Introduction to Behavioral Science and Criminal Investigative Analysis

Blood Spatter Analysis Lab and Class Announcements

  • Lab Volunteer Recruitment:

    • Volunteers are required for a marketing blood spatter analysis lab conducted for the University of Akron.
    • The session is scheduled to take place immediately following class on Thursday downstairs in Room 167 (Polsky Building).
    • Participants will participate in hands-on activities, including dropping synthetic blood using droppers, measuring stain stature, and mapping blood spatter using trigonometry and crime scene investigation (CSI) methodology.
    • Media personnel will take photographs during the session for university promotional and marketing materials.

  • Participant Requirements and Logistics:

    • Duration: The session will take approximately 45 minutes to 1 hour.
    • Attire: Volunteers should wear University of Akron sweatshirts (or T-shirts), as cold weather is expected.
    • Clothing Warning: Participants should avoid wearing expensive or favored clothing. Although synthetic blood is used and generally washes out, complete stain removal is not guaranteed.
    • Academic Value: Serving as a volunteer provides a preview and hands-on exposure for students planning to take Basic Forensic Investigation in upcoming semesters.

Introduction to Behavioral Science in Forensic Investigation

  • Interdisciplinary Nature of Investigation:

    • Forensic investigation relies heavily on natural sciences, but behavioral science plays a critical role in solving crimes and understanding offender motivations.
    • Behavioral science involves applying social and behavioral sciences to assist victims, locate perpetrators, and solve complex investigative problems.

  • Media Portrayals vs. Professional Realities:

    • The Silence of the Lambs: Featured fictional characters such as Dr. Hannibal Lecter ("Hannibal the Cannibal") and FBI Agent Trainee Clarice Starling (played by Jodie Foster). FBI Agent Jack Crawford was directly patterned after an actual colleague in the field.
    • Six Degrees of Separation: Popularized through "Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon," illustrating how interconnected real-world forensic professionals are to fictionalized cases.
    • Television Influence: Shows such as Profiler (popular during the 1990s and 2000s) and Criminal Minds highlighted the FBI's Behavioral Science Unit (now the Investigative Support Unit) and emphasized the role of crime analysts (e.g., the fictional analyst Garcia).

  • Academic Confusion and Student Interest:

    • Approximately three-quarters (75%75\%) of prospective criminal justice students express an initial desire to become forensic psychologists.
    • Significant public and administrative confusion exists among distinct fields: Criminology, Criminal Justice, Forensic Psychology, Criminal Investigative Analysis ( profiling), and Crime Analysis.
    • Marketing departments frequently misrepresent crime analysis degree programs by pairing them with imagery of fingerprints or natural science equipment.

Forensic Psychology and Psychiatry Overview

  • Psychology vs. Psychiatry Education and Credentials:

    • Forensic Psychologist:
      • Requires a Doctoral Degree (PhD), typically in Clinical Psychology (or alternatively Social Psychology).
      • Academic Path: Major in Psychology, Minor in Criminal Justice (or Forensic Psychology), complete a PhD program in Clinical Psychology, finish residency/internship requirements.
      • Licensing: Requires completing a post-doctoral apprenticeship program under a licensed, experienced forensic psychologist, logging required clinical field hours, and passing a formal licensing examination.
    • Forensic Psychiatrist:
      • Requires a Doctor of Medicine (MD) or Doctor of Osteopathic Medicine (DO).
      • Medical Path: Complete medical school followed by a residency specializing in psychiatry and fellowship in forensic psychiatry.
      • Authority: Medical doctors hold unconditional statutory authority to prescribe medications and order medical diagnostic tests.

  • Core Responsibilities in the Legal System:

    • Competency Determinations:
      • Assessing whether a criminal defendant possesses the mental capacity to understand court proceedings, comprehend their constitutional rights (e.g., waiving Miranda rights or the right to trial), and assist in their own defense.
      • Legal Rationale: Trying or sentencing an incompetent individual results in immediate constitutional appeal and process invalidation.
      • Competency to be Executed: An individual cannot be executed under capital punishment unless they understand that they are being executed and why. In a notable Ohio capital murder case, a defendant with developmental disabilities placed his last-meal dessert aside to "eat later," demonstrating a complete lack of capacity regarding his execution.
    • Sanity Evaluations:
      • Determining legal sanity at the time of the offense. Sanity is strictly a legal term, not a medical or psychiatric diagnosis.
    • Psychological Autopsies:
      • Conducting retrospective behavioral evaluations following major traumatic events (such as active shooter incidents or terrorist acts) to identify risk factors, warning signs, and absent protective factors.
      • Examples: Studying school shooters such as Dylan Fiebel and Aaron Harris to construct threat assessment models for future prevention.

