Category: Crime

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Your Fingerprints: Junk Science

When we were little children watching police shows like “The FBI” and “Adam-12” on TV, we became convinced, along with everyone else, that if a criminal’s fingerprints were found at the scene of the crime, it was case closed, proof-positive, open and shut.

Why? Because no two fingerprints, in the entire world, could be alike. How did we know that? How did we know that that was true? Because everyone acted as it it was true. Everyone acted as if no two fingers in the entire world could have matching patterns on them. Everyone acted as if this was the product of years of sound, thorough research conducted by revered scientists.

It is very odd, then, to discover, that there might never have been a good reason for believing that the evidentiary value of fingerprints has ever been established with any kind of scientific rigor. There really is no body of systematic research or scientific proof that fingerprints really are unique to each individual, at least, not in the way the movies and television would have you believe. In other words, nobody has ever systematically compared fingerprints to each other to establish just what the odds are that any two, from perfect strangers, might match.

In 1995, a proficiency test was administered to 156 law enforcement examiners. These are the guys called in to court to testify that the suspect’s prints — don’t forget, we could be talking about Lee Harvey Oswald here, among others– were found on the murder weapon, or a door knob, or a table surface, or something. Only 44% of these “experts” could correctly identify all five of a set of test prints. Read that again: less than half of the “experts” were proficient. And again: half of these guys got at least one of the prints wrong, out of five. Twenty percent. One in five.

I don’t know the details of the test, but I do know that the people who administered it considered the performance of half the experts to be inadequate and unreliable.

What has happened is that the Supreme Court of the United States has recently made some rulings that require courts to establish that “scientific evidence” really is scientific before it is allowed in the courtroom. What you have to imagine is some “expert” talking in obscure, difficult language about some scientific information which the jury doesn’t understand. The jury takes the guy’s word for it. The jury figures that the “expert” knows. The jury figures that he wouldn’t be testifying this way if he didn’t have a solid body of research and knowledge behind him. Think about fiber and hair analysis. Think about fingerprints. Think about those difficult cases where the prosecution actually has very little evidence so they scrounge around for “matching” fibers and hairs and semen and spots of blood. We have been trained by television and the movies to regard such evidence as definitive and decisive. Now we are beginning to know that such evidence can be constructed around a suspicion.

In France, 16 points of similarity, between fingerprints, are required before a “match” can be asserted. In Sweden, the number is 7. The FBI, in the U.S., won’t tell us how many it considers decisive. The FBI says it decides on a case by case basis. I thought that justice is exactly the opposite of that. Blind and impartial. Consistent. The FBI says, “trust me”. I wish I could.  Science does not provide standards that apply on a “case by case” basis.

Our system of justice– adversarial– encourages both sides to become advocates for their clients’ interests, rather than the truth. The police don’t just present facts– they invest in the suspect’s guilt, and advocate for it, and do whatever they feel needs to be done to “win” their case. It is apparent that often they feel that they know who did it– they just need to muster the facts necessary for a conviction. They sometimes regard the law as an impediment to justice.

They almost never willingly admit a mistake, even when DNA analysis proves they were wrong.

Occasionally, it is clear, they manufacture the “facts”. An expert, for example, will testify that a fiber found in the suspect’s car exactly matches a fiber taken from the victim’s sweater. So how do you assess the real degree of similarity, and the real likelihood that these fibers could have matched fibers from almost anyone else’s sweater? The lab is not presented with five samples and five potential matching fragments of evidence, and then asked to identify which ones match. They are presented with a set of fibres from the suspects home or clothing, and a set of fibres found at the crime scene. Do they match, yes or no? If no matches are found, we’ll find more fibres, and then more. The lab technician knows that the police will be happier if a match is found.

A suspect’s car– or any car– is loaded with smells, particles, dust, fragments of things, scraps of paper, coffee stains, oil and grease, residues, maybe even bodily fluids. If you took thousands of samples of every substance in a any car, how hard would it be to find something– anything– that matches something that can be linked to a victim– any victim? I’ll bet it wouldn’t be that hard at all.  Look at the Azaria Chamberlain case.

The Supreme Court is right. We should demand very high standards of “expert” testimony, before allowing smooth-talking partisan professionals to try to bowl over a jury with analysis that might well be nothing more than “junk science”.

Random Notes:

Until the 1880’s, the commonly accepted “age of consent” in America was 11.

2011-06: in the case of Casey Anthony, the prosecution is actually presenting “evidence” that traces of the smell of a decomposing body can be detected and analyzed from the trunk of Ms. Anthony’s car. This has all the hallmarks of the good old fibre analysis presented at so many cases by discredited forensic “scientists” in the past.

