Category: crime

“I’ll be riding a pale horse”: Louisiana sheriff addresses those who vandalized a church

September 6, 2015 • 9:45 am

Reader Aneris sent this video, which you really should watch because it’s unbelievable—even for those familiar with the American Deep South. This is what passes for crime prevention in St. Landry Parish, Louisiana. NOTE: as far as I can see, this is NOT a joke.

Aneris’s note:

You could mistake it for a parody, but it seems to be real. Capt. Higgins appears on the local channel KATC of Arcadiana, Louisiana and addresses the public and its criminals alike. In this episode he reports a burglary of a church; a man who opened “things that belong to Christ” and stole money collected from good Catholics. “Think about what kind of evil passed through him that night” he added. He then demands “Mr Lucifer step away” and addresses the criminal directly, asking him to turn himself in. And all of that while channelling John Wayne himself.

Not only does Higgins have a real gun, but many of the commenters in his videos (see below) see him as God’s gift to law enforcement.

Aneris adds that there are a lot more videos of Capt. Higgins on the KATC channel; and I’ll adds that they are a hoot!

 

The insanity of how sentencing works in U.S. capital cases

August 7, 2015 • 11:00 am

There are four justifications for putting criminals in prison: keeping society safe from those who might transgress again (sequestration); using prisons or hospitals as a place to reform criminals so they’re no longer a danger when released (reformation); serving to keep others from committing crimes lest they face the same fate (deterrence); and simple revenge: punishing someone who transgresses because they made the wrong choice and deserves to be punished for that (retribution).

In the case of the death penalty or life in prison without parole—two possibilities that face James Holmes, who killed 12 and wounded 70 in a Colorado movie-theater shooting two years ago—only one of these reasons is justified: sequestration,which means no execution. The death penalty has been shown to have no deterrent effect; and retribution, at least for most of us, is not a rational motivation but an emotional reaction. If the jury decides to execute Holmes, reformation is off the table as well.

And, as I’ve mentioned before, two arguments against the death penalty are that imposing it is more costly and time-consuming than imposing life in prison without parole (the appeals in the US system last for years, involving masses of lawyers), and that mistakes are made more often than we realize when executing criminals. If an innocent person is put to death, there’s no way to undo the damage.

For someone like Holmes who commits such a heinous crime, and faces the possibilities of either life in prison without parole or execution (the jury will decide this week), the only reason to choose execution over other penalties is retribution: the idea that someone who chooses to do something so evil deserves to be killed.

But the U.S. gives some murderers a break: if the judge or jury doesn’t think you had a choice, you get sent to a hospital instead of a prison (and remember, those convicted of murder face horrible circumstances in US jails). The lack of choice is determined by whether the court deems a convicted defendant legally insane, and thus presumably unable to have controlled his or her actions. But often that’s not enough. In the case of Holmes, who’s been diagnosed by the examining psychiatrists as schizophrenic, a determination of “legal insanity” (it varies state by state) requires not just extreme mental illness, but “incapability of distinguishing right from wrong.”

Well, it’s possible to have a severe mental illness and be driven by that illness to commit crimes, even if you do know that society considers them “wrong”—or even if the criminal considers them “wrong”. And so, as psychiatrist Dr. Sally Satel argues in the Washington Post, Holmes should not be executed because he is neither “genuinely criminally responsible” nor a “moral agent,” for, given his condition, he could not control his behavior:

Unfortunately, the insanity defense. . . makes little distinction between ordinary motives for murder — revenge, hatred, greed, or elimination of rivals — and motives that spring from twisted assumptions produced by mental illness. Yet how can anyone suffering from such assumptions be genuinely criminally responsible?

. . . After all, the basic requirement for blame is whether the perpetrator is a moral agent. And a defendant cannot properly be considered a moral agent if his acts were the products of cognitive (e.g., infancy, dementia, or mental derangement) or volitional (e.g., gun to the head) circumstances that were not under the defendant’s control.

. . . Indeed, the basic logic behind the insanity defense is that the law should not punish people who are mentally incapable of controlling their behavior.

