porn

Florida sex offenders on probation can possess pornography so long as it does not relate to their ''particular deviant behavior pattern,'' the state's Supreme Court has ruled.

The case involved Donald Kasischke, a 61-year-old Miami man with a doctoral degree in gerontology. He was on probation following a year in prison in the sexual molestation of a 15-year-old boy. Probation officers had searched his home and found pornographic photos of young males having sex, but it could not be determined that any were underage.

The ruling involved a condition of Kasischke's release stating that:

"Unless otherwise indicated in the treatment plan provided by the sexual offender treatment program, a prohibition on viewing, accessing, owning or possessing any obscene, pornographic or sexually stimulating visual or auditory material, including telephone, electronic media, computer programs or computer services that are relevant to the offender's deviant behavior pattern.''

The Miami Herald story is here.

Part of national registry ruled unconstitutional

The law making it a federal crime for a sex offender to travel to another state and fail to re-register in that jurisdiction is unconstitional, a federal judge in Montana has ruled. The Montana Attorney General will now appeal the ruling to the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

The case involved 58-year-old Bernard Waybright, who was convicted of a misdemeanor sex crime in West Virginia. Waybright traveled to Montana several times without registering there, a violating of the federal Sexual Offender Registration and Notification Act.

The complete ruling in US v. Waybright is here. The news report in the (Montana) Missoulian is here. Analysis and news roundup of the case is here.

Coming soon: Instant sex offender alerts

Want to find out when a sex offender moves into your neighborhood. In Washington, a new system will allow you to get instant "real-time updates" and email alerts. Whoopee!

(Too bad that 90 percent of people arrested for sex offenses do not have a prior record. But these laws presumably make people feel safer.)

It's all part of the Sex Offender Sentencing, Monitoring, Apprehending, Registering, and Tracking (SMART) program, established by the U.S. Department of Justice under the Adam Walsh Child Protection and Safety Act of 2006. SMART has just issued its final guidelines for implementation, available online here.

Under the new guidelines, all 50 states, plus the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, and Guam, are required to establish online sex offender databases that are easily searchable by name, zip code, and geographical radius. All states and U.S. territories must also participate in a similar one-stop-shopping federal database, the National Sex Offender Public Website (NSOPW).

Jurisdictions are also "permitted and encouraged" to provide public access to sex offenders' email addresses, by allowing members of the public to query whether a specific email address belongs to a sex offender.

All adult sex offenders and some juveniles as young as 14 are included in the national and state databases. (See this fact sheet for more information on juvenile registration requirements.) Registration is for life for offenders designed as “Tier III,” and for minimum periods of 15 to 25 years for Tier I and II offenders, respectively.

The FBI, which maintains the National Sex Offender Registry (NSOR) database, may freely share registrants' information with "other appropriate databases."

Two new journals

Just what we all need – more journals!

Psychological Injury and Law

The first issue of Psychological Injury and Law has hit the news stands.

Well, not exactly. But it's hit the web, and articles in the premiere issue are available for free downloads without a subscription.

The journal bills itself as "a multidisciplinary forum for the dissemination of research articles and scholarly exchanges about issues pertaining to the interface of psychology and law in the area of trauma, injury, and their psychological impact."

Spearheading the new journal - and an associated new organization, the Association for Scientific Advancement in Psychological Injury and Law - is Gerald Young, a psychology professor at York University in Ontario and co-author of the text, Causality of Psychological Injury: Presenting Evidence in Court and similar texts.

Young and colleagues hope to promote research, guide the application of that research in forensic cases, and improve cross-disciplinary communication.

Topics of focus will include PTSD, chronic pain, traumatic brain injury, and malingering.

Articles in the first issue, available here for free download, include:

• Expert Testimony on Psychological Injury: Procedural and Evidentiary Issues

• Forensic Psychology, Psychological Injuries and the Law

• Psychological Injury and Law: Assumptions and Foundations, Controversies and Myths, Needed Directions

• Posttraumatic Stress Disorder: Current Concepts and Controversies

That final article, by Steven Taylor and Gordon Asmundson, provides a concise summary of PTSD research, with a focus on malingering in the forensic context.

Happy downloading!

The Jury Expert

Also new online is the American Society of Trial Consultants' The Jury Expert. Now in its second issue, the e-journal "features articles by academics, researchers, popular writers and speakers, and trial consultants. The focus is on practical tips for litigators and
on the accurate interpretation and translation of social sciences
theory into litigation practice."

The current issue includes articles on case themes, witness preparation, an overview of eyewitness research, tips for using RSS feeds, a new form of forensic animation, and the use of religion research in legal cases.

The Jury Expert will publish six times per year and - best of all - subscriptions are free.

Check it out here.

The evidence does not lie – or does it?

Will exposes signal end to blind reliance on "science"?

CSI trumpets the notion that evidence does not lie.

But critical news stories may be signaling the end of uncritical evidence of this dubious tenet.