I hope her defense attorney has the intelligence to ask the prosecution to produce evidence of the smells of hundreds of cars compared to the smell captured from Ms. Anthony’s car and then have the “expert” blindly identify which one had the body in it.

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Mel Lastman and the Bikers

Toronto Police Chief Julian Fantino nearly had a fit when he heard that Mayor Mel Lastman went down to a local hotel that was hosting a biker’s convention and shook hands with a member of a motorcycle gang.

Didn’t he know, by golly, that these bikers are criminals? What the hell was he doing shaking hands and smiling with a gang of known felons?

My question is, what was Julian Fantino doing sitting on his duff while known criminals were frequenting a Toronto bar? Why didn’t he get into his new police helicopter, race down to the hotel, and arrest them? Quick– before they hurt the mayor!

Possibly because the police didn’t happen to have any evidence that any one of these particular persons shaking the hands of the mayor had actually committed a crime.

In other words, these were merely unsavory characters, with whom respectable men– like Julian Fantino– would never associate.

Fantino knows that some members of biker gangs commit crimes. He also knows very well that some do not, just as we know that not all business executives cheat and lie and then sell off their stocks and retire with millions in ill-gotten gains. But I’ll bet Mayor Lastman doesn’t get any flack for shaking hands with Enron executives.

Mel Lastman should never have apologized. He should have said, look Fantino, if you have evidence that these people committed crimes, go ahead and arrest them. If you don’t, then respect the fact that like any other citizen they are entitled to the assumption of innocence, and to visit our fair city and spend their tourist dollars here like any other tourist.

The image of a supposedly respectable public person shaking hands with a felon, though, calls to mind an image from last year: Margaret Thatcher embracing Augusto Pinochet, Chile’s dictator and torturer-general.

I don’t care if you call it “stereo-typing” or “profiling” or any other euphemism for prejudice. It’s wrong. Fantino is the one who should apologize. His statement is the one that should be garnering loads of disapproval from the so-called liberal media.

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Give Peace a Chance

There was a moment a few years ago when some Republican leaders in Florida came to a startling realization.

As Republicans they held two cardinal values. Well, “cardinal” to Republicans. Firstly, they were in favor of small government, efficient, and free of wasteful extravagance. Secondly, they were strongly in favor of an effective, strict criminal justice system that promoted law and order and reduced crime.

The realization that they came to was that the same strict law-and-order platform they espoused was at odds with their first goal– small and efficient government. They realized that throwing hundreds and thousands of teenaged hoodlums into jail for long sentences without possibility of early parole or rehabilitation was actually costing the government a lot more money than… gasp… prevention programs.

What they realized was that a relatively small amount of money invested in youth programs in the inner city would actually have the effect of reducing the number of youths that would proceed into a life of crime and violence. It would also thereby reduce the costs of policing, criminal prosecution, and incarceration, by a very substantial amount. They came to this conclusion on the basis of solid research conducted by– gasp– intellectuals with college degrees.

So these Republicans found themselves in the odd position of advocating greater spending on social programs and prevention– Democrat icons– in order to further their goal of smaller, more efficient government.

They were far-sighted and wise. They foresaw a win-win situation: less crime, and more opportunity for the poor in their community. They were willing to re-examine dogmatic belief in the light of scientific evidence.

National governments today spend over $800 billion on defense. They spend about $10 billion on the primary tool of averting wars, the United Nations.

The Republicans have worked very hard to demonize the United Nations over the past few years. They claim that it is a bloated bureaucracy–which it is–and that it is inefficient and works against the interests of the United States.

What they really see is that the United Nations tries to work in the interests of all peoples of the planet, and that sometimes means that the U.S. is called upon to share, and Republicans don’t want to share. They don’t want to share the fish in the sea, or the profits of pharmaceutical corporations or the responsibility of reducing global warming. They do want to share in the profits to be made by selling weapons to antagonists in local conflicts. They don’t even hesitate to sell land-mines which, more often than not, end up harming civilians rather than soldiers. Thousands and thousands of children. Children with missing limbs. Bill Clinton wanted to sign the International Land Mine Treaty. The Republicans, with a majority in Congress, blocked him.

But these Republicans in Miami realized that their long-range goals are best served with foresight and planning, and with consideration of the causes of the problems they mean to address.

Why is this lesson so hard to absorb on a national level? These terrorists are global thugs and our immediate reaction is to demand death, or long prison sentences. We launch a military attack which, in substance if not formal organization, is similar to the action that provoked it. We bomb the hell out of them.

If we keep waiting for more terrorist attacks and then simply retaliate and punish, not only will we have the very thing we are trying to stamp out– as every retaliation provides righteous fodder for the next generation of suicide bombers– but we will increase it, and it will cost us more and more to deal with.