Her solution?

In my view, the best solution is for states to broaden the definition of insanity to cover defendants whose crimes flowed directly from delusional thinking, extreme paranoia, or command hallucinations. Such defendants should be confined and treated in mental hospitals, not punished by the criminal justice system. To be clear, murderers would need to show a severe deficit in the ability to reason, not merely a record of mental illness. Depression, anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder, or drug-induced paranoia, for example, should not be exculpatory.

The American Bar Association largely agrees:

A 2006 report from an American Bar Association panel sensibly proposed that defendants “should not be executed or sentenced to death if, at the time of the crime, they had a severe mental disease that significantly impaired their capacity to (a) appreciate the nature, consequences and wrongfulness of their conduct, (b) exercise rational judgment in relation to conduct, or (c) conform their conduct to the requirements of the law.”

And I agree with both of these solutions. But they don’t go nearly far enough.

If you’re a determinist, and feel that nobody has a real choice about how to behave at a given moment—that is, in a given circumstance at a given moment, nobody can behave other than as he did—then appreciation of the distinction between right and wrong is irrelevant in determining whether someone should be executed. It’s relevant in deciding how the criminal should be treated after conviction, but—given your genetic endowment and environmental influences—if your behavior was absolutely mandated by the configuration and interaction of your neurons, what justification is there for partly exculpating those whose behaviors were driven by mental illness while at the same time killing or imprisoning those whose behaviors were driven by inexorable mental processes?

What I’m saying is that, given determinism, there is no rationale for executing anyone. With respect to crime, mental illness is in principle no different from mental compulsion. (The deterrent effect of execution is not relevant, because there isn’t one.)

Of course we should treat criminals with a serious mental illness differently from those who aren’t as abnormal. Treatments should be tailored to the individual’s mentality, background, and health, as well as to the likelihood of recidivism. Someone who remains a danger to society because of intractable mental illness should be sequestered longer or permanently, exactly as someone who is a danger because of intractable sociopathy or murderous impulses, regardless of whether they know right from wrong. 

But once a crime is done, the ultimate goal (beyond sequestration) should be reformation, for many criminals can become productive members of society, and it seems wrong to torture them after they’ve reached that point. If they can’t be reformed, keep them sequestered. (That, of course, will be a judgment call, but it’s one that can at least be studied empirically.)

I’ve previously written about how the prison system of Norway works. It’s a system that should be taken seriously by American criminologists. A report from Business Insider, which I discussed earlier, gives some details (Norway, like nearly all Western countries, does not execute criminals). Not only are Norway’s prisons far more comfortable and humane than in the U.S. (they’re like dormitories, through prisoners aren’t allowed to leave), but the sentencing is considerably different from methods used in America:

The maximum life sentence in Norway shows just how serious the country is about its unique approach. With few exceptions (for genocide and war crimes mostly), judges can only sentence criminals to a maximum of 21 years. At the end of the initial term, however, five-year increments can be added onto to the prisoner’s sentence every five years, indefinitely, if the system determines he or she isn’t rehabilitated.That’s why Norwegian extremist Anders Behring Breivik, who killed 77 people in a bombing and mass shooting, was only sentenced to 21 years. Most of the outrage and incredulity over that sentence, however, came from the US.

Overall, Norwegians, even some parents who lost children in the attack, seemed satisfied with the sentence, The New York Times reported. Still, Breivik’s sentence, as is, put him behind bars for less than 100 days for every life he took, as The Atlantic noted. On the other hand, if the system doesn’t determine Breivik “rehabilitated,” he could stay in prison forever.

That seems quite enlightened to me. Most important, though, is that it works: the rate of recidivism in Norway is considerably lower than in the U.S.

In Norway, fewer than 4,000 of the country’s 5 million people were behind bars as of August 2014.

That makes Norway’s incarceration rate just 75 per 100,000 people, compared to 707 people for every 100,000 people in the US.

On top of that, when criminals in Norway leave prison, they stay out. It has one of the lowest recidivism rates in the world at 20%. The US has one of the highest: 76.6% of prisoners are re-arrested within five years.

