It seems that public entities, from schools to police forces, have a bad habit of firing employees who complain that murderers and child molesters are being protected or treated gingerly.
Here's a story of a school district that forced out a teacher who reported a child molester.
The final paragraph of the story below discusses an LAPD detective who was fired for revealing that a witness and her family had not been adequately protected.
After years of lying, ex-honors student admits her role in murder
Keeairra Dashiell is sentenced to life in prison for driving her then-boyfriend to the home of a crime witness, where he shot Pamela Lark, the witness' mother.
By Joel Rubin
Los Angeles Times
April 4, 2013
When Keeairra Dashiell graduated with honors from Crenshaw High School seven years ago, she seemed headed for success. Offered admission into several top colleges, she accepted a scholarship to UC San Diego, leaving behind the often rough, inner-city world of South Los Angeles.
But on Thursday, Dashiell's talent and promise were a distant, squandered memory as the 24-year-old sat handcuffed in a downtown Los Angeles courtroom. After years of lying, she fully confessed to her role in a 2007 murder and, in a deal with prosecutors, pleaded guilty to second-degree murder and attempted robbery. Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Michael Pastor sentenced Dashiell to life in prison with the possibility of parole after 19 years.
After handing down the sentence, Pastor spoke to Dashiell at length as she sat quietly next to her attorney with her head bowed. "You made horrific decisions and caused incalculable pain and suffering to others," Pastor said in a somber tone. "You're not entitled to pity."
PHOTOS: Aftermath of a holdup
Dashiell confessed to having a hand in the Jan. 3, 2007, murder of Pamela Lark, who was shot to death by Dashiell's then-boyfriend, Tyquan Knox. Dashiell admitted to driving Knox to the Mid-City block where Lark lived with her teenage daughter Khristina Henry and, with several members of her family and Lark's listening in the courtroom, said she knew Knox was armed with a gun and that he planned to kill Henry. Dashiell waited for Knox and drove him away when he returned.
Months earlier, Knox, a one-time football star at Crenshaw High School, had robbed Henry and her boyfriend at gunpoint. Lark insisted that Henry report it to police, telling her that it was her duty to do so.
Over the next few months, Knox's mother and other acquaintances contacted Lark and Henry in an effort to dissuade the teenager from testifying at Knox's approaching trial. "You better watch your back," Henry remembered being told by a mutual acquaintance. "It's best that you guys not go to court."
Knox, who had ruined his best chance at earning a football scholarship when he was kicked off Crenshaw's team for hitting a girl, still harbored hopes of catching the eye of scouts. He feared that a conviction would ruin any chance of being recruited by a college, the prosecution contended at his murder trial.
Despite the threats against her, Henry still planned on taking the stand at Knox's preliminary hearing. Four days before the hearing, Knox strode up to Lark as she, a niece and two young grandchildren stood near her car. He demanded her purse and then opened fire without taking anything.
Dashiell said on Thursday that she and Knox went to the apartment before dawn with a plan to kill Henry, not Lark. The pair apparently did not see Henry when she emerged from the apartment in the morning and drove off to attend class at a nearby community college. It remains unknown why Knox targeted Lark. After two attempts at prosecuting Knox ended in mistrials when the juries could not reach verdicts, Knox was convicted of murder at a third trial in 2011 and sentenced to life in prison without parole.
In the first two trials, Danette Meyers, the assistant district attorney who prosecuted the cases, struck a deal with Dashiell: In exchange for her testimony against Knox, Dashiell would serve only seven years in prison. Dashiell, however, proved to be a reluctant and unconvincing witness, often contradicting herself and getting caught in lies. Meyers rescinded the offer and, until Thursday's agreement, had vowed to prosecute Dashiell on murder charges.
With more than six years having passed since the murder, Thursday's hearing brought an end to countless hours Lark's family has spent in courtrooms having to relive the horror of the killing. "I'm just happy it's finally over," Henry said after the hearing.
Lark's murder and its fallout was the subject of a two-part series in The Times.
In his comments, Pastor, a veteran judge who heard each of Knox's trials as well, said that of the thousands of cases he's handled as a judge and previously as a prosecutor, none "impacted me as much as this case." The strain was so great, Pastor said, it pushed him to request a transfer so he wouldn't have to hear such cases anymore.
"I couldn't handle it anymore because I saw the terrible pain this case has caused all of you," he said to the members of both Lark's and Dashiell's families. Pastor offered kind words to Dashiell's parents, saying they appeared to be good people. "Mrs. Dashiell asked where she went wrong. She didn't go wrong," he said. "Keeairra Dashiell did this herself."