The United Nations is the world’s inner-city program. It should be funded. It’s not perfect, but it does better than most people think it does. We don’t keep statistics on wars prevented but the truth is that the world is a far more peaceful place today than it used to be. The United Nations should be empowered. It should be employed to resolve the issues that give rise to terrorism. The U.S. will have to change it’s tack from “how can we directly benefit” to “how can we reduce the global tensions and economic disparities that give rise to insurgencies and terrorist acts”.

Redneck America scoffs: what we need to do is kill them all. If you want Ireland or the Middle East, you shall have it. But if the real goal is to reduce terrorism, to reduce death and destruction and violence, we have to follow the path of the British, who decided 20 years ago that the only way to bring an end to violence in Northern Ireland was to end the cycle of attack and retaliation and bring the interested parties to the negotiating table.

And every cop knows that the first step to preventing trouble is to win the trust and respect of the people who might or might not eventually go on to make trouble. The U.S. has to show Pakistan and Saudi Arabia and Egypt that it can develop new policies in the region that are principled and fair, and that don’t always only benefit themselves. Step #1 is that Israel must be dragged kicking and screaming to the negotiating table, not because they are wrong or because they are at fault or because they are bullies– they might or might not be all of these– but because it is the only way to begin to resolve the Palestinian issue, and the Palestinian issue is at the heart of most conflicts between Islamic fundamentalists and the west.

The U.S. must also review it’s relationships with Egypt, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia. Those nations need to gradually incorporate more democratic elements into their governments or they will eventually be over-thrown by militant Islamic fundamentalists, as Iran was. Most of the September 11 hijackers came from Saudi Arabia. There is serious resentment in the Moslem world over the conspicuous U.S. presence in this nation that is custodian to the holiest sites in Islam, Mecca and Medina.

The sanctions against Iraq should end. Saddam Hussein, though vilified by the U.S. media, is really no better or worse than most of the other leaders of nations in the region, including Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and Syria.

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Thomas Sophonow

Thomas Sophonow of Manitoba was convicted in 1981 of the murder of a 16-year-old Winnipeg waitress named Barbara Stoppel.

He spent four years in prison before the Manitoba Court of Appeal ordered him released. The Manitoba Court of Appeal said that the evidence against Sophonow was inadequate.

Did the police and prosecutors admit they might have made a mistake? Not for fifteen years. And no level of government involved appears eager to pay the $2.6 million compensation suggested by an inquiry into the affair.

How did it happen? How did the wrong mean end up in prison for four years?

Does this phrase ring a bell: jailhouse informant. Snitch. One man about to be deported to Hong Kong agreed to testify that Sophonow had confessed to him. All charges against the snitch and the deportation hearings were dropped. Two of the other snitches had lengthy resumes, performing the function regularly for the police in exchange for various favors.

Commissioner Peter Cory, investigating the miscarriage of justice, recommends that jailhouse snitches never be used again in criminal proceedings. That is NEVER.

There were three eye-witnesses. Three of the four could not identify the suspect in a police line-up, but they still testified that Sophonow was the man they saw leaving the crime-scene. Why? In all likelihood, the police assured them that he was the man, and that it would be a “crime” for him to walk free simply because there wasn’t any evidence. The police worked their witnesses into a state of absent compliance.

One remaining eye-witness insists that Sophonow is the man he saw leaving the donut shop where Stoppel was murdered. But more and more recent research– especially by Elizabeth Loftus– shows that eye-witnesses tend to blend the face of the accused with their memory of the person they actually saw at the time. They see the accused every day in court, for extended periods of time, whereas their original view of the suspect is fleeting and ephemeral. Memory is not reliable, and certainly not as reliable as DNA testing, which has excluded Sophonow from any further suspicion.

According to an American study released in June, juries make up their minds early in the trial– based, obviously, on anything but evidence– and then fit the facts presented to their prejudice.

After injustice, exploitation. Sophonow’s lawyer will be paid more than $800,000. Do lawyers work that hard? Are they that talented? That is more than a teacher makes over ten years.

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And Why Would the Police Lie

Why would the police lie about a thing like that?

Anyone who still believes in fairy tales might have a hard time explaining away the behavior of the Fort Lauderdale, Florida police and District Attorney’s office.

Chiquita Lowe claimed that she saw a man leaving the home of Shandra Whitehead in Fort Lauderdale on the night of April 14, 1985. Shandra had been raped and murdered. She was eight years old. Chiquita Lowe saw the man, she said in court.

The police had a suspect: he was Frank Lee Smith, a man with a criminal record. But they had no evidence linking Smith to the crime.

But they had Chiquita Lowe.

