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Friday, March 16, 2012

Are You an Innocent RSO ?

                              Are You an Innocent RSO ?

    Are you an innocent man who was falsely accused and wrongly convicted of a sex crime who now is forced to register as a sex offender ? If so, tell us you story. Alot of our readers claim innocence. Did you go to trial ? Why were you falsely accused ? Has registration made you life impossible ? How has your family been effected ? Were you attacked in prison ? Tell us your story. Click on the comment link below and have at it. We look forward from hearing from you.

SO Laws Based on Rage and Fear

<>From: Corrections.com<>
http://www.corrections.com/news/article/30085-sex-offender-laws-are-based-on-rage-and-fear

Sex Offender Laws Are Based On Rage and Fear
By Chris Dornin, Retired Statehouse reporter
Published: 03/12/2012

Female-judge-w Nine-year-old Jessica Lunsford was kidnapped from her Florida home, raped and buried alive in February 2005. Lawmakers filed the 82-page Jessica Lunsford Act in her memory on April 1. Gov. Jeb Bush signed the new law on May 2. That’s light speed for any legislature. It passed unanimously in both houses.

The most draconian sex offender code in America at the time had a mandatory 25-year minimum sentence for any sex crime against a child under age 12. The bid was life without parole for perpetrators older than 17.

Bill O’Reilly of FOX News urged viewers to push their governors for even tougher laws to protect kids. “This is literally a life-and-death battle to save our youngest and most vulnerable citizens from abuse, torture, and murder,” O’Reilly warned. “I hope you'll do your part.”

New Hampshire and 16 other states had passed versions of Jessica’s Law within a year. That’s how sex offender laws get made. By rage and fear in a hurry.

“People who prey on children are the most dangerous criminals in our state, targeting our most precious and vulnerable citizens,” Gov. John Lynch told the New Hampshire Senate Judiciary Committee. “It is time for us to send a clear message in New Hampshire. If you prey on children, we will send you to prison, and we are going to keep you there for a long time.”

Rep. Peter Batula, prime sponsor of the predator bill, said the state needed to keep from becoming “a haven for sexual predators to move over the borders.”

NH Attorney General Kelley Ayotte told senators about 17 repeat sex offenders who had gotten off too lightly. She testified that the sex offense recidivism rate for pedophiles “is between 90 and 94 percent. Offenders who sexually abuse children have a lifelong problem that is not amendable to treatment.”

Sex offender laws have bred a universal hysteria about sex offenders by branding them all as equally and intolerably dangerous. The Michigan public registry law promises to help the public know about sexual predators living near them “who, by virtue of relatively high recidivism rates among such offenders and the devastating impact that sex crimes have on society, pose a serious threat to society.”

The US Justice Department made the same argument before the U.S. Supreme Court in the landmark Alaska v John Doe case. The court ruled that the Alaska public registry is not an ex post facto punishment. In their amicus brief, the feds said sex offenders pose a huge threat because of their high recidivism rates and the injury they inflict on children.

New Hampshire State Sen. David Boutin sponsored a bill two years ago to encourage police departments to use active public notice when sex offenders are released into a neighborhood. He filed the legislation to please constituents hoping to drive all the sex offenders from his home town. Joel Dutton, a man on the sex offender registry there, had been charged with a new sex crime. When Dutton made bail, his neighbors started a website against him with these and similar comments:

"You show true restraint by not beating the tar out of this lowlife." Chris Johnson

"I hope you guys get rid of the bastard. What a piece of crap." MTgirl

"This is an incestuous family of whack-jobs and psychopaths, and it makes me feel good to know they are going down." Steve

"Hang'em high and let the sun set on em. Only in a perfect world right? Haha" Josh T

Boutin echoed those feelings in Senate testimony for his legislation. "Late September of 2009 a convicted child sex offender heinously struck again and was charged with felonious sexual assault against a 7 year old Hooksett girl," Boutin told lawmakers. "Quick adoption of this bill and dissemination of notification guidelines to local law enforcement will go a long way towards preventing another sexual assault, with regrettable consequences for the victim, family and community, who all share in the burden of the pain."

Boutin failed to mention that the prosecutor had already dropped the case against Dutton for lack of evidence. A neighbor had accused Dutton of molesting his own niece, who still lives with Dutton, his wife, and his brother in law. The bill died on the Senate floor, even in an election year

A growing body of research calls into question the wisdom of all this crusading against sex offenders. Dr. Karl Hanson, a corrections researcher for the Canadian Department of Public Safety, is a pioneer in the risk assessment of sex offenders. He has also co-authored numerous studies of sex offender recidivism, including several meta-analyses that followed large groups of offenders over many years. One of his projects found a 13.4 percent sex offense recidivism rate after five years. Another reported a 14.3 percent after six years. A third found a 14 percent rate after five years, 20 percent after 10 years and 24 percent after 15 years.