After Dashiell had been led away, members of her family approached Henry and other relatives of Lark. Forming a line, they each tearfully embraced Henry and the others, whispering apologies.
Taking in the emotional scene was Michael Slider, Henry's uncle and a detective in the Los Angeles Police Department. Slider was fired by the department in 2010 for leaking confidential information about the case after he became convinced that his fellow LAPD detectives had not done enough to protect Henry and Lark from Knox. After an appeals court threw out one of the department's allegations against Slider and sent the case back to the LAPD for reconsideration, police officials relented and reinstated Slider.
Showing posts with label psychopaths. Show all posts
Showing posts with label psychopaths. Show all posts
Friday, April 05, 2013
Friday, August 17, 2012
Why judges hand down shorter sentences to convicted psychopaths when their behavior is blamed on the brain
I'm afraid these judges aren't thinking through the actual effect on behavior of being a psychopath. Being a psychopath only means that a person doesn't have empathy.
These judges and prosecutors should read The Psychopath Test by Jon Ronson. It's hilarious at the same time as being highly informative about an important phenomenon.
It doesn't make anyone WANT to do anything. That's a whole separate ball game. Certainly, most psychopaths aren't interested in murdering anyone, or having sex with children. That's a completely separate mental condition that usually experienced by people who aren't psychopaths.
Horrible things happen, however, when psychopaths WANT to do bad things. These Psychopaths can't blame their motivations on their lack of empathy. While it's true that psychopaths have one less mechanism to control their own behavior, they still have the ability to figure out that they may get caught and punished if they commit a crime. Surely that part of their brain is telling them not to commit a crime.
Also, many psychopaths have brains that are guided by moral principles, and that part of their brain is also telling them not to commit a crime. They may not feel empathy, but they know the difference between right and wrong. They simply can't truthfully say that their brain made them do it.
My Brain Made Me Do It: Psychopaths and Free Will
Why judges hand down shorter sentences to convicted psychopaths when their behavior is blamed on the brain
By MAIA SZALAVITZ
August 17, 2012
TIME
Should murderous psychopaths be punished less severely if their behavior can be blamed on brain differences or genes? Or, conversely, should their sentence be longer precisely because their biology makes them even more intractable and dangerous than other criminals?
A new study published in Science explored these questions by asking judges to impose a prison term on a hypothetical convict. When the judges were initially told that the offender was a psychopath, they tended to consider it an aggravating factor in sentencing, but when they heard additional expert testimony that biological factors could explain the guilty man’s behavior, they saw that information as mitigating and handed down a shorter sentence.
The impact of such expert testimony depended in part on whether the biological arguments came from the defense or the prosecution — it influenced judges’ reasoning more when it was delivered by the defense. But, overall, judges still levied lengthy sentences for the crime and viewed the convict as morally and legally responsible for his behavior: they reduced prison time only by a year, from 13.93 years on average to 12.83, when considering brain or genetic explanations for the convict’s behavior.
“The judges did not let the defendant off,” said lead author Lisa Aspinwall of the University of Utah in a statement. “They just reduced the sentence and showed major changes in the quality of their reasoning.” The researchers noted that they were surprised the judges reduced their sentencing at all, considering that they were dealing with psychopaths who are in general a highly unsympathetic bunch.
(MORE: Which Kids Join Gangs? A Genetic Explanation)
The hypothetical case used in the new study was loosely based on the 1994 trial of Mobley v. State. In 1991, Stephen Mobley robbed a
Stephen A. Mobley, 39, was convicted of murder and sentenced to death for fatally shooting 24-year-old John Collins in Oakwood, Ga, during a robbery of a Domino's on Feb. 17, 1991.
Domino’s pizza shop in Georgia, during the course of which he shot the restaurant’s manager to death; at trial, his attorney attempted to present evidence showing that Mobley had a variant of a gene linked to violent behavior: the MAO-A or so-called warrior gene.
Because the scientific data on MAO-A was so new at the time, however, the judge rejected its use in court and Mobley was executed in 2005. But since then, research has supported the link between the gene and violence, and studies have found that men who have the gene and are abused as children are significantly more likely to display antisocial behavior.