Chiquita saw Smith leave the house. The entire case– a capital case– sat on her testimony. Smith was convicted and sentenced to death. He remained on death row for eleven years, until he died, of cancer, in prison. He remained on death row for eleven years, even though Chiquita Lowe recanted her testimony. He remained on death row for eleven years while the prosecutors refused to do a DNA test to confirm or exclude his guilt.

Eventually, of course, the DNA test was done. Smith was categorically excluded. Not only was Smith exonerated, but another man, Eddie Lee Mosley, was matched to the DNA. Mosley is being held in psychiatric prisons after being found insane when he was brought up on two other murder charges.

Do the police go, “oops”?

Do they apologize?

And admit that the police can make mistakes?

Never!

Chiquita Lowe now says that the police pressured her to identify Smith. We now know enough about how the police work to imagine what they said to her.   We know the guy did it but we don’t exactly have the evidence. Do you want to be responsible for his next victim if he walks? It’s your duty to testify as to what we think you saw that night….

She also says the police never showed her a picture of Mosley though the police claim they did, and the police claim that she did not recognize him.

The police claim she did recognize Smith.

Who are you going to believe?

Lowe testified about all this at hearings to reopen the case in 1991 and 1998. The police and prosecutors said she was a liar and completely unreliable. The judge agreed. The judge didn’t seem to realize that he had just rejected as “unreliable” the only witness in support of the prosecution’s original case, a case so thin and insubstantial that it makes you wonder if there is any system at all to justice in America.

How can a judge, with a straight face, declare that a man’s life should be taken based almost entirely on the word of a single “unreliable” witness?

Well, now that the DNA evidence is in, what do the police have to say for themselves? You know what they say? You won’t believe it. They say that Smith must have been burglarizing the home at the same time that Mosley was raping and murdering little Shandra Whitehead. That’s why, they say, Lowe did see Smith fleeing the house. That’s why, they say, detectives really did overhear Smith say something incriminating as they were escorting him to jail. That’s why, they say, the police are really never wrong, though sometimes strange things happen… who knows?

The problem is not that the police occasionally make a mistake. The problem is that the police, encouraged by conservative law and order politicians and incompetent judges, have developed the habit of picking a likely suspect– preferably someone poor and uneducated and with a history of convictions– and then hanging a case on him.

It’s so much easier than investigating the crime and making a case against a real suspect.

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A Victory in the War of Drugs

Russell Eugene Weston Jr., 44 years old, walked into the Capitol Building in Washington DC on July 24th, 1998, in order to save the world from cannibals, and to retrieve top secret information from a satellite system that was capable of time-travel. I’m not sure why he thought the government would be of any use to him, but he did, and when the government didn’t listen he shot and killed two guards.

He is imprisoned in Butner, North Carolina, in solitary, because, after all, he is mad. In what used to be the civilized world, he would be in some kind of treatment program where smart people with degrees in psychology would be trying to help him recover his senses. But this is America of the 21st century and bloodlust over-rules compassion so the government wants very badly to put him on trial for murder and sentence him to death.

The trouble is, of course, that Mr. Weston appears to be insane. It is a well-established facet of the modern justice system that a person who is not responsible for his actions cannot be convicted of crimes committed while he was not responsible for his actions, ie., in possession of his faculties, his reason, his ability to discern right from wrong.

A small obstacle to be sure. In a new, significant skirmish in the real drug war– the war waged by pharmaceuticals to get everybody onto drugs– a three judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. circuit ordered him to be medicated!

Mr. Weston’s lawyer– a public defender (and we all know how awesome public defenders are)– is considering an appeal. Of course, appeals ultimately end up in the hands of those robed dildos of Partisan Politics, the Supremes.

Well, what is wrong with medicating this guy so he can be ruled sane so he can be tried for murders committed while he was insane?  And then executed?   We need to provide a nice deterrent to all those crazy UFO-believers out there with guns.

Apart from the obvious– that just because medications can make him appear to be sane doesn’t mean he was sane at the time of the murders– there is the absurd circumstance of the government drugging people into certain specified conditions (guided by the high priests of mental sanitation, psychiatrists and psychologists) in order to obtain particular results from the justice system.

I know– it’s hard to wrap your mind around this issue, especially if it’s medicated. But break it down. The drugs in question are those very powerful psychotropic drugs the mission of which is to alter a person’s personality or emotions.

Is this allowed by the constitution? The very question is insane– of course not. The idea that a constitution that protects the right of privacy and freedom of speech and presumes innocence until proof of guilt is established and  validated by a duly constituted jury or judge, would permit any government body to forcibly alter a person’s mind with powerful psychotropic drugs— it’s absolutely outrageous.

But that’s not even the most objectionable part of it all. Of what use is this procedure to the prosecution? The man was probably insane when he shot the two guards. The prosecution wishes to argue that he was not insane. They are allowed to specify how his mind should be altered in order to present him as evidence in support of their view????

