idealawg

Is it okay for a sheriff to lie?

In investigating the Balloon Boy alleged hoax, Larimer County Sheriff Jim Alderden did not tell the truth when he said he believed the Heenes. He admitted this at the press conference last Sunday. Was lying appropriate? Experts are disagreeing about that question's answer.

From "Experts: Lies by law enforcement jeopardize system" (Fort Collins Coloradoan):

During the last two decades, the two largest law enforcement agencies in Fort Collins have deceived the public and media during investigations into high-profile cases, a tactic that has ethicists and criminologists questioning integrity standards.

Larimer County Sheriff Jim Alderden on Sunday told the world he deliberately misled the public when he said two days earlier he thought the Heene family was sincere when they reported to authorities their 6-year-old son Falcon was floating above Northern Colorado in an experimental balloon.

Alderden's decision to use deception is legal and appears to have assisted investigators in their efforts to determine whether Richard and Mayumi Heene could be criminally liable.

...

Experts in criminology and ethics from around the country have questioned using deception or lying except during dire circumstances, if at all.

"Law enforcement officials in particular depend on trust and (the public's) confidence so people will cooperate," said Samuel Walker, an expert on police conduct with the School of Criminology at the University of Nebraska at Omaha and author of "The New World of Police Accountability."

"So when you're just throwing that trust away, you're undermining yourself; you're damaging your own integrity."

I have mixed feelings on the question of law enforcement lying and will be thinking about the matter. I am really torn. What do you think?

Note: Oh, dear! A Balloon Boy Halloween costume. On that, I am very clear about my opinion. Tacky.

Note (added October 23, 2009): Sheriff Alderden's blog post about the balloon incident. It's the entry on October 22.

Poetry -- and law -- are about matters of the mind and the brain, not just the brain

As I have blogged about in the past both here and at Brains on Purpose™, a debate continues among neuroscientists about whether or not there is a difference between the mind and the brain. The materiaIists do not distinguish between the two. After much research, thought, and conversation, I do.

I believe the mind is not the same as the brain so sighed long and loudly when reading a column written by David Brooks. He was writing about the recent Social and Affective Neuroscience Society’s conference. From "The Young and the Neuro" (New York Times):

Since I’m not an academic, I’m free to speculate that this work will someday give us new categories, which will replace misleading categories like ‘emotion’ and ‘reason.’ I suspect that the work will take us beyond the obsession with I.Q. and other conscious capacities and give us a firmer understanding of motivation, equilibrium, sensitivity and other unconscious capacities.

The hard sciences are interpenetrating the social sciences. This isn’t dehumanizing. It shines attention on the things poets have traditionally cared about: the power of human attachments. It may even help policy wonks someday see people as they really are.

Oh, dear. Were life and love ever in the future to be so clear and easily reduced to the organ inside our skull. I say, no, never.

I was glad to read this in the column:

[The research] also suggests that even though most of our reactions are fast and automatic, we still have free will and control.

And

[C]onsciousness is too slow to see what happens inside, but it is possible to change the lenses through which we unconsciously construe the world.

That change would be one of the roles of the mind. As Dr. Jeffrey Schwartz has said, "The brain puts out the call, the mind decides whether to listen."

Many of the materialists do not believe in free will. (See, for example, the first link below.) This reductionist lens can be insulting to the human spirit. In the legal profession, it can be dangerous

Guest blog by Sunny Schwartz: "Really Getting Tough on Crime"

Sunny Schwartz, author of Dreams from the Monster Factory: A Tale of Prison, Redemption, and One Woman's Fight to Restore Justice to All is guest blogging here today. I read her book a while back and found it very engrossing. In her post she tells you about a successful prison program she co-founded which she thinks could provide a solution for prisons nationwide.

Here's Sunny . . .

Really Getting Tough on Crime

California prisons have followed a road all the way to its very tragic end.  An exploding prison population aided and abetted by no mercy sentencing, parole, and prison policies led directly to Judge Henderson’s  ruling last February.  Judge Henderson recognized what is clear to any person working in corrections in the state that’s it’s broken and needs to be fixed  Choices made at all levels of government feed the problem instead of solving it.  There are many reasons why it is broken but the quickest way to measure the failure is this: the state spends more than $40,000 to house one prisoner for a year, and there is a 70% re-arrest rate among prisoners released.  This is abject failure. 

But this is not another essay or blog post about the incurable prison system. It’s about the poisonous and cowardly political discussion about prisons that only makes it seem incurable.  Both our Republican and Democratic lawmakers are not leveling with the public about our system.