We should deep-six the “knowing right from wrong” criterion, as it has absolutely nothing to do with whether a person could have refrained from crimes already committed. What is important is understanding why somebody transgressed the norms of society, to figure out the best way to prevent that from happening again and, if possible, to render the criminal a law-abiding citizen.

In the end, I think it’s unproductive to worry, as does Satel, whether a criminal is “genuinely criminally responsible” or a “moral agent.” Those are nebulous and even philosophical categories that seems incapable of an objective resolution. We should worry about results, not semantics, and realize that while every criminal is responsible for his deed, in the sense that he did it, none of them had a choice about whether to do it. My hope is that this profound realization can render America’s prison system, and its results, more like Norway’s.

More on the Lockett execution and the uselessness of the three-drug protocol

May 2, 2014 • 10:07 am

Today’s New York Times has two reports:  a grim description of what happened before Clayton Lockett was executed on Tuesday, and an analysis of the common three-drug protocol for executing inmates in several states.

Since Lockett died of a heart attack after a botched attempt to execute him, it’s come out that he was actually tasered before being taken to the execution chamber, for he showed resistance. That’s the first time any condemned prisoner has ever been treated that way.  Second, the initial reports that a vein in Lockett’s arm collapsed were apparently untrue. Instead, a phlebotomist or a doctor (it’s not clear which one, but doctors aren’t supposed to be assisting in executions) tried to insert a line into Lockett’s femoral vein (in the groin), not a good thing to do:

But Oklahoma officials said that problems with the IV delivery, not the drugs themselves, accounted for Tuesday night’s problems.

Anesthesiologists said that while they sometimes use a femoral vein accessible from the groin when those in the arms and legs are not accessible, the procedure is more complicated and potentially painful.

Putting a line in the groin “is a highly invasive and complex procedure which requires extensive experience, training and credentialing,” said Dr. Mark Heath, an anesthesiologist at Columbia University. Oklahoma does not reveal the personnel involved in executions.

“There are a number of ways of checking whether a central line is properly placed in a vein, and had those been done they ought to have known ahead of time that the catheter was improperly positioned,” Dr. Heath said.

Dr. Joel Zivot, an anesthesiologist at the Emory University School of Medicine, said that the prison’s initial account that the vein had collapsed or blown was almost certainly incorrect.

“The femoral vein is a big vessel,” Dr. Zivot said. Finding the vein, however, can be tricky. The vein is not visible from the surface, and is near a major artery and nerves. “You can’t feel it, you can’t see it,” he said.

Without special expertise, Dr. Zivot said, the failure was not surprising.

And this is an understatement:

David Dow, a death penalty appellate lawyer in Texas, said that prisoners sometimes resist leaving their cells, but that “it’s not something that happens regularly.” He expressed surprise that the medical staff administering the drugs did not have a second vein ready in case of problems with the first. “For a state that executes people,” he said, “they are awfully bad at it.”

This has been a mess. Not only was the execution botched, perhaps by incompetent technicians or doctors, but Oklahoma has been releasing incorrect information on what happened, and bit by bit. They should have waited for a full investigation, and made it absolutely public.  The secrecy is unwarranted. And the execution was certainly “cruel and unusual punishment”.

So is the use of three drugs. The other article answers a question that several people had, including myself: do we really need to use three drugs given that large animals can be peacefully euthanized with a single injection, and terminal patients in Switzerland with a single drink? (Doctors often give an overdose of morphine to terminal patients, knowing it will kill them.) The answer is no: a single drug—a barbituate—will suffice, and in fact has been used in several states. The three-drug cocktail is a mess: one supposedly puts you under, the second paralyzes your breathing muscles, and the third stops your heart. But if the first one doesn’t work well, you’ll be conscious while the second and third ones work: horribly painful when you’re aware.

Physicians have long known that large doses of single drugs — certain sedatives or anesthetics — can take a life painlessly, and with far less distress than the three-drug cocktail causes if the injection is botched.

