psyc 162 final

Arrest

• Miranda Rights

• Attorney appointed

Arraignment

• Before a judge within 48 hours

• Charges / bail set

Preliminary Hearing/ Grand Jury

inquiry to see if there is sufficient evidence

Pretrial Hearings/ Plea Bargaining

• What evidence will the jury hear?

• Judge wants to know everything that you are going to show the jury and they decide what you get to present 

• Eyewitness will confidently ID the suspect, but there are many problems in it that taints the process

Plea Bargaining

• relevant to the majority of cases, cases almost never make it to trial

  • 1 yr 

  • Mostly 2-3 years waiting

Criminal Trial

• Prosecution

• Defense

• Jury verdict

Inadequate Defense

• Many of our clients were represented by lawyers who provided an inadequate defense 

• Large majority in the justice in the justice system are not rich and cannot afford to hire an attorney

more than 90% of felony cases in state and federal courts

 are disposed of through plea bargaining (no jury trial)

plea bargaining

• Largely unregulated, hidden from public view, and not recorded

Right to a trial, to confront and cross-examine accusers, and right to present evidence in one’s defense is forfeited

Standard guilty plea

defendant simply pleads guilty

Nolo contendere

defendant accepts punishment but no admission of guilt

Alford plea

defendant pleads guilty while declaring innocence

• Plead guilty while declaring innocence

  • No civil lawsuit because there’s no assets

  • If you can be paroled the parole board wants to hear you accept responsibility for your crime that you committed in order to agree to let you go.

1976-2002

state felony trial jury rates declined considerably

prosecutors would only go after the people the know they could win against in court

Fewer defendants would be coerced into taking guilty pleas to lessen or avoid jail time

Plea hearings in actual practice have…

huge power imbalances & super consequential decisions under high uncertainty

Felony defendants who accepted pleas in New York

about 23% claimed to be completely innocent

plea bargaining, wrongful conviction

about 11% involved a false plea of guilt

Civil Commitment of Sexual Offenders (“Sexually Violent Predators”)

• Mandated treatment in a facility still not free, like a prison but for treatment 

• Legal mechanism to confine and treat sexually violent offenders in a secure treatment facility after completing a prison sentence 

• Court determines that the to-be-released offender is likely to engage in future acts of sexual violence

SVP criteria

• Offender must suffer mental abnormality or  personality disorder

  • Predisposition to committing future acts of sexual violence 

• 20 states allow for involuntary commitment laws 

• 1-5% sexual offenders being released from prison will be civilly committed 

  • Most are not

Leroy Hendricks: first to be held under the Sexually Violent Predator (SVP) law

Stats suggest not many people get out once they have been committed

Pros of civil commitment

• Safeguard for the community by incapacitating high risk subgroup of sex offenders

  • Protects the community - humanitarian idea 

• Individuals get treatment interventions

Cons of civil commitment laws

• Double jeopardy (trying/ punishing someone for the same crime twice)

• Slippery slope

  • seems like you should commit people for what they have done not what they might do in the future

Kansas v. Hendricks (1997 Supreme Court decision)

• Civil commitment laws don’t violate “double jeopardy”

• Civil commitment laws impose civil (non-punitive) consequences rather than criminal

  • Double jeopardy applies to criminal punishment

The need for sexual predator laws fill is for…

• Anyone who is deemed mentally ill and dangerous to self or others 

• Can be placed indefinitely in a mental institution 

  • For people found not guilty by reason of insanity, 

  • not competent to stand trial and not restorable, 

  • someone treated at an acute psychiatric unit 

SVP Sexual violent predators can go in this category because they have mental abnormality or personality disorder

• Not the classic mental illness

• Examples:

  • Schizophrenia

  • Psychotic depression

• Patients with these diagnoses can be a danger to themselves/ others & civilly committed

SVP Sexual violent predators that might not fall into the category of “mental illness” - in the manual but not traditionally what you would think of (mental abnormality)

• Pedophilia

• Antisocial personality disorder

Pedophilia -DSM-5 Diagnostic Criteria

• Individual experiences intense sexually arousing fantasies or urges:

  • Prepubescent children (for a period longer than 6 months)

  • Acted on sexual urges or been caused serious distress

  • At least 16 years of age

  • & 5 years older than victim

    • Not including late adolescence in sexual relationship with 12/13 year old

• Not hearing voices or having bizarre thoughts

Antisocial Personality Disorder - DSM-5 Diagnostic Criteria

• Pervasive pattern of violation of rights of others since 15 years old (having 3 out of 7 of the criteria)

  • Failure to obey laws and norms

  • Lying, deception, and manipulation

  • Lack of remorse for actions (and so on)

• 18 years od

• Conduct disorder with onset before 15 years

  • Aggression towards people and animals

  • Destruction of property

  • Deceitfulness int heft

• Don’t care about other or the law

• Can be civilly committed in ~26 states

• Better for these individuals to go to prison instead of treatment

  • If they got hospitalized they would be institutionalized for life

Free Will

• Legal system assumes criminals act freely (evil) unless proven otherwise (insanity)

• Do we have free will?