Uncovering Deceptive Behavior and Psychological Evaluations

  • Human Fallibility and Profiling Errors:

    • People default to assuming positive motivations in others, leading to failures in personal profiling and situational awareness.
    • Case Example (Larry Nassar): The US Olympic gymnastics team physician engaged in long-term sexual abuse under the guise of legitimate medical examinations, often while parents were present in the room because adults defaulted to trusting his medical authority.
    • Case Example (Amanda Knox): Wrongfully convicted in part because authorities misinterpreted her immature, stressed, and unusual behavior (doing somersaults at the police station) as a indicator of guilt and disrespect.

  • Specific Deceptive Behaviors:

    • Malingering (Simulation):
      • The conscious, deliberate attempt to feign or exaggerate mental disease or defect to avoid criminal prosecution, trial, or punishment.
      • Example: An organized crime figure walking publicly in a bathrobe with nothing underneath to establish a false history of psychosis in preparation for future indictment defenses.
    • Dissimulation (Defeigning / Minimization):
      • The conscious attempt to minimize or conceal active mental disorder symptoms to secure release from custody, mental health facilities, or legal supervision.
      • Presents a significant challenge for clinical practitioners, as offenders actively manipulate evaluations to appear rehabilitated while remaining dangerous.

Mental Health, Culpability, and Deinstitutionalization

  • Defining Mental Illness:

    • Clinical mental illness (defined in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) involves the inability or impaired capacity to carry out routine life functions and obligations.
    • The vast majority of individuals suffering from severe mental illness are non-violent and are statistically far more likely to be victims of crime rather than perpetrators.
    • Violent predators and serial killers generally suffer from severe personality disorders rather than classic incapacitating mental illnesses that disrupt executive planning functions.

  • Historical Trends in Mental Health and Justice:

    • 1930s: Enactment of Sexual Psychopath Laws, which mandated evaluation and psychiatric treatment for individuals convicted of sexual offenses.
    • 1980s Shift: A broad societal move away from rehabilitation and treatment toward a strictly punitive criminal justice model.
    • Deinstitutionalization: Large state asylum compounds (such as Edmond Shaw) were closed. While intended to return individuals to community-based care supported by new psychiatric medications, patients often stopped taking medications due to adverse side effects, leading to increased homelessness and psychiatric crises.

  • Sex Offender Management and Registries:

    • Sex offenders represent a unique population due to high rates of compulsive behavioral patterns and severe vulnerability to targeted violence inside general prison populations.
    • Tiered Registration: Laws establish distinct tiers based on crime severity (e.g., Tier 1 non-violent lewd conduct vs. predatory rape).
    • Constitutional Challenges: Arguments maintain that mandatory life-long public registration constitutes double jeopardy after prison sentences are served; courts have consistently upheld registration requirements to protect public safety.
    • Case Example: In an adjacent university computer lab, students searching the Suffolk County sex offender database discovered a classmate in the front row was a registered sex offender with a documented compulsive touching disorder.

Legal Standards for Insanity and Criminal Intent

  • Sanity as an Affirmative Defense:

    • An affirmative defense requires the defendant to admit to committing the physical act (actus reus) while arguing that lack of criminal intent (mens rea) excuses legal culpability due to severe mental defect.

  • Evolution of the Insanity Defense:

    • M'Naghten Rule (Cognitive Test):
      • The defendant is not guilty if, at the time of the act, mental disease caused them not to know the nature and quality of their action, or not to know that what they were doing was wrong.
    • Irresistible Impulse Standard:
      • Addresses situations where the defendant understood the wrongfulness of the act but suffered from a complete loss of volitional control.
      • Case Example (Charles Whitman): The 1960s UT Austin tower shooter was revealed during autopsy to have a malignant brain tumor pressing directly against the amygdala/aggression centers of his brain.
    • Durham Rule and Brawner Standard:
      • Focuses on whether the defendant lacked substantial capacity to appreciate the criminality of their conduct or conform their conduct to the law (governs Ohio law).
    • Federal Insanity Defense Reform Act of 1984 (Omnibus Crime Control):
      • Enacted following the 1981 assassination attempt on President Ronald Reagan by John Hinckley Jr. (who was attempting to impress actress Jodie Foster, injuring Press Secretary James Brady).
      • Shifted the burden of proof entirely to the defense, requiring proof of insanity by a preponderance of the evidence.

  • Alternative Verdicts and Mental States:

    • Guilty But Mentally Ill (GBMI):
      • The defendant is held criminally responsible and sentenced to prison, but is designated to serve the sentence inside a correctional mental health facility or psychiatric wing.
    • Diminished Capacity and Levels of Criminal Intent:
      • Purposeful Intent: Highest level of intent; fully premeditated and planned conduct (e.g., First-Degree Murder).
      • Knowing Intent: Awareness that conduct will cause a specific result, often committed under sudden passion without prior planning (e.g., Voluntary Manslaughter triggered by walking in on spousal infidelity).
      • Reckless Intent: Conscious disregard of a substantial and unjustifiable risk (e.g., Involuntary Manslaughter or Vehicular Homicide caused by distracted driving while eating, drinking, applying lotion, and looking in the mirror).
      • Negligent Intent: Failure to perceive a substantial risk where a reasonable person would (e.g., leaving loaded firearms accessible on walls in a house with visiting children).