Since 2010, more death-penalty states — Oklahoma not among them — have moved to use single drugs for lethal injection. Even critics of the death penalty say most of those executions have gone more smoothly than ones involving multiple drugs.

Barbiturates, including sodium thiopental and pentobarbital, infused into the bloodstream can quickly make a person go deeply unconscious, stop breathing and die. Dr. Mark J. Heath, an anesthesiologist at Columbia University and an expert on lethal injection, said that high doses of pentobarbital were routinely used to euthanize animals, from pet rabbits to beached whales.

Barbiturates alone have been used in 71 executions, in Arizona, Georgia, Idaho, Missouri, Ohio, South Dakota, Texas and Washington, said Jennifer Moreno, a lawyer with the Death Penalty Clinic at Berkeley Law School.

Even though Dr. Heath opposes lethal injection, he said, “I have not seen a single complaint, not an unhappy warden or family or anybody, from the single-drug barbiturate approach.”

So why are we even using the three-drug protocol? Apparently because it was developed by a doctor in Oklahoma in 1977 (Dr. Jay Chapman, the state’s medical examiner), and it’s been used there and in other states simply out of inertia. In fact, Chapman later said that he’d recommend a single injection of barbituate instead.

The problem is not just that, though: it’s also the fact that the drugs are intravenously injected, with the needles put in by people who are largely inexperienced, and that the doses of the drugs may be too low.

The three-drug cocktail can be eliminated in favor of a more humane injection, and the drug doses can be fixed. But what can’t be fixed is the inexperience of people inserting the lines, and the absence of doctors supervising the process (it is rightly considered unethical for a physician to help kill someone.)  What also can’t be fixed is thee new report suggesting that more than 4% of people on death row are likely to be innocent, and once executed cannot be brought back. And what also cannot be fixed is the inhumanity of the state’s killing someone for doing the same thing. That’s retributive punishment.

Since yesterday I’ve pondered my alternative to capital punishment—life without parole—and in light of a few readers’ comments have rethought it a bit. I now think it should not automatically be the alternative to capital punishment. After all, we don’t know if, say, a 25-year sentence instead would be a better deterrent, or if some prisoners can actually be rehabilitated if treated in a different way.  Yes, some prisoners may have to spend the rest of their lives in jail, particularly if they’re psychopaths or incurably mentally ill in a dangerous way.  But in other countries life without parole is not a sentence used often, even for horrible capital crimes.

The object of punishment, if you’re a determinist, is threefold: deterrence, rehabilitation, and sequestration of offenders from society to prevent further harm. (Retribution isn’t a viable option since it accomplishes nothing but cater to our desire for reventge.)  None of these are met by capital punishment, and maybe not by automatic life-without-parole sentences, either. If you don’t think a murderer or rapist had a free “choice” about what he did, then you have to rethink how to deal with his transgression. The reason we don’t concentrate more on what forms of punishment are best for deterring others, rehabilitating offenders, and keeping them out of society until they do no more harm, is because those things are hard to do. They take empirical study—scientific analysis. But it’s what we must do if our justice system is to be both rational and humane. What you don’t do is keep on inflicting cruelty simply because that’s what’s always been done.

 

Another botched execution reinforces the cruelty of capital punishment

May 1, 2014 • 7:56 am

You’ve surely heard of the botched execution of Clayton Lockett in Oklahoma on Tuesday, in which that inmate’s vein “exploded” after he was given the first drug, the sedative midazolam.  After the inmate is rendered unconscious, two more drugs are supposed to be injected in succession: vecuronium bromide, which paralyzes the breathing muscles, and then potassium chloride, which stops the heart. It’s not clear how far they got into the execution procedure, and whether the second drug was actually injected, for Oklahoma officials aren’t talking.

Lockett, whose lawyers had sued Oklahoma for details about the drug’s origins (they’re provided by small “compounding pharmacies” that aren’t regulated very strictly), died of a heart attack shortly thereafter. Another execution scheduled the same day has been put off for at least two weeks.