Recent American studies suggest even lower rates. One by Sarah Schelle of the Indiana Department of Corrections, entitled “Juvenile Recidivism, 2010,” said that only two of 71 juvenile sex offenders released in 2007 had committed new sex offense within three years. That’s a 2.8 percent sex offense recidivism rate, although the sample size was small and the tracking period was shorter than Hanson used. The comparable rate for hundreds of adult sex offenders in Indiana the same year was 1.05 percent three years after release.

A report in July 2011 led by Mark Rubin of the University of Southern Maine’s Muskie School of Public Service followed 900 sex offenders released from prison or probation in Maine between 2004 and 2008. Within three years after release 3.8 percent had been convicted of a new sex crime. The study entitled “Sexual Assault Trends and Sex Offender Recidivism in Maine, 2010” can be found online
by clicking here.

Rubin told the Portland Press Herald the public still thinks sex offenders have high re-offense rates. “There’s really no data to support that theory,” he told the newspaper.

A report in March 2012 by the State of Connecticut tracked 746 sex offenders for five years after release from prison in 2005. Only 3.6 percent had been charged with a new sex crime, 2.7 percent were convicted, and 1.7 percent had returned to prison for that new crime. The author of the report, Ivan Kuzyk, noted these low rates contradict a conventional wisdom that sex offenders have very high sexual re-offense rates. “The real challenge for public agencies is to determine the level of risk which specific offenders pose (to) the public," Kuzyk said. Here is
the full report.

I wrote a piece for Corrections.com a couple of years ago entitled
“Facts and Fiction about Sex Offenders ”, which summarized similar low American sex offense recidivism rates in study after study: 1.2 percent after two years in Britain; 3 percent after 4.3 years in Iowa; 8 percent after a decade in Ohio; 5.3 percent after three years in a 15-state federal study; 3 percent after three years in Alaska; 4.7 percent after three years in Tennessee; 2 percent after three years in West Virginia; 3.38 percent after 10 years in California; 7.2 percent after 25 years in Utah; 2.3 percent after three years in Arizona; 3.8 percent after three years in Delaware; 2.4 percent after three years in Illinois; 1.8 percent after three years in New Mexico; 4 percent after three years in South Carolina. My article on this literature is still available elsewhere on corrections.com.

Hanson said the earliest Canadian and American sex offense recidivism studies found unusually high rates because the investigators looked only at high- and medium-risk populations. Most were repeat offenders to begin with. Hanson is familiar with the recent U.S. studies, but questions some of those low numbers because parolees in states like Iowa and Alaska can return to prison after a new sex offense without counting officially as re-offenders.

“I know that first-hand,” Hanson said. “The way they capture their data underestimates the recidivism. And not all repeat offenders go back to prison. Or they might return in a different state.”

In an unlikely alliance, victim advocates have begun standing up for sex offenders in litigation and battles over legislation. Atty. Margie Slagle wrote an amicus brief representing the Cleveland and Texas rape crisis centers in the Williams v Ohio case. They intervened on the side of the plaintiff, a sex offender challenging the public registry law before the Ohio Supreme Court as an ex post facto punishment. Slagle helped Williams to win last summer. Below is a passage from her brief.
While protecting Ohioans from sex offenders is a compelling interest-and indeed, it is the core mission of the amici- none of the changes implemented as part of Ohio's AWA has been proven to achieve that goal. Research shows that the law's more burdensome requirements on law enforcement, the public, and sex offenders can cause higher levels of recidivism and thus pose increased danger to the community. More onerous sex offender registration and community notification laws threaten to harm the very people they are intended to protect and to undermine goals of community safety and treatment of offenders. These laws perpetuate myths and create a false sense of security.

Research demonstrates that victimization can be reduced when sex offenders successfully reenter the community. These changes also put law enforcement agencies, already in budgetary crises, in the position of spending precious dollars on monitoring low risk individuals with a limited impact on public safety. Thus, any argument that Ohio's AWA is simply a remedial law designed to protect children and the public from sexual abuse and sex crimes is seriously flawed. Ohio's AWA is not based on empirical evidence or proven research, but on fear and misinformation.


In an interview, Slagle said prosecutors and other officials pander for votes by playing the sex offender card. “The sad truth is we leave parents and children more vulnerable when lawmakers pass laws based on myth and not facts,” she said. “The public registry makes thing so difficult for them. Part of rehabilitation is getting them accepted back into the community.”

Hanson said the research fails to support claims that the public sex offender registries deter sex crimes or prevent recidivism. “The recidivism rates before and after implementation of registries are essentially the same,” he explained. “When policies are going to affect other people, it is worth collecting data first.”