Equivocal Death Investigations and Crime Scene Staging

  • Equivocal Death Investigations:

    • Conducted by Medical Examiners, Coroners, and Forensic Behavioral Scientists when the mode or manner of death (Homicide, Suicide, Accident, or Natural) is unclear.
    • Evaluates physical evidence alongside psychological autopsies to determine suicidal ideation vs. accidental death.

  • Complex Equivocal Death Examples:

    • Autoerotic Asphyxiation: Accidental deaths resulting from oxygen deprivation during solitary sexual activity, frequently misidentified as suicides.
    • Fantasy-Driven Accidental Death: An adult male bound himself in lingerie, high heels, and rear handcuffs to await his neighbor's departure for a rescue fantasy; he tripped, suffered facial trauma, and drowned in his own blood.
    • Medical/Seizure Accidental Death: An epileptic individual suffered a non-lucid seizure, broke sharp shelving inside a refrigerator, attempted while disoriented to vacuum up blood and food with a vacuum cleaner, and expired in the living room.

  • Crime Scene Staging:

    • The deliberate manipulation of physical evidence at a crime scene prior to police arrival, intended to redirect investigation (e.g., staging a homicide to look like a suicide or burglary).
    • Investigators analyze physical and behavioral consistency across the scene to detect staging.

Criminal Investigative Analysis: MO, Signature, and Linkage Analysis

  • Shift in Terminology:

    • The historical term Criminal Profiling has been formally replaced by Criminal Investigative Analysis (CIA) to distinguish investigative behavioral science from prohibited racial profiling.

  • Linkage Analysis and ViCAP:

    • Linkage Analysis: The statistical and behavioral process of determining whether two or more separate criminal acts were committed by the same offender.
    • ViCAP (Violent Criminal Apprehension Program): A nationwide FBI database facilitating multi-jurisdictional data sharing to link serial violent crimes across state and municipal borders.

  • Modus Operandi (MO) vs. Signature:

    • Modus Operandi (MO):
      • The functional methods used by an offender to commit the crime, prevent detection, and facilitate escape.
      • Fluid Nature: MO is dynamic and evolves as the offender gains experience, learns from mistakes, or acquires better tools/information.
    • Signature:
      • Behaviors committed at a crime scene that are completely unnecessary to completing the offense, serving solely to satisfy the psychological needs or fantasy patterns of the offender.
      • Static Nature: Signatures remain constant across offenses.
      • Examples: Posing a corpse, taking specific souvenirs (jewelry, body parts, driver's licenses), or defecating at the crime scene.
      • Investigative Value: Signatures are withheld from public media to validate genuine offender confessions and prevent copycat acts.

Victimology and the Crime Triangle

  • Victimology Analysis:

    • Examines the victim's lifestyle, daily routines, risk factors, and vulnerability parameters to understand why a specific target was selected at a given time and location.

  • Hard vs. Soft Target Selection:

    • Offenders favor "soft targets" displaying low situational awareness (e.g., individuals distracted by mobile devices, unlit residences with overgrown landscaping, lack of guardianship).
    • Offenders avoid "hard targets" (e.g., confident individuals displaying active situational awareness, well-lit houses with visible security systems and aggressive dogs).

  • The Crime Triangle Framework:

    • A crime requires three simultaneous elements intersecting in time and space:
      1. Motivated Offender
      2. Suitable Victim / Target
      3. Absence of Capable Guardianship
    • Removing any single vertex prevents the commission of a crime.

Behavioral Geography and Journey to Crime

  • Awareness Space and Routine Activity Theory:

    • Human beings are creatures of habit who navigate known geographic corridors connecting home, school, workplace, and recreational areas.
    • Offenders commit crimes primarily within or immediately adjacent to their existing geographic awareness space.

  • Buffer Zone and Journey to Crime:

    • Buffer Zone: A spatial area surrounding an offender's residence where they refrain from committing crimes to prevent local recognition and identification.
    • Journey to Crime: The distance traveled outside the buffer zone into familiar awareness spaces to select targets.

  • Geographic Profiling Integration:

    • Investigators overlay the Target Backlog (known spatial distributions of vulnerable target populations, such as college housing corridors) with a suspect's Activity Space (workplace, gym, residential routes).
    • This spatial intersection narrows unknown suspect pools and optimizes police surveillance deployments.