The reality is that most of the 44,000 prisoners the courts are ordering released will be free in the near future anyway. The stay for inmates in California prisons is about 23 months.  But whether it is 23 months or 12 months or 6 months the result is almost always the same. 70% reoffend minor and major crimes and are sent back.  Prisons are doing almost nothing to interrupt this

Two new books on "methods and motivations at the base of evil and human cruelty"

Two books on evil behavior are reviewed today in the Seattle Times. I have read neither but plan to order the book by Dr. Stone. Have any of you read one or both? If so, let's hear what you thought, please.

"Divining the source of evil and human cruelty" begins:

When news breaks of a psychopathic crime (usually murder), people use a particular set of adjectives that reflect their horror, writes psychiatrist Michael H. Stone, M.D., in his new book "The Anatomy of Evil" — "words like 'fiendish,' 'revolting,' 'heinous,' and (pretty regularly) 'inhuman.' This is how we distance ourselves from the acts in question, as if to say: 'no human could do these things.' We don't like to be reminded that only humans do these kinds of things, that evil is an exclusively human phenomenon."

University of Oxford neuroscientist Kathleen Taylor concurs. Her new book, "Cruelty: Human Evil and the Human Brain," coincidentally appearing on the shelves at the same time as Stone's, examines the roots and forms of human cruelty.

Taylor writes, "Cruelty is as old as humankind, if not older. At its core lies unjustified voluntary behaviour which causes foreseeable suffering to an undeserving victim or victims ... [I]ts aim is to make its targets suffer physically or psychologically."

But why does cruelty exist? It is comforting to consider brutality an aberration and decency the norm. ...

Click to read the rest of the "Divining the source of evil and human cruelty."

Note: The Wikipedia entry for Dr. Stone's Most Evil. Excerpt:

Most Evil is an American forensics television program on Investigation Discovery starring forensic psychiatrist Michael Stone from Columbia University. On the show, Stone rates murderers on a scale of evil that he has developed in order to help science understand and thus prevent this type of behavior.

Call for papers: Intersections of Law and Culture 2009

This cross-disciplinary conference will be held in October in Switzerland. From its Web page:

Intersections of Law and Culture aims to investigate law’s place in culture and culture’s place in law. This focus proceeds from the realization that law, once one of society’s most powerful discourses in both its secular and religious forms, has become increasingly influenced by intersecting and competing discourses in medicine, ethics, education and politics. Moreover, the operations of law—its processes and decisions—have entered the realm of popular culture, media and the arts as plot devices used in sit-coms, films and pulp fiction. These in turn have begun to change the way law operates.

Given this increasing porosity and interpermeability among prominent areas of knowledge, the focus of this conference is precisely on the interstices between law and other discursive practices.

• What are the mechanisms by which popular representations and cultural practices find their way into legal processes?
• How does law in turn bleed into and influence cultural processes?
• Does law act as a buffer against societal assumptions about, and constructions of, gender, age, ability, sexuality and ethnicity, or does it re-enforce and re-inscribe existing social norms?

Clearly there are no simple, monolithic answers to these complex questions; answers will be historically and culturally contingent, and will change shape depending on the case or the context at hand.

We are especially interested in work that reflects on the differences in law and culture in the European and the Anglo-American contexts. What are the differences between the legal cultures in these distinct

Articles on Buddhism and the law, lawyers and legal system

From the University at Buffalo Law School Law, Buddhism and Social Change come several articles, including

• The Dalai Lama Speaks on Law
• The Ideal and Non-Ideal in Behavior Guidance: Reflections on Law and Buddhism in Conversation with the Dalai Lama
• Religiosity and the Invocation of Law in the Conversation with the Dalai Lama
• “Necessary Evil”: The Growth of a System of Judicial Courts and the Responses it Evoked among the Buddhist Monastic Community in Ancient Sri Lanka
• Universal Compassion and the Lawyer’s Duty
• Internal Motivations, External Coercion, and Educating for Happiness
• Some Notes on the Buddha As a Law Giver.

Click to download the articles.

Blog Glob: "More Americans serving as their own lawyers"

Excerpt from "More Americans serving as their own lawyers" (Seattle Times):

The number of people serving as their own lawyers is on the rise across the country, and the cases are no longer limited to uncontested divorces and small claims. Even people embroiled in child custody cases, potentially devastating lawsuits and bankruptcies are representing themselves, legal experts say.

...

The trend has resulted in court systems clogged with filings from people unfamiliar with legal procedure. Moreover, some of these pro se litigants, as they are known, are making mistakes with expensive and long-lasting consequences - perhaps confirming the old saying that he who represents himself has a fool for a client.