The precedent is shattering. With the pharmaceutical companies already revving up the corporate cheer-leaders, every prosecutor in the country will now consider the option of obtaining a court order to force prescribed personality alterations of defendants in criminal actions.

You think I’m getting carried away? What if I had told you 50 years ago that we were headed towards the kind of society in which people who are unhappy or dissatisfied with their lives in any form would go to their doctors and readily obtain prescriptions for powerful mood-altering substances that would help them cope with their terrible little lives?

You would have thought I was insane.

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Joyce Gilchrist Locks up a few Innocent Men

If you’re a regular visitor to these pages, I hope you’re not getting bored with the rants about false convictions. There are so many.

Joyce Gilchrist is a “forensic chemist” with a police crime laboratory in Oklahoma City. In 1986, she testified at the trial of Jeff Pierce who was charged with rape and robbery. Her testimony was decisive: she said that hairs found on the victim were “microscopically consistent” with samples taken from Pierce. He was sentenced to 65 years in prison. He served 15 before DNA testing– considered far more reliable than microscopic hair analysis– proved he could not have been the perpetrator.

I use the word “considered” with ambivalence.  The microscopic hair analysis was “considered”, in a manner of speaking, reliable at his first trial.  But it was not really “considered” at all: it was accepted with blind faith in this charade of forensic science.

You have to give credit to the police department here, where it is due. After an appeals court overturned several cases in which her testimony was pivotal, the police department ordered a review of other cases in which she had testified. (This may sound like something that should be automatic, but it isn’t. It is amazing how many police departments and prosecuting attorneys will refuse to admit they might have been wrong.)

At this stage, at least, that’s the way it’s supposed to work: the police are supposed to find out what actually happened. In the Pierce case, it looks like they simply picked a likely suspect (he happened to be working as a landscaper in the area in which the crime was committed) and then tried to muster the evidence necessary to convince a jury.

Gilchrist was regarded as a prosecution-friendly witness, who was likely to provide the police with evidence that would confirm their gut feelings about the suspect. She rarely testified for the defense, which should tell you something. She is supposed to be a scientist. She is supposed to testify for whichever side happens to have good science with them. If the science appears to always favor the prosecution, you have to ask yourself a few questions…

An FBI specialist, according to People Magazine, had problems figuring out what led Gilchrist to draw the conclusions she did about Pierce’s hair samples. In other words, she either grossly exaggerated or lied about the similarities. Do you want to know how many other cases she was involved with? Hundreds. No wait. 1,800! I’m not kidding. And an FBI chemist who reviewed four of Gilchrist’s cases said that in all four of them, hair or fibers had been misidentified. Twenty-three of the cases in which Gilchrist’s testimony played a part involved capital crimes. Eleven of the defendants have already been executed. In some cases, the police have destroyed the evidence, so we’ll never know if they were really guilty or not.

In another case, she testified that an FBI test of a semen sample could not exclude Alfred Mitchell from suspicions of rape, sodomy, and murder. In fact, the FBI lab clearly asserted that the one thing the sample did do was exclude Mitchell. He was convicted anyway, on Gilchrist’s “expert” testimony. In 1999, a federal district judge threw out the conviction because of her “errors”.

And another: Robert Miller was convicted of raping and murdering two elderly women, again, largely on the basis of Gilchrist’s “expert” testimony that hair samples found on the victims matched his. After seven years on death row, DNA evidence fingered someone else. As if that wasn’t enough, DNA evidence pointed to a man Gilchrist had explicitly cleared of the crime.

Even more disturbing: the police had the FBI’s exculpatory evidence in their hands before they brought Mitchell to trial, and did not provide the defense with copies of the reports. This is your police department, friends. These are the people in charge of enforcing the law. The appeal judge stated that the “State’s blatant withholding of unquestionably exculpatory evidence is absolutely indefensible.”

Gilchrist is on “paid administrative leave”. Did you know that the laws are written in such a way as to release the police and prosecution from all potential liability for financial compensation for the wrongly convicted? So what does Pierce get for his 15 years in prison? Unless the state gets generous voluntarily, nothing.

The case of Malcolm Rent Johnson is fascinating. He was convicted in 1982 of the rape and murder or Ura Alma Thompson, who was 76 years old. Johnson was executed in January, 2000.

The police found many of Thompson’s missing possessions in Johnson’s room. Johnson claimed that he received the stolen goods from a friend. Gilchrist testified that hairs found on the victim were compatible with Johnson’s hair, and that fibers from a shirt the police took from his apartment were similar to fibers found on the body, and that the semen found in the victim was compatible with Johnson’s blood type. When the police confronted Johnson with the semen evidence, Johnson, according to police, said that was impossible because he hadn’t ejaculated.

