Forensic Psychology

Forensic Psychology

Forensic Psychology • Courtroom Uses: • Jury Selection (Voir Dire) • Competency for Hearings • Custody Cases • Investigational tools: • Polygraph and Brain-Fingerprinting • Hypnosis • Profiling

Forensic Psychology • Voir Dire - French for "to speak the truth." • Process through which potential jurors are questioned by either the judge or a lawyer to determine their suitability for jury service. • The preliminary questioning of witnesses to determine their competence to testify. • Ask Open Questions (questions begin with ‘what,’‘how,’‘could you,’‘would you.’) • Repeat the words the juror uses • Give verbal and nonverbal cues to keep jurors talking

Psychology • Tasks: • Testing for mental illness • Assessing suspects sanity • Estab. Mental state at time of crime • Competency to stand trial • Detect signs of deception and malingering (fake illness) • Insanity defense

Psychology • How forensic psychology used: • Assess role of alcohol/drugs • Determine sanity • Assess defendants understanding of reality and responsibility • State of mind at the time of the crime • Offer investigators info for use in witness/suspect interrogations • Psychological profile

Psychology • How forensic psychology used: • Pre-trial Uses • Crime Scene Analysis • Victimology • Interrogations • Eyewitnesses • Confessions • Profiling • Hypnosis

Psychology • How forensic psychology used: • During-trial Uses • Jury Selection • Competency to Stand trial • Defenses on Mental Disease or Defect • Legal Insanity • Diminished Capacity

Psychology • How forensic psychology used: • Post-trial Uses • Sentencing • Post trial commitment • Competency

Psychology • How forensic psychology used: • Psychological Autopsy • Witness Reliability • Stalking threat level • Profiling • Specific Examples

Recognizing Lying Suspects • Look for signs of nervousness • Read body language • Use Neuro-Linguistic Programming (eye movements) • Getting at the truth: • Lie-detectors (not allowed in court) • Hypnosis • Use of Drugs

Witness Reliability • Based on Long-standing science. • Based upon population genetics and empirical testing. • Development of extensive databases. • Practices and standards developed by wide-based scientific community and research (peer-reviewed papers). • Reliably estimated error rates and random matches

Project Innocence • "Project Innocence" was established in 1992 by Barry Scheck and Peter Neufeld in an attempt to use DNA evidence to exonerate wrongly convicted suspects. The Project handles cases where post-conviction DNA analysis could possibly lead to a "conclusive proof of innocence". According to the Innocence Project, 208people in 32 states have been exonerated through DNA testing through 2007.

DNA

Eyewitness • http://viscog.beckman.uiuc.edu/grafs/demos/15.html

DNA • Eyewitness 1st • FS Expert Testimony 63%! • FS Experts most likely witnesses to mislead: • Possibly due to training: 96% of forensic scientists have BS/BA or less - without training in scientific openness, caution and rigor. Based on Wrongful Convictions:

Competency • Mental retardation • Severe drug/alcohol addiction • Organic brain syndromes • Severe Neuroses • Psychoses and schiophrenias w/ altered perception of reality

Competency • Insanity • Rarely Used • Insanity (not guilty) vs Reduced capacity (guilty) • Insanity Def. “at the time of the committing of the act, the party accused was laboring under such a defect of reason, from a disease of the mind, as not to know the nature and quality of the act he was doing; or, if he did know it, that he did not know he was doing what was wrong.”

Profiling • How did the killer get at the victim? • What was done? • Cover track or in the open? • What was the attraction? • What was the motive? • Info: • Physical and psychological makeup • Areas of residence and work • Behaviors exhibited

Profiling • “Mad Bomber” • Terrorized NYC for 16 yrs with pipe bombs (1940s – 1950s); 33 bombs • First Bomb, 1940, to Con Ed “CON EDISON CROOKS—THIS IS FOR YOU” • 1940s “I WILL MAKE NO MORE BOMB UNITS FOR THE DURATION OF THE WAR—MY PATRIOTIC FEELINGS HAVE MADE ME DECIDE THIS—LATER I WILL BRING THE CON EDISON TO JUSTICE—THEY WILL PAY FOR THEIR DASTARDLY DEEDS... F.P” • No Good Leads after many tries.

Profiling • Male, as historically most bombers were male. Well proportioned and of average build • Forty to fifty years old, as paranoia develops slowly. Precise, neat and tidy, based on his letters and the workmanship of his bombs. An exemplary employee, on time and well-behaved. • A Slav, because bombs were favored in Middle Europe • Courteous but not friendly, good education but not college • Foreign born, oedipus complex • Loner, no friends, little interest in women, unmarried, perhaps living with mother, probably in Connecticut. • When caught, probably wearing a double-breasted suit - buttoned.

Profiling • George Metsky

“Disputed” Techniques • Brain Fingerprinting • Lie Detector • Control Question • Directed Lie • Guilty Knowledge Test • Hypnosis

Polygraph (Lie detector) • Inadmissable in most states - however, a number of family and juvenile courts have admitted polygraph results as evidence. • Selected physiological activities are simultaneously recorded - A polygraph instrument will collect physiological data from at least three systems in the human body. Rubber tubes are placed over the examinee's chest and abdominal area record respiratory activity. Two small metal plates, attached to the fingers, will record sweat gland activity, and a blood pressure cuff, or similar device will record cardiovascular activity.

Brain Fingerprinting • Uses ecg

Hypnosis • Trance State- characterized by extreme suggestibility, relaxation and heightened imagination • Heightened State of Awareness - like daydreaming • Fully Conscious • Self-hypnosis - movies, etc.

Hypnosis • People have been entering hypnotic-type trances for thousands and thousands of years - meditation (religion). • Scientific conception of hypnotism wasn't born until the late 1700s. • The father of modern hypnotism is Franz Mesmer, an Austrian physician. Mesmer believed hypnosis to be a mystical force flowing from the hypnotist into the subject (he called it "animal magnetism").

Hypnosis • Approach suggestions and ideas as if they were real….BUT, all they time you’re aware it’s not real - like play pretending on a very intense level. • Highly Suggestible BUT your sense of safety and mortality remain - the hypnotist cannot make you do something you don’t want to do.

Hypnosis • How? Hypnosis is a way to access a person's subconscious mind directly. • Theorized that deep relaxation and focusing exercises of hypnotism work to calm and subdue the conscious mind so that it takes a less active role in your thinking process. In this state, you're still aware of what's going on, but your conscious mind takes a back seat to your subconscious mind. This allows the hypnotist to work directly with the subconscious.

Hypnosis Hypnotists say that subjects under hypnosis are a lot like little kids: playful and imaginative, fully embracing bizarre suggestions.

Hypnosis • The subconscious regulates your bodily sensations, such as taste, touch and sight, as well as your emotional feelings and the storehouse of your memories.

Hypnosis • Requirements: • The subject must want to be hypnotized. • The subject must believe they can be hypnotized. • The subject must eventually feel comfortable and relaxed. • Techniques: • Fixed-gaze induction or eye fixation • Rapid • Progressive relaxation and imagery • Loss of balance

Hypnosis • Before hypnotists bring a subject into a full trance, they generally test the willingness and capacity to be hypnotized. The typical testing method is to make several simple suggestions, such as "Relax your arms completely," and work up to suggestions that ask the subject to suspend disbelief or distort normal thoughts, such as "Pretend you are weightless.

Forensic Hypnosis • Forensic hypnotism, investigators access a subject's deep, repressed memories of a past crime to help identify a suspect or fill in details of the case. Since hypnotists may lead subjects to form false memories, this technique is still very controversial in the forensics world.

Forensic Psychology