In the new study, researchers tweaked the hypothetical case to eliminate the murder; instead, the defendant was convicted of aggravated battery for savagely beating a fast-food restaurant manager with a gun during a robbery attempt and causing permanent brain damage. By taking murder off the table — and therefore the death penalty or a life sentence — the researchers compelled the judges to consider the future dangerousness of a criminal who could eventually be set free. Researchers presented one of four versions of the hypothetical case to 181 judges in 19 states. In all versions, judges read scientific evidence that the convicted criminal was a psychopath and what that meant, namely that psychopathy is incurable. Half of the judges also received expert testimony on the genetic and neurobiological causes of the criminal behavior, presented either by the defense as a mitigating factor, or by the prosecution, which argued that it should increase the convict’s sentence. The other judges got no mention of the idea that biological differences in the convict’s brain could have caused his behavior. Researchers controlled for the fact that different states have different sentencing laws.
The judges who were given a biological explanation for the convict’s psychopathy issued shorter sentences, but notably, all judges committed the criminal to significantly more prison time than their average nine years for aggravated battery. And while all judges viewed psychopathy as an aggravating factor in sentencing, the judges who heard evidence about the genetic and neurobiological causes of the condition from the defense reported viewing it as less aggravating. Nearly 9 in 10 judges listed at least one aggravating factor in their reasoning for their sentence, but when they heard the expert testimony from the defense, the percentage of judges who also listed mitigating factors rose from 30% to 66%. And judges who received this evidence were 2.5 times more likely than other judges to report actually having weighed aggravating versus mitigating factors in deciding their sentence.
(MORE: Understanding Psychopathic and Sadistic Minds)
The expert testimony offered in the study described how the MAO-A gene affects the amydgala, a part of the brain involved in emotion and learning. The amygdala is the seat of the so-called violence-inhibition mechanism, which is what triggers anxiety in normal people when they recognize that others are in pain or distress. People with low MAO-A activity, like the convicted psychopath, don’t experience normal brain development, however; that may explain why psychopaths are incapable of responding to the fear and pain of others with normal distress. Ultimately, the testimony argued, because of their genetic and brain-related differences, psychopaths don’t undergo functional moral development and fail to learn right from wrong.
Interestingly, however, even though the judges handed out reduced sentences when presented with this expert testimony, they did not report viewing the convict as having less free will or as being any less responsible, legally or morally, for his crime. “What this tells me is that the effect of neuroscience evidence may operate at a non-conscious level. People think it does not affect their judgment of responsibility, but in fact it does,” says Barry Schwartz, professor of psychology at Swarthmore, who has researched this issue, but was not involved in the study.
It is this basic question of responsibility that many psychologists find crucial — and that so many people misunderstand. “There is a lot of interest these days in the implications of neuroscience for justice and the legal system. Some of this interest focuses on the radical notion that neuroscience undermines the very idea of personal responsibility,” says Martha Farah, director of the Center for Neuroscience and Society at the University of Pennsylvania, who was also not associated with the new study. “The idea is that, since everything I do results from my brain, and my brain is the product of my genes and my life experiences, then how can you hold me responsible for anything? Isn’t it always true that ‘my brain made me do it?’”
Indeed, earlier studies have shown that when participants are presented with neuroscientific evidence in cases involving people who have caused harm or behaved violently, they see it as far more mitigating than psychological factors like child abuse — even though research now shows that brain differences themselves can actually be caused by such abuse and that child abuse is more strongly linked with violence than most neurobiological factors.
Schwartz and a colleague described their findings on such research in a recent New York Times op-ed:
The pattern of results was striking. A brain characteristic that was even weakly associated with violence led people to exonerate the protagonist more than a psychological factor that was strongly associated with violent acts. … In contrast, while psychologically damaging experiences like childhood abuse often elicited sympathy for the protagonist and sometimes even prompted considerable mitigation of blame, the participants still saw the protagonist’s behavior as intentional. The protagonist himself was twisted by his history of trauma; it wasn’t just his brain.
The problem here, however, is that all of our psychology and behavior has a biological cause, even if we don’t understand exactly how it works. As Schwartz put it, “’Was the cause psychological or biological?’ is the wrong question when assigning responsibility for an action. All psychological states are also biological ones.”
Schwartz called the new study “terrific,” noting in particular that hearing evidence of biological causes of behavior had a larger impact on how mitigating the judges considered the convict’s psychopathy than on the actual sentences they handed down. Among the mitigating factors that judges cited after hearing the neurobiological evidence was the idea that mental illness made the perpetrator less responsible for his behavior.
As one judge in the study explained: “The evidence that psychopaths do not have the necessary neural connections to feel empathy is significant. It makes possible an argument that psychopaths are, in a sense, morally disabled, just as other people are physically disabled.”
(MORE: Study: 1 in 25 Business Leaders May Be Psychopaths)
Consequently, as Schwartz says, “If you sentence to punish, it will reduce sentencing. But if you sentence to protect society, it may well increase sentencing, by implying that the perpetrator is incorrigible.”