Click to read the rest.

New edition of THE JURY EXPERT is now online

The November edition of The Jury Expert is now up for your reading pleasure and learning. Articles (all pdf) include:

Anticipate and Influence Juror Reactions to Successful Women by Elizabeth J. Parks-Stamm

What happens when women jurors see successful women attorneys, plaintiffs or defendants and how you can mitigate the often negative judgment against successful women. Trial consultants respond.

What Does a Juror's Generation Mean to Trial Consultants? by Patricia McEvoy, Eliza Shepherd

New data that allows examination of damage awards, attitudes, and values as they differ (and are similar) across the most common generations seen in the jury box.

Cross-Examination of the Narcissistic Witness by Douglas Keene

A reader-requested follow-up to last months’ feature on preparation of narcissistic witnesses. Recommendations on how to cross-examine this sort of witness.

Just World Jurors by Alison Bennett

A research review. You’ve heard of the “just world” belief. What is it? How does it have impact on jurors? What can you do to use this belief in support of your particular case?

The American Jury: A Book Review by Kevin Boully

A review of the book all about the American Jury.

Blog Glob: "New legal services provider proposal creates controversy in Washington state"

Excerpt from "New legal services provider proposal creates controversy in Washington state" (Puget Sound Business Journal - subscription required):

Many local attorneys are concerned about a proposal before the state Supreme Court that would allow nonlawyers to practice law in certain limited circumstances.

The proposed rule would create a new kind of legal-services provider called a “legal technician,” who could provide some assistance with family law issues, presumably at a lower cost than legal services from a lawyer.

The proposal pits the legal profession’s long-standing goal of making legal services more affordable and accessible against concerns about maintaining high professional standards. A number of small firms, solo practitioners and other family lawyers say the proposed rule may not only undermine their business, but leave clients in more serious legal trouble than if they’d hired an attorney in the first place.
...
The proposal offered by the Practice of Law Board, a panel created by the state Supreme Court, would create a pilot program that would authorize legal technicians to practice in certain areas of family law. Legal technicians could help a client with the preparation of documents necessary for child support and

Would there be more crime if we all thought we lacked free will? Different results in negotiatons?

A research study of free will and morality (linked to below) has been in my "To Blog About" file for a while. Scientific American just published "Free Will versus the Programmed Brain" in which this same research is discussed. I took that as a message from the e-Gods to quit procrastinating.

In the study, participants were given a passage to read from a science book. Half of the participants were given a passage that said there is no such thing as free will. The other half read a passage about the importance of studying consciousness, with no mention of free will. Participants then were asked to complete a survey about their belief in free will.

Now for the intriguing part of the research: Participants were given a task at which they could cheat.

The results were clear: those who read the anti-free will text cheated more often! ... Moreover, the researchers found that the amount a participant cheated correlated with the extent to which they rejected free will in their survey responses.

The author of the Scientific American article goes on to discuss some questions.

• How far does the effect go? "Presumably the experiment didn’t also lead to a rash of criminal activity among those who read the anti-free will passage."
• Is the effect permanent? "[W]hat would happen if those people were brought back to the lab two weeks later?"
• Are philosophers and scientists who reject free will less moral?

That third question leads to three other questions.

People who explicitly deny free will often continue to hold themselves responsible for their actions and feel guilty for doing wrong. Have such people managed to accommodate the rest of their attitudes to their rejection of free will? Have they adjusted their notion of guilt and responsibility so that it really doesn’t depend on the existence of free will? Or is it that when they are in the thick of things, trying to decide what to do, trying to do the right thing, they just fall back into the belief that they do have free will after all?

I urge you to read and think about the questions this short article poses. As I may have mentioned in the past, the prevailing opinion in neuroscience is that we do not have free will. (I am a firm believer in free will so it is fortunate that the neuroscientist with whom I work is of the same belief.) The existence or nonexistence of free will obviously is not just the concern of scientists; it has profound societal and cultural implications. Just one example of where the question is germane: Criminal law. Personal responsibility without free will is very different from with free will.  (See previous post.) In another arena, I'd like to see how belief/non-belief in free will would affect negotiations.

Do we have free will? What do you think?

Notes: If you are interested in this question of free will and the split in what neuroscientists believe, I urge you to read The Mind and the Brain: Neuroplasticity and the Power of Mental Force.

Click to read the study "The Value of Believing in Free Will: Encouraging a Belief in Determinism Increases Cheating." [pdf]

Image credit: Alvimann.