Take this introduction to a 2007 Denver Post series, “Trashing the Truth”:

Virtually every night on prime time, TV detectives pluck tiny samples of DNA from clothes, carpets, and even car tires, test it and nail the bad guy, all in one episode. But in real life, DNA samples … get mishandled with impunity…. Law enforcers have won passage of laws letting them off the hook for perjuring evidence on which people's lives and liberties hinge. The result: Killers walk…. These are the stories you won’t see on CSI. In cases around the country, the truth is being trashed.

As the Post series meticulously documents, contrary to the portrayals on fictional crime dramas and by expert witnesses for the prosecution, evidence rooms are characterized by "darkness and disorder" and the accidental and intentional destruction of tens of thousands of potentially important DNA samples.

Forbes magazine recently echoed the alarm, in an opinion piece "What's wrong with CSI: Forensic evidence doesn’t always tell the truth" by Roger Koppl, an economics professor and director of the Institute for Forensic Science Administration:

Forensic evidence is foolproof, right? It's how those clever cops on CSI always catch the killer. DNA evidence springs innocent men from prison. Fingerprints nab the bad guys.

If only forensics were that reliable. Instead, to judge by the most comprehensive study on the reliability of forensic evidence to date, the error rate is more than 10% in five categories of analysis, including fiber, paint and body fluids. (Meaning: When the expert says specimen X matches source Y, there's a 10% probability he's wrong.)

Even Government Technology, hardly a muckracking journal, is calling for reform. GT's July 9 story, "Police Crime Labs Struggle with Funding, Training and Bias Issues," focuses on the Houston crime lab, where an investigation found "hundreds of cases where incompetence, inadequate training and resources, lack of guidance and even intentional bias on the part of a crime lab - which is not independent from the HPD - contributed to mistakes."

The problems "may be inherent in crime labs across the country," the GT article concludes, citing reports of DNA testing errors nationwide - in Washington, North Carolina, California, Minnesota, Pennsylvania and Nevada.

Problems obvious

When a TV station in Houston looked into that city's crime lab operations back in 2002, the problems were obvious to an independent forensic expert:

"They weren't running proper scientific controls. They were giving misleading testimony. They were computing their statistics incorrectly - in a way that was biased against the accused in many cases,” said forensic expert William Thompson of UC Irvine.

Errors favor prosecution

Most troublingly, the errors are not random - they almost invariably favor the prosecution. Thompson identified a "team culture" mentality in the crime lab, a mentality that may lead technicians to bend the evidence against defendants in court.

Journalist Scott Henson at Grits for Breakfast has been keeping up with this issue for several years, publicizing not only DNA evidence scandals but also problems with other supposedly neutral scientific technologies in the criminal justice system. These include false-positive breathalyzer tests for drunk drivers and urinalyses that routinely send probationers and parolees back to jail.

Indeed, Henson says it was the 25% rate of false positives in breathalyzer tests that first turned his attention toward "the reality that accuracy appears optional in many forensic science endeavors, with error rates of 10% or more routinely accepted in a variety of forensic fields."

What’s the solution?

Most outsiders agree that a first step toward improving the abysmal state of scientific evidence collection and analysis is outside oversight.

Beyond that, Roger Koppl, the economics professor writing for Forbes, has some other interesting ideas, primary among them opening the labs to free market forces:

The core problem with the forensic system is monopoly. Once evidence goes to one lab, it is rarely examined by any other. That needs to change. Each jurisdiction should include several competing labs. Occasionally the same DNA evidence, for instance, could be sent to three different labs for analysis.

This procedure may seem like a waste. But such checks would save taxpayer money. Extra tests are inexpensive compared to the cost of error, including the cost of incarcerating the wrongfully convicted. A forthcoming study I wrote for the Independent Institute (a government-reform think tank) shows that independent triplicate fingerprint examinations in felony cases would not only eliminate most false convictions that result from fingerprint errors but also would reduce the cost of criminal justice if the false-positive error rate is more than 0.115%, or about one in a thousand.

Other reforms suggested by Koppl and others include making crime labs independent of law enforcement, requiring blind testing, and giving the defense the right to its own forensic experts:

When crime labs are part of the police department, some forensic experts make mistakes out of an unconscious desire to help their "clients," the police and prosecution. Independence and blind testing prevent that. Creating the right to a forensic expert for the defense would help restore the imbalance in scientific firepower that too often exists between prosecution and defense.

The Denver Post series, Trashing the Truth, includes the following segments:

1. Bad faith difficult to prove: Through carelessness or by design, tiny biological samples holding crucial DNA fingerprints often disappear on authorities' watch. Innocent people languish in prison, and criminals walk free.
2. Room for error in evidence vaults: In some evidence rooms, chaos and disorganization make searches futile. Others are purged of valuable DNA samples, leaving cases unsolvable.
3. Missing rape kits foil justice: Rape kits routinely vanish, unfuriating victims and prosecutors alike. Even when evidence is intact, laws can keep suspects like William Harold Johnson walking free in our midst.
4. 14 years later - Tell my story: Floyd Brown has an IQ in the 50s. Its authenticity in doubt, his confession to a 1993 murder has him locked up indefinitely in a North Carolina mental hospital. A bloodstained stick that could settle his innocence or guilt has vanished.