“This is not the grand, metaphysical, ‘We are all helpless to override the inevitable workings of our brains’ idea that neuroscience is incompatible with moral or legal responsibility,” says Farah....
Read more: http://healthland.time.com/2012/08/17/my-brain-made-me-do-it-psychopaths-and-free-will/?xid=gonewsedit&google_editors_picks=true#ixzz23r4KWxtZ
These judges and prosecutors should read The Psychopath Test by Jon Ronson. It's hilarious at the same time as being highly informative about an important phenomenon.
It doesn't make anyone WANT to do anything. That's a whole separate ball game. Certainly, most psychopaths aren't interested in murdering anyone, or having sex with children. That's a completely separate mental condition that usually experienced by people who aren't psychopaths.
Horrible things happen, however, when psychopaths WANT to do bad things. These Psychopaths can't blame their motivations on their lack of empathy. While it's true that psychopaths have one less mechanism to control their own behavior, they still have the ability to figure out that they may get caught and punished if they commit a crime. Surely that part of their brain is telling them not to commit a crime.
Also, many psychopaths have brains that are guided by moral principles, and that part of their brain is also telling them not to commit a crime. They may not feel empathy, but they know the difference between right and wrong. They simply can't truthfully say that their brain made them do it.
My Brain Made Me Do It: Psychopaths and Free Will
Why judges hand down shorter sentences to convicted psychopaths when their behavior is blamed on the brain
By MAIA SZALAVITZ
August 17, 2012
TIME
Should murderous psychopaths be punished less severely if their behavior can be blamed on brain differences or genes? Or, conversely, should their sentence be longer precisely because their biology makes them even more intractable and dangerous than other criminals?
A new study published in Science explored these questions by asking judges to impose a prison term on a hypothetical convict. When the judges were initially told that the offender was a psychopath, they tended to consider it an aggravating factor in sentencing, but when they heard additional expert testimony that biological factors could explain the guilty man’s behavior, they saw that information as mitigating and handed down a shorter sentence.
The impact of such expert testimony depended in part on whether the biological arguments came from the defense or the prosecution — it influenced judges’ reasoning more when it was delivered by the defense. But, overall, judges still levied lengthy sentences for the crime and viewed the convict as morally and legally responsible for his behavior: they reduced prison time only by a year, from 13.93 years on average to 12.83, when considering brain or genetic explanations for the convict’s behavior.
“The judges did not let the defendant off,” said lead author Lisa Aspinwall of the University of Utah in a statement. “They just reduced the sentence and showed major changes in the quality of their reasoning.” The researchers noted that they were surprised the judges reduced their sentencing at all, considering that they were dealing with psychopaths who are in general a highly unsympathetic bunch.
(MORE: Which Kids Join Gangs? A Genetic Explanation)
The hypothetical case used in the new study was loosely based on the 1994 trial of Mobley v. State. In 1991, Stephen Mobley robbed a
Stephen A. Mobley, 39, was convicted of murder and sentenced to death for fatally shooting 24-year-old John Collins in Oakwood, Ga, during a robbery of a Domino's on Feb. 17, 1991.
Domino’s pizza shop in Georgia, during the course of which he shot the restaurant’s manager to death; at trial, his attorney attempted to present evidence showing that Mobley had a variant of a gene linked to violent behavior: the MAO-A or so-called warrior gene.
Because the scientific data on MAO-A was so new at the time, however, the judge rejected its use in court and Mobley was executed in 2005. But since then, research has supported the link between the gene and violence, and studies have found that men who have the gene and are abused as children are significantly more likely to display antisocial behavior.
In the new study, researchers tweaked the hypothetical case to eliminate the murder; instead, the defendant was convicted of aggravated battery for savagely beating a fast-food restaurant manager with a gun during a robbery attempt and causing permanent brain damage. By taking murder off the table — and therefore the death penalty or a life sentence — the researchers compelled the judges to consider the future dangerousness of a criminal who could eventually be set free. Researchers presented one of four versions of the hypothetical case to 181 judges in 19 states. In all versions, judges read scientific evidence that the convicted criminal was a psychopath and what that meant, namely that psychopathy is incurable. Half of the judges also received expert testimony on the genetic and neurobiological causes of the criminal behavior, presented either by the defense as a mitigating factor, or by the prosecution, which argued that it should increase the convict’s sentence. The other judges got no mention of the idea that biological differences in the convict’s brain could have caused his behavior. Researchers controlled for the fact that different states have different sentencing laws.