CNN reports the gruesome scene:

Lockett lived for 43 minutes after being administered the first drug, CNN affiliate KFOR reported. He got out the words “Man,” “I’m not,” and “something’s wrong,” reporter Courtney Francisco of KFOR said. Then the blinds were closed.

Other reporters, including Cary Aspinwall of the Tulsa World newspaper, also said Lockett was still alive and lifted his head while prison officials lowered the blinds so onlookers couldn’t see what was going on.

Dean Sanderford, Lockett’s attorney, said his client’s body “started to twitch,” and then “the convulsing got worse. It looked like his whole upper body was trying to lift off the gurney. For a minute, there was chaos.”

Sanderford said guards ordered him out of the witness area, and he was never told what had happened to Lockett, who was convicted in 2000 of first-degree murder, rape, kidnapping and robbery.

After administering the first drug, “We began pushing the second and third drugs in the protocol,” said Oklahoma Department of Corrections Director Robert Patton. “There was some concern at that time that the drugs were not having the effect. So the doctor observed the line and determined that the line had blown.” He said that Lockett’s vein had “exploded.”

The execution process was halted, but Lockett died of a heart attack, Patton said.

If that’s not “cruel and unusual punishment,” I don’t know what is.  Because regular and foreign pharmacies refuse to furnish the drugs for this form of retributive punishment, there’s not much quality control. And I can’t understand why, if they must execute inmates, they can’t do it in the relatively painless way that vets euthanize animals: with pentobarbital or other derivatives that first put the animal to sleep and then cause death.  I’ve had this done to a cat, and several of you have gone through this traumatic procedure, but at least we know that it’s quick and there’s no sign of the animal suffering.

Nevertheless, like innocent people sentenced to death, botched executions aren’t uncommon; the Death Penalty Information Center described 44 botched executions since 1977, when U.S. states began executing people after a decade’s respite. Warning; the descriptions are graphic and horrific, but if you are in favor of the death penalty, even by lethal injection, read about how many things have gone wrong, some of them undoubtedly due to the incompetence of the executioners.

But we shouldn’t kill people at all, if for no other reason than subsequent evidence could show the inmate was actually innocent.  that has happened, you know, and more than once. And once you’re dead, there’s no bringing you back.  But it’s still cruel and unusual punishment, for it forces someone to know the exact time and method of death, which to me seems horrible. And it’s more expensive than the logical alternative: life without parole, which is still a deterrent and keeps the criminal out of society.

America is the only First World country to retain judicial executions, and it’s barbaric and embarrassing. Here, from Time magazine, is the list of people we (and by “we”, I mean our country) have killed. The hiatus from 1967-1977 was ended when the Supreme Court ruled that executions were constitutional. You can go to the website and, by using your mouse over the chart, see what happened in any given year:

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So much for benign religion, Rabbi Sacks

June 15, 2013 • 12:09 pm

The other day, the old faker Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, Britain’s “Chief Rabbi,” was busy expatiating in the Spectator how wonderful the non-fundamentalists faiths are, and how much the world would suffer if they vanished, taking with them all the grounding of human morality. Well, that was bogus, but Sacks also neglected the malignity of some non-fundamentalist faiths.

Take Catholicism, not generally thought of as fundamentalist. Yet I’d claim that its tenets are profoundly immoral, as evidenced by its marginalization of women and gays, its refusal to sanction birth control (therefore spreading AIDS in Africa), its retrograde stands on divorce and sex, and its official coverups of child rape. (See my series a while back on Catholic “sins of the day”.)

And speaking of coverups, have a gander at this New York Times article documenting yet another perfidy of the Church. It’s fighting lengthening the statue of limitations for child abuse, so that child-raping Church officials can get off the hook more easily:

Victims and their advocates in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts and New York are pushing legislators to lengthen the limits or abolish them altogether, and to open temporary “windows” during which victims can file lawsuits no matter how long after the alleged abuse occurred.

The Catholic Church has successfully beaten back such proposals in many states, arguing that it is difficult to get reliable evidence when decades have passed and that the changes seem more aimed at bankrupting the church than easing the pain of victims.