Either Johnson was a complete fool– and victims of prosecution misconduct seem to be disproportionately poor and uneducated– or he meant to say that he wasn’t the one who raped Thompson and therefore couldn’t have been the one who ejaculated. It’s a strange statement to make, but even stranger that the police would regard a statement like that as believable enough to be incriminating but not believable enough to contradict Gilchrist’s findings that the semen matched Johnson’s blood type. If he inadvertently told the truth– that he raped Thompson but didn’t ejaculate– then the police should offer that as evidence that he committed the rape and murder, and Gilchrist’s evidence should have been thrown out. Instead, the police had it both ways. He is guilty because he told the truth when he implied he had sex with Johnson but didn’t ejaculate, and besides, the semen was compatible with his blood type.

Or, did Johnson receive the stolen goods from a friend who actually committed the robbery and rape and then “tipped” the police off to Johnson?

Gilchrist isn’t the only incompetent police expert around. In Randall County, Texas, a forensic pathologist named Ralph Erdmann was convicted in 1994 of falsifying evidence on at least six occasions, including at least one capital case. In that one case, an off-duty police officer, James D. Mitchell, approached a car that had skidded off the road and was shot by one of the occupants who claimed that he fired in self-defense. No one disputes who shot who, but the question of whether it is a capital offense hinges on whether the defendant, Randal Wayne Hafdahl, believed he was being threatened or not, and that determination was based on Erdmann’s evidence.

In New York, a former detective named Michael S. Race has made it his mission to re-examine some old criminal cases. He is already responsible for five men being released from prison, including Anthony Faison and Charles Shepherd, who were charged with the murder of a cabby. Some say that Race is trying to assuage his own guilt– he was involved in some these questionable cases as a homicide detective in Brooklyn. In some of these cases, a rather shady witness provided the only compelling evidence. It is clear that the police and district attorneys were derelict in their obligations to ensure that such witnesses were reliable and credible. It didn’t matter: the juries bought it. Innocent men went to jail. In the “tough on crime era”, few people cared.

What all of this means is that the criminal justice system in the U.S. is in a crisis. There is a drug crisis and a medical crisis and an education crisis. Why doesn’t anyone step up and announce that they will make criminal justice an issue in the next campaign? Because conventional political wisdom is that Americans want politicians and judges to be “tough on crime”. But I’ll bet that a lot of Americans are slowly becoming convinced that there is a difference between “toughness” and fairness.

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There is a Rising Tide of Hysterical Over-Reaction

Manalapan, New Jersey.

We are going to stop school killings. We are going to put a stop to the violence. We are going to take the bull by the horns and put our heads together and think and think and think and we will come up with strategies and policies that will prevent students from bringing guns to school and killing their classmates and teachers.

So what did you come up with? Metal detectors? A ban on guns? A program to detect stressed-out students and counsel them before they go nuts? A plan to reduce the stress on teenagers? A plan to reduce the stress on society? Improved communications between parents, teachers, students, and police? Come on, tell us!

You are going to bust five-year-olds.

All right. I just know that your school will never have an incident of a five-year-old bringing an assault rifle to class and shooting people now. I just know it.

It was the county prosecutor’s idea, in Manalapan, New Jersey. After the shootings at other schools in California and Colorado, he decided that the only solution was “zero tolerance” for threats of violence. Not for actual acts of violence– for threats of violence.

So when an angry ten-year-old girl who wet her pants because her teacher wouldn’t let her go to the bathroom said, “I could just kill her”, she was suspended for three days. The police now have her name in their files. Watch this girl– she’s a danger to society!

There have been fifty such suspensions so far. But why are they so reticent? Are they only dealing with the most serious incidents of violent threats? Violence is also caused by greed, jealousy, lust. The next time a 12-year-old says, “I want that,” have him fingerprinted– he’ll think twice before stealing. Notice any six-year-olds guzzling Coca-Cola? An incipient coke addict– have him spend a night in the slammer so he knows what his future will be like. Notice any grade sixers holding hands with six-year-olds?  Possible future abuse. Counseling and group therapy, and maybe a prescription drug or two.

Do these thought police patrol the school yard during sports activities? Have they missed any quarterbacks or coaches shouting “hit him, hit him”? Have they checked the library? Lots of pictures to snip. Any children bringing bibles to school? Besides being unconstitutional, there are some rather lurid tales in there about incest, rape, murder. “Unduly fascinated with morbid acts”. Perhaps it is a little early for institutionalization.

