October 31, 2008

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.

October 30, 2008

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.

October 29, 2008

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.

October 28, 2008

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.

October 27, 2008

Trials of a Forensic Psychologist: A Casebook

The latest from forensic psychologist Charles Ewing

No sooner do I get done reviewing law professor Charles Ewing's book, Insanity: Murder, Madness, and the Law, than the internationally known forensic psychologist and legal scholar cranks out another one.

Ewing's latest, Trials of a Forensic Psychologist, is also his most autobiographical to date, drawing on his 30 years of experience in the trenches and in some of the nation's most high-profile cases. As such, it promises to be an engaging read as well as good fodder for course instructors.

"Many people, myself included, have written books examining high-profile controversial cases whose verdicts hinged on the testimony of forensic experts," Ewing said. "My goal in this book was to take that genre one step further. After sorting through the many trials in which I have testified throughout the United States, I selected 10 high-profile cases that were not only fascinating, but allowed me to give readers an intimate and detailed look at my work as a forensic psychologist."

I was interested to see that women are well represented among the 10 cases, which include:
  • Waneta Hoyt, who under intense pressure confessed to killing five of her children whose deaths had originally been attributed to Sudden Infant Death Syndrome.
  • Judith Neelley, a battered woman and the youngest American woman to serve time on death row, was convicted of committing the heinous murders of two women at the behest of her abusive husband.
  • Richard Knupp, charged with over 1,400 counts of sexually abusing his own children, who was first convicted and then exonerated in a second trial.
  • Shirley Kinge, whose son murdered a family during a robbery before himself being killed by police. The mother was convicted as an accomplice but was exonerated based on evidence that a prosecution expert had falsified evidence against her and many other criminal defendants.
In the process of profiling the 10 cases, Ewing discusses a variety of psycholegal issues, including Miranda rights waivers, coerced confessions, the insanity defense, malingering, the battered woman's defense, and child sexual abuse evaluations.

Ewing, a professor at the University of Buffalo Law School, has several books to his credit, including Fatal Families, Kids Who Kill, and an excellent, co-authored case-study book, "Minds on Trial."

The book's table of contents and excerpts are available here.
Photo credit: Douglas Levere

October 19, 2008

Pseudoscience in policing

The October issue of Criminal Justice and Behavior is a special issue on Pseudoscientific Policing Practices and Beliefs. There are some great articles and, best of all, Sage is offering free access to those of you without access to academic databases through the end of this month.

As those of you who have been reading my blog for a while know, criminal profiling is one of my pet peeves (See last year's post, "Of profiling, astrology, and magic.") So, my favorite article in the current issue is "The Criminal Profiling Illusion: What's Behind the Smoke and Mirrors?"

The idea that police can deduce a suspect's characteristics from the crime scene has no strong empirical support and may indeed be an illusion, say the authors, Brent Snook, Richard M. Cullen, Craig Bennell, Paul J. Taylor, and Paul Gendreau, who go on to argue that the technique should not be used as an investigative tool:
There is a belief that criminal profilers can predict a criminal's characteristics from crime scene evidence. In this article, the authors argue that this belief may be an illusion and explain how people may have been misled into believing that criminal profiling (CP) works despite no sound theoretical grounding and no strong empirical support for this possibility. Potentially responsible for this illusory belief is the information that people acquire about CP, which is heavily influenced by anecdotes, repetition of the message that profiling works, the expert profiler label, and a disproportionate emphasis on correct predictions. Also potentially responsible are aspects of information processing such as reasoning errors, creating meaning out of ambiguous information, imitating good ideas, and inferring fact from fiction. The authors conclude that CP should not be used as an investigative tool because it lacks scientific support.
There's quite a lineup of scholarly experts behind the other articles in the special issue, too:
Check it all out here.
Photo credit: Troy & Patrice