Already reeling from about $2.5 billion spent on legal fees, settlements and prevention programs relating to child sexual abuse, the church has fought especially hard against the window laws, which it sees as an open-ended and unfair exposure for accusations from the distant past. In at least two states, Colorado and New York, the church even hired high-priced lobbying and public relations firms to supplement its own efforts. Colorado parishes handed out postcards for churchgoers to send to their representatives, while in Ohio, bishops themselves pressed legislators to water down a bill.

How can an institution that supposedly embodies morality be so concerned about money? What does money matter—and the church has billions—compared to the sexual abuse of a child?  If they really were God’s institution on Earth, they’d be working to get rid of all time limitations on prosecution.

This is about the most cynical thing I’ve heard a Catholic say:

The church’s arguments were forcefully made by Patrick Brannigan, executive director of the New Jersey Catholic Conference, in testimony before the State Legislature in January opposing a proposal to abolish the limits in civil cases.

“How can an institution conceivably defend itself against a claim that is 40, 50 or 60 years old?” Mr. Brannigan said. “Statutes of limitation exist because witnesses die and memories fade.”

“This bill would not protect a single child,” he said, while “it would generate an enormous transfer of money in lawsuits to lawyers.”

Uh huh.  They just don’t want to pay lawyers. But of course it would protect children, because priests and other abusers wouldn’t be free from prosecution after the statue of limitations ran out. It would also protect them by deterring current abusers, some of whose crimes are long past, from transgressing again. It’s a powerful disincentive. And, as we know, many victims of abuse don’t even admit it, or become sufficiently empowered to seek redress, until decades have passed.

Finally, the Church could make the same argument about murder, which has no statute of limitations. Too many lawyers to pay! Memories fade! Tell that to Whitey Bulger.

The priests even try lobbying in their sermons!

Joan Fitz-Gerald, former president of the Colorado Senate, who proposed the window legislation, was an active Catholic who said she was stunned to find in church one Sunday in 2006 that the archdiocese had asked priests to raise the issue during a Mass and distribute lobbying postcards.

“It was the most brutal thing I’ve ever been through,” she said of the church campaign. “The politics, the deception, the lack of concern for not only the children in the past, but for children today.” She has since left the church.

What do you say, Chief Rabbi? Is this good behavior or what?

Illegal ivory sold in New York

July 13, 2012 • 8:53 am

The New York Times reported yesterday on the arrest of two New York jewelry dealers for selling illegally poached ivory. The illegal goods weighed more than a ton—equivalent to 100 dead elephants.

The case, brought by the Manhattan district attorney’s office, reflects an unsettling trend. Last year, some 24 tons of ivory was seized around the world — the product of an estimated 2,500 elephants — making it the worst year for elephant poaching since an international ban on commercial ivory trading began in 1989, according to Traffic, a wildlife trade monitoring network.

Much of the ivory being harvested by poachers leaves Africa through Kenya and Tanzania and is destined for China and Thailand, the network said.

From 2002 to 2006, 4 of every 10 dead elephants were killed by poachers, but today, poachers are responsible for 8 of 10 elephant deaths in Africa, where the animals are a threatened species, according to the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora, which the United States has signed.

Poaching of Asian elephants, which are an endangered species, is not as closely monitored.

The punishment for this? Unbelievably trivial!

But the law treats illegal ivory sales as a relatively minor felony, prosecutors said. As a result, neither man will receive a prison sentence. Under plea agreements, both agreed to pay fines and forfeit the ivory, some of which law enforcement officials said they would retain for training purposes. . .

Mr. [Mukesh] Gupta, who investigators said had more than $1 million in ivory on hand, agreed to $45,000 in fines and other payments. Mr. [Johnson Jung-Chien] Lu, whose illegal goods were valued at about $120,000, agreed to a $10,000 fine.

All of the money will go to the Wildlife Conservation Society, the Manhattan district attorney’s office said.

There will be no jail time for either.  So that’s $55,000 in fines for 100 dead elephants. Is that all their lives are worth? I would mandate jail time—even a minimal amount—as a stronger deterrent.