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Welcome to the nexus of ethics, psychology, morality, technology, health care, and philosophy
Showing posts with label Death Sentence. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Death Sentence. Show all posts

Monday, June 11, 2018

Discerning bias in forensic psychological reports in insanity cases

Tess M. S. Neal
Behavioral Sciences & the Law, (2018).

Abstract

This project began as an attempt to develop systematic, measurable indicators of bias in written forensic mental health evaluations focused on the issue of insanity. Although forensic clinicians observed in this study did vary systematically in their report‐writing behaviors on several of the indicators of interest, the data are most useful in demonstrating how and why bias is hard to ferret out. Naturalistic data were used in this project (i.e., 122 real forensic insanity reports), which in some ways is a strength. However, given the nature of bias and the problem of inferring whether a particular judgment is biased, naturalistic data also made arriving at conclusions about bias difficult. This paper describes the nature of bias – including why it is a special problem in insanity evaluations – and why it is hard to study and document. It details the efforts made in an attempt to find systematic indicators of potential bias, and how this effort was successful in part, but also how and why it failed. The lessons these efforts yield for future research are described. We close with a discussion of the limitations of this study and future directions for work in this area.

The research is here.

Wednesday, December 24, 2014

Don't Execute Schizophrenic Killers

By Sally L. Satel
Bloomberg View
Originally posted December 1, 2014

Is someone who was diagnosed with schizophrenia years before committing murder sane enough to be sentenced to death?

The government thinks so in the case of Scott L. Panetti, 56, who will die on Wednesday by lethal injection in Texas unless Governor Rick Perry stays the execution.

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This is unjust. It is wrong to execute, even to punish, people who are so floridly psychotic when they commit their crimes that they are incapable of correcting the errors by logic or evidence.

Yet Texas, like many other states, considers a defendant sane as long as he knows, factually, that murder is wrong. Indeed, Panetti’s jury, which was instructed to apply this narrow standard, may have been legally correct to reject his insanity defense because he may have known that the murders were technically wrong.

The entire article is here.

Thursday, June 19, 2014

IQ Cutoff for Death Penalty Struck Down by Supreme Court

By Sara Reardon and Nature News Blog
Scientific American
Originally posted on May 28, 2014

When deciding whether a defendant is too intellectually disabled to receive the death penalty, courts must take into account inherent variability in IQ scores, the US Supreme Court ruled today.

In its 5-4 decision, the court said that it is unconstitutional for states like Florida to use an IQ score of 70 as a cutoff above which a defendant is considered to be intelligent enough to understand the consequences of his or her actions.

The entire article is here.

Tuesday, June 3, 2014

Are Psychologists Violating their Ethics Code by Conducting Death Penalty Evaluations for Defendants with Mental Disabilities?

By Celia Fisher
The Center for Ethics Education
Originally posted on May 17, 2014

Imagine you are a forensic psychologist asked during the sentencing phase of a capital punishment case to assess the mental status of a homeless, African American defendant convicted of murder.  Your evaluation report states that the defendant has an IQ and adaptive living score bordering on a diagnosis of intellectual disability, but the absence of educational and health records from childhood prevents you from definitively stating he fits the Supreme Court’s definition of “mental retardation” which would preclude the jury from recommending the death penalty.  Subsequently the defendant is sentenced for execution.

The entire article is here.

Wednesday, October 24, 2012

A Schizophrenic on Death Row

The Opinion Pages
The New York Times
Originally published Ocotber 17, 2012

The Florida Supreme Court decided on Wednesday that the state can proceed with the execution next week of a 64-year-old inmate named John Ferguson. His lawyers immediately said that they will ask the United States Supreme Court to stay the execution and to review the case on grounds that Mr. Ferguson is mentally incompetent and that executing him would violate his constitutional rights as defined by the court in two earlier decisions.

The court must review the case. At issue are not only Mr. Ferguson’s life but also two differing interpretations of what constitutes competence: one Florida’s, the other the Supreme Court’s.

The entire story is here.

Tuesday, October 4, 2011

Texas Execution Stayed Based on Race Testimony

By Manny Fernandez
The New York Times
Published September 16, 2011

In May 1997, a psychologist took the stand in a courtroom here during the sentencing hearing of Duane E. Buck, a black man found guilty of killing his former girlfriend and her friend.

The psychologist, Walter Quijano, had been called by the defense, and he testified that he did not believe Mr. Buck would be dangerous in the future. But on cross-examination, the prosecutor asked Dr. Quijano more detailed questions about the factors used to determine whether Mr. Buck might be a danger later in life.

“You have determined that the sex factor, that a male is more violent than a female because that’s just the way it is, and that the race factor, black, increases the future dangerousness for various complicated reasons,” the prosecutor asked Dr. Quijano. “Is that correct?”

“Yes,” the psychologist replied.

That statement, and how it was handled by the Harris County District Attorney’s Office, helped spare Mr. Buck from the death chamber on Thursday, and has become the center of a case that has raised questions about the role of race in the Texas criminal justice system at a time when Gov. Rick Perry’s support of the death penalty has become a factor in his campaign for the Republican presidential nomination.

Mr. Buck, 48, had been scheduled to be executed on Thursday evening, but the Supreme Court intervened, granting a temporary stay of execution pending a decision about whether it will review an appeal of his case. Mr. Buck’s lawyers had argued that his death sentence was based, at least in part, on his race, and that in carrying out his execution, the state would violate the Equal Protection Clause of the Constitution, which prohibits discrimination by state governments.

At Mr. Buck’s sentencing hearing in 1997, the Harris County prosecutor told the jury in her closing argument to rely on the psychologist’s expert testimony, telling the jury: “You heard from Dr. Quijano, who had a lot of experience in the Texas Department of Corrections, who told you that there was a probability that the man would commit future acts of violence.”

In 2000, while the case was on appeal, the state attorney general at the time, John Cornyn, made an unusual announcement, conceding error in Mr. Buck’s case and six others in which the government had relied on race as a factor in sentencing. Mr. Cornyn, now a United States senator, stated that if the lawyers for the defendants in those cases challenged the government’s reliance on race at sentencing, he would not object. All of those cases centered on testimony from Dr. Quijano, a former chief psychologist for the state prison system.

“The people of Texas want and deserve a system that affords the same fairness to everyone,” Mr. Cornyn said then.

Of the defendants, all of whom were on death row, Mr. Buck was the only one who had not been granted a new sentencing hearing. The others were later re-sentenced to death.

The efforts to stop Mr. Buck’s execution drew widespread support. Linda Geffin, a former assistant district attorney in Harris County who helped prosecute Mr. Buck, wrote a letter to state officials, including Mr. Perry, asking them to halt the execution, writing that it was regrettable that “any race-based considerations were placed before Mr. Buck’s jury.” In addition, a survivor of Mr. Buck’s attack, Phyllis Taylor, had urged the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles and the governor to halt the execution.

The entire article can be read here.