If you think this is an isolated incident, think again. Check the link above. There’s more. There was a nine-year-old who was suspended for “threatening” any classmates who took the last French fries at a cafeteria lunch. He was last seen packing a howitzer. A twelve-year-old was shoved during a football match. The shover received no sanction, but the victim, who shouted something he had heard his parents and friends and television heroes say a million times– “I’m gonna kill you”– suspended. A girl suspended because she was planning to blow up a friend’s house. One hopes the police burst into her bedroom with proper warrants and authorizations and thoroughly investigated every orifice on on every Barbie doll for evidence of explosive materials.

And of course, in Kingston, Ontario, a grade 11 student was suspended after a dramatic reading of a piece of his own fiction in class describing how an alienated student bombed his own school. His classmates, who had ostracized the boy, thought it was judgment day. The student was arrested and strip-searched and incarcerated for 34 days (while two students in Quebec, who had actually set off a bomb at school, but who were popular with their classmates, were released on bail after a few hours).

Down the street, of course, for a mere $9, any student at the school could enjoy two hours of far greater mayhem, also fictional, without repercussions. (The boy’s 14-year-old brother, who is developmentally delayed, was harassed by students as a result of the incident. He made some verbal threats and was also arrested.)

I’m sorry if this offends you, but there is no other word for these people. They are idiots.

They say, Klebold and Harris (the Columbine killers) were known to have made violent statements before they came to the school with bombs and guns. Klebold and Harris were also known to have guns before they came to the school with guns and bombs. In the current climate of U.S. culture, that was not considered a warning sign.

Do you have children? Can you count how many times they have said to each other, in anger, “I’m going to kill you”? Have you ever seriously believed they were about to commit the act?

The rationale is that there is a tide of killings taking place at schools all across America. The perception is that this is a rising tide, threatening to overwhelm society with murder and mayhem. The only solution is to nip it in the bud. But of course, that is not really a solution at all. Nobody has said, “this is a solution”. Nobody has demonstrated that it works.

There is strong evidence that the same approach to marijuana has had no effect at all on the use of hard drugs. There is over-whelming evidence that “zero-tolerance” applied to the drug problem has been a colossal failure.

There is further irony in the fact that many of the actual violent acts at schools, including killings, have been committed by students who were… suspended. So the very policy that is supposed to save us all has been demonstrated to fail, just as the zero-tolerance policy towards marijuana has demonstrably failed.

The truth is that there is no “rising” tide of violence in our schools. There are a number of small, isolated incidents. There has never not been a number of small isolated incidents. The statistics– those annoying facts– do not show anything like what people tell you they think is happening. When people go, “What is happening to our society”, they are simply reacting thoughtlessly and without information.

What is really happening to our society is that the profusion of law suits for civil liability has indeed reached epic proportions creating an atmosphere in which the hysterical attitudes of paranoid idiots prevail, because nobody wants to be the one who said he didn’t do everything possible to prevent this week’s catastrophe of the month.

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Missing Children

You worry. You have children– you worry. You worry that some evil person will come and take your child away and do terrible things to him or her. That’s a legitimate worry. Welcome to parenthood.

We want to be good parents but we also want to live in a livable world. So we deal with our fears and support reasonable measures to protect our children and ourselves from evil. And what seems reasonable to us often depends on our perception of how dangerous it really is out there.

A headline in the local papers recently proclaimed, “Missing Kids Case Numbers Soar: Report”. A subhead insists that the RCMP statistics show that more children than ever before are missing.

Last year, in this country of 30 million people, about 65,000 children went missing. Does that mean there were 65,000 abductions? No. This is the breakdown:

Other: 1,900
Parental Abduction: 416
Runaway: 50,450
Accident: 35
Wandered Off: 597
Unknown: 10,000

Okay– some numbers are missing. How many, of the 65,000, do you think were kidnapped by strangers– our worst nightmare about the fate of a missing child? More or less than “Wandered off”?

The answer is, 42.

Yes, forty-two. 42. Less than 50. In all of Canada, less than 50 children were abducted by strangers last year.

I suppose you could argue that some of the 10,000 “unknown” must have been kidnapped by strangers. You don’t think a parent would report an abducted child, if that was a real possibility?

Is the number going up as the headline implies?

No. No. No.

In 1987, there were 93 stranger abductions. The number is going down.

So, while we spend all our time worrying about stranger abductions, and while a lot of people use examples of stranger abductions to justify repressive government measures against pornography and increased prison terms for all crimes, the truth is that we would be much, much better served if we would simply try to be better parents. Our kids are far more likely to run away than they are to be abducted. They are more likely to wander off by themselves than be abducted. They are more likely to die in a car accident than to be abducted.

Even one abduction is too many. But there are a lot of politicians, police, and social critics who advocate unreasonable solutions for a problem that does not exist to the degree they would have you believe it exists.