The judges who were given a biological explanation for the convict’s psychopathy issued shorter sentences, but notably, all judges committed the criminal to significantly more prison time than their average nine years for aggravated battery. And while all judges viewed psychopathy as an aggravating factor in sentencing, the judges who heard evidence about the genetic and neurobiological causes of the condition from the defense reported viewing it as less aggravating. Nearly 9 in 10 judges listed at least one aggravating factor in their reasoning for their sentence, but when they heard the expert testimony from the defense, the percentage of judges who also listed mitigating factors rose from 30% to 66%. And judges who received this evidence were 2.5 times more likely than other judges to report actually having weighed aggravating versus mitigating factors in deciding their sentence.
(MORE: Understanding Psychopathic and Sadistic Minds)
The expert testimony offered in the study described how the MAO-A gene affects the amydgala, a part of the brain involved in emotion and learning. The amygdala is the seat of the so-called violence-inhibition mechanism, which is what triggers anxiety in normal people when they recognize that others are in pain or distress. People with low MAO-A activity, like the convicted psychopath, don’t experience normal brain development, however; that may explain why psychopaths are incapable of responding to the fear and pain of others with normal distress. Ultimately, the testimony argued, because of their genetic and brain-related differences, psychopaths don’t undergo functional moral development and fail to learn right from wrong.
Interestingly, however, even though the judges handed out reduced sentences when presented with this expert testimony, they did not report viewing the convict as having less free will or as being any less responsible, legally or morally, for his crime. “What this tells me is that the effect of neuroscience evidence may operate at a non-conscious level. People think it does not affect their judgment of responsibility, but in fact it does,” says Barry Schwartz, professor of psychology at Swarthmore, who has researched this issue, but was not involved in the study.
It is this basic question of responsibility that many psychologists find crucial — and that so many people misunderstand. “There is a lot of interest these days in the implications of neuroscience for justice and the legal system. Some of this interest focuses on the radical notion that neuroscience undermines the very idea of personal responsibility,” says Martha Farah, director of the Center for Neuroscience and Society at the University of Pennsylvania, who was also not associated with the new study. “The idea is that, since everything I do results from my brain, and my brain is the product of my genes and my life experiences, then how can you hold me responsible for anything? Isn’t it always true that ‘my brain made me do it?’”
Indeed, earlier studies have shown that when participants are presented with neuroscientific evidence in cases involving people who have caused harm or behaved violently, they see it as far more mitigating than psychological factors like child abuse — even though research now shows that brain differences themselves can actually be caused by such abuse and that child abuse is more strongly linked with violence than most neurobiological factors.
Schwartz and a colleague described their findings on such research in a recent New York Times op-ed:
The pattern of results was striking. A brain characteristic that was even weakly associated with violence led people to exonerate the protagonist more than a psychological factor that was strongly associated with violent acts. … In contrast, while psychologically damaging experiences like childhood abuse often elicited sympathy for the protagonist and sometimes even prompted considerable mitigation of blame, the participants still saw the protagonist’s behavior as intentional. The protagonist himself was twisted by his history of trauma; it wasn’t just his brain.
The problem here, however, is that all of our psychology and behavior has a biological cause, even if we don’t understand exactly how it works. As Schwartz put it, “’Was the cause psychological or biological?’ is the wrong question when assigning responsibility for an action. All psychological states are also biological ones.”
Schwartz called the new study “terrific,” noting in particular that hearing evidence of biological causes of behavior had a larger impact on how mitigating the judges considered the convict’s psychopathy than on the actual sentences they handed down. Among the mitigating factors that judges cited after hearing the neurobiological evidence was the idea that mental illness made the perpetrator less responsible for his behavior.
As one judge in the study explained: “The evidence that psychopaths do not have the necessary neural connections to feel empathy is significant. It makes possible an argument that psychopaths are, in a sense, morally disabled, just as other people are physically disabled.”
(MORE: Study: 1 in 25 Business Leaders May Be Psychopaths)
Consequently, as Schwartz says, “If you sentence to punish, it will reduce sentencing. But if you sentence to protect society, it may well increase sentencing, by implying that the perpetrator is incorrigible.”
“This is not the grand, metaphysical, ‘We are all helpless to override the inevitable workings of our brains’ idea that neuroscience is incompatible with moral or legal responsibility,” says Farah....
Read more: http://healthland.time.com/2012/08/17/my-brain-made-me-do-it-psychopaths-and-free-will/?xid=gonewsedit&google_editors_picks=true#ixzz23r4KWxtZ
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