  • Behavior is determined by genetics and environment

    • No control over those factors

  • No free will = should prisons exist?

Incapacitation through containment

Can’t commit a crime in society if you are in prison

Deterrence

• Others will be less likely to commit a crime because they are aware of the consequences

• More cameras & police on the streets has a stronger deterrent effect than rising the jail time

  • Increasing length of prison sentences → diminishing return in deterring crime

  • “Certainty principle”

    • Certainty of being caught → more effective at deterring crime

    • Increase in police presence → certainty principle →deterrence

      • More hits and false alarm rates

      • Crime will go down, but hits and false alarms will go up

Death Penalty

• Deterrence theory posits that potential murders will be restrained by possibility of execution

• Counterargument:

  • Murderers don’t think rationally

    • Usually under the influence

    • Don’t think they’ll be caught/ executed

• Conclusion:

  • Inconclusive = not sure

  • “Capital punishment decreases or increase the homicide rate by a specific amount or has no effect on the homicide rate should not influence policy judgment” 

  • Too many variables could be explaining the results

  • Any way the analysis is performed, too many decisions influence results

Retribution

punishment

Rehabilitation

Not met with huge amount of success

Unstructured clinical judgment

• Lots of training, lots of experience evaluates the guy on the potential to hurt others 

• for a while wanted something better but there’s nothing better

Actuarial techniques

• Statistical use of risk factors

  • Using age to predict risk

• People in their 20s, early 30s are more likely to commit crime than those in their later ages

Guided professional judgement instruments

• Combines clinical & actuarial predictors

• Psychiatrists + knowledge of stat predictors to make recommendations for the judge to make the judgement call

Predicting Future Offenses: Age Distribution of Sexual Recidivism in Sexual offenders

% chance offenders will reoffend as they increase in age

STATIC-99

• 10 item actuarial assessment used with adult male sexual offenders at least 18 years old at the time of release

• Used because it works: U.S., Canada, United Kingdom, Australia, & European nations

• Estimate of future risk based on number of risk factors in an individual

  • The more risk factors you have, the more likely you are to do it again

  • Knowledge wanted before a judge will civilly commit someone

Civil Commitment of the Mentally Ill (not a SVP with a “mental abnormality”)

• Maybe an individual became mentally ill during a prison sentence

• A treatment facility cannot keep someone there indefinitely against their will (medical insurance will only pay for so many days)

• Patient deemed risk for committing violent offense → need to assess them

Classification of Violence Risk (COVR)

• Interactive software program designed to estimate risk that a person hospitalized for mental disorder will be violent to others

• Chart review & brief interview with patient → generated report of statistical useful violence risk estimate 1% to 76% likelihood 

• How you talk about risk matter - COVR Default Categories

Examples of a specific hospital policy that might be in effect

• Category 1: discharge without further evaluation

  • Don’t have to bother the court 

  • It is hospital policy 

• Category 2: discharge if a routine evaluation is negative for violence risk

• Category 3: Do no discharge now, re-evaluate in 72 hours

• Category 4: Do not discharge without a full evaluation by Dr. Smith (clinical judgement)

• Category 5: Consider warning potential victim and/ or petitioning the court for some sort of civil commitment

  • No court involvement until category 5

Treatments to Reduce Risk of Violence

• Assist in life domains

  • Some people might be right on the street after release, try to get them a job so life isn’t as stressful

• Improve social skills

  • Eye contact etc

• Communicate with legal officials

  • Keep an eye on them if they can

Only 18% of countries in the world have an active death penalty

Most are abolished or not very used

Ethic issues in Competency for Execution (CFE)

• Have to be competent to confess, engage in a plea bargain, in a trial, and to be executed

• It is unconstitutional to execute mentally incompetent inmate sentenced to death

• Condemned prisoner must have rational understanding of execution reason

  • Like why are they being executed

• Prisoner’s ability to rationally understand connection between their crime and approaching execution

  • If they are so mentally impaired they can’t understand that, then they cannot be executed