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Go to Bed Crying for Scott Twaddle: He will be Your Inspiration

The United States Navy likes to take civilians on joy-rides on their submarines.

You can’t wait for your turn? You’ll have a long wait, unless you’re rich or famous, or well-connected. No, no, these rides are not for the people who pay for the submarines. These thrilling excursions are for people who, at a time of a threatening peace, are in a position to promote massive expenditures of your money on more, bigger, faster, deadlier submarines.

You see, there are a whole raft of deadly submarines out there, just waiting to whack us one with a big nuclear missile. These submarines come from our deadly foes, like… well, Britain might get mad at us someday. The Russians still aren’t fond of us, really. China? Someday they might well have a sub that comes back up after it submerges. And North Korea– rumour has it that they are plotting our final destruction at this very moment. So, yes, by all means, more $2 billion submersibles, please.

That’s why there are the joy rides. You see, Congress is not always as forthcoming with the money for these toys weapons deterrents as they should be. So they must be promoted. So if you are a Congressman and you and your famous or rich loved one would like a thrilling ride in a giant steel cigar, the navy will oblige.

But there are some limitations, my friends. If you and your significant other– one can’t imagine a submarine hosting Elton John and “friend”– go joy-riding together and the excursion happens to last more than a day, you are not allowed to bunk down together. Oh no, no, no! You must sleep in separate bunks. And the rules are spelled out in case you still don’t get it: no sex. We can’t have love on a submarine!

When the nuclear-powered attack submarine Greeneville hit a Japanese trawler, it was not out on a training mission as first reported. No, the training mission had been cancelled. But important visitors had been promised a ride so, at an operating cost of $25,000 a day, the navy obliged. The Greeneville was out on a joy ride. The Ehime Maru, the Japanese Trawler whose name barely rates a mention in the follow-up news stories, was out on a genuine training mission, teaching young people how to fish. They were out in the middle of a very big ocean. Then a nuclear-powered submarine on a joy ride bashed into their hull and sank them, and twelve people died.

The New York Times has published a lengthy article about the grief and despair experienced by the crew of the Greeneville! I may have missed a similar article on the families of the dead fishermen. I must have missed it. If I didn’t miss it, this weird apologia is a pathetic joke in extremely bad taste.

But if they ever published an article about the families of the dead fishermen, it is not listed in the links to this article. I’m afraid the suffering of these families did not rate the New York Times.

This article is interesting in a perverse way. I wouldn’t normally argue that the grief of the submariners or their wives should be completely over-looked or ignored. There is a place for genuine sympathy for crew members who didn’t make the mistake but worry about public perception that they were responsible for needless death.

We only honor them, after all, when they are responsible for needful death. We give them medals.

But this article attacks a perception that does not exist. Who out there, in his right mind, thinks that the working crew were responsible for this disaster? No one. We all know that it was the Navy brass that made the decision to go joy-riding, and the Navy brass that wanted visitors to experience the thrill and excitement of riding a death machine, and the commander of the sub who did not take adequate measures– measures that are normally required as a matter of policy– to ensure that no vessels were above them when they pulled their stunt.

The New York Times quotes a submariner’s spouse: ”

In 16 years here I’ve never faced that kind of crisis. It makes you get more loyal, more defensive. I’ve gone to bed crying for Scott Waddle. And his crew — it’s going to affect them for the rest of their lives.

One hopes she shed a tear or two for the families of the dead fishermen.

Why does the New York Times publish this drivel? Remember, we’re talking here about the poor submariners who got to sail back into port alive. Are you supposed to forget all about the Japanese fishermen and go, “oh, those poor submariners…”?

Well, we know why. Somebody got to the New York Times. I don’t mean in a sinister way. I mean that someone high-ranking in the Navy or government called an editor or the publisher at the New York Times and gave them a big lecture about how they were ignoring the sufferings of the poor crew and how they were needlessly damaging the reputation of the brave and courageous men of the armed forces. God help us, they might even have accused the New York Times of undermining NATIONAL SECURITY by giving needless focus to the families of the dead.

Like a rotting fish.

10 Years Later (2011)

How about that! Here it is about ten years later and all those people lamenting the fate of Commander Scott Twaddle… well, he’s now a motivational speaker. Here he is on Youtube.

Yes, people are paying a lot of money to hear Scott Twaddle twaddle about his astonishing courage in dealing with his own astonishing incompetence.  I hope part of his speech is about how people are so stupid that you can actually make a lot of money bragging about your biggest mistake.

Is this where Donald Trump got the idea of running for president?

You couldn’t make this shit up.

Sometimes I am truly flabbergasted by the turn of events… And other times, I am silenced by the unspeakable, incomprehensible absurdity of human behavior.