Chris Dornin is a former New Hampshire State House reporter and the founder of Citizens for Criminal Justice Reform. In the interest of full disclosure, he helped to kill Sen. Boutin’s active notification bill.
Other articles by Dornin

Over 600 Million $ for CA County Jails

From : LA Times
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/california-politics/2012/03/california-prison-budget.html
California writes $602-million check for local jail construction

L.A. County inmates at a church service
California will dish out $602 million for local jail construction in 11 counties, state officials announced Thursday. The money is intended to help county facilities handle an influx of inmates, part of Gov. Jerry Brown’s realignment strategy to reduce chronic overcrowding at state prisons.
“This provides a major boost for California counties to house local inmates safely and effectively,” Matthew Cate, secretary of the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, said in a statement.
Los Angeles, Orange and Riverside counties were awarded the most money: $100 million each. Twenty counties applied for the money.
The funding, provided through the sale of bonds, was approved by the Legislature last year. So far, $1.2 billion has been awarded to 22 counties.

California is trying to reduce its state prison population to 110,000 inmates by mid-2013 to comply with a U.S. Supreme Court ruling, the result of lawsuits saying prison conditions constituted cruel and unusual punishment. Right now there are roughly 131,200 inmates in state lockups.Low-level offenders now remain in local jails instead of being sent to state prisons, and the state has promised to send more money to counties to help them deal with the influx.
RELATED:
Federal oversight of state prison healthcare to end
Slideshow: Delivering healthcare in California prisons
Inmate advocates question state's commitment to prison healthcare
-- Chris Megerian in Sacramento

No One to Blame But Ourselves

From: Johnny California

No One to Blame But Ourselves: Jessica’s Law is a California Voter Approved Disaster
prop83mapBack in 2006, Californians voted in “Jessica’s Law” (Prop 83) by a 70% majority. Jessica’s Law prohibits registered sex offenders from living 2,000 feet from schools, churches, parks, playgrounds and other places frequented by kids. Under the law, cities and counties are allowed to pass additional restrictions.
So two years into Jessica’s law, how is it working out? The LA Times reports:
A state panel is urging the governor and legislators to change “Jessica’s Law,” saying its restrictions on where sex offenders can live are counterproductive and calling the nearly $25 million a year spent to house them a poor use of taxpayers’ money.
The residency restrictions, passed by voters more than two years ago in Proposition 83, have never been shown to prevent new crimes and may reduce public safety, the panel says…
…Barring sex offenders from living within 2,000 feet of schools, parks and other areas where children gather has driven many into homelessness, an unstable situation that can propel them back to crime, according to the [Sex Offender Management] Board…
…”It seems unwise to spend such resources as a consequence of residence restriction policies which have no track record of increasing community safety,” board members wrote.
This should come as a surprise to nobody. Why? Because in the runup to the 2006 election, we were warned that this was going to happen.
Here’s one example of reports that ran before the ’06 election. From the October 30, 2006 L.A. Times:
As Californians prepare to vote next week on Proposition 83, which would impose a similar residency ban, Iowa is becoming an example of the unintended consequences of such measures.

Prosecutors, police officials and even victims rights groups say the crackdown has backfired, driving some offenders into rural towns and leaving others grouped at motels, campgrounds, freeway rest stops or on the streets.

Many have simply gone underground, authorities say, with more than twice as many registered sex offenders now considered missing than before the law took effect…

“These guys are off the radar scope, and we’ve got no idea where they are,” said Bill Vaughn, chief deputy of the Polk County Sheriff’s Department in Des Moines.

All around the Hawkeye State, police and sheriff’s deputies say they are overwhelmed by the task of chasing down child molesters who violate the residency law. And although they don’t often pity sex felons, authorities say the house-hunting challenge faced by the ex-cons is almost insurmountable.

“When they call and ask where they can legally live, my response is, ‘Do you know anybody in Nebraska?’ ” said Des Moines Police Sgt. Barry Arnold. “It’s a nightmare.”

Iowa prosecutors agree. Their statewide association earlier this year declared the law a failure and asked the Legislature to pursue a different strategy to protect children from sex crimes.

The Iowa Coalition Against Sexual Assault, representing victims, echoed that request. Executive Director Elizabeth Barnhill said Iowans are less safe now because sex offenders, facing banishment, are absconding in large numbers.
That’s right. The Iowa Prosecutors Association AND the Coalition Against Sexual Assault, a group which represents sexual assault victims were AGAINST Prop 83. The Iowa Prosecutors even warned Californians about the perils of Jessica’s Law before the ’06 election. These warnings were in all the voting materials and on the actual ’06 ballot.
A year after the law was enacted, city governments started to complain about enforcement problems. State Senator and Jessica’s Law author George Runner (R-Lancaster) put a statement up on his website dismissing the law’s critics. Here’s our favorite part:
Distancing sex offenders 2,000 feet from schools, parks and other places where children gather is another contemporary idea, and one that California voters have embraced. Parents simply don’t want sex offenders living across the street from schools and parks. Again, a few cities have cried foul, claiming that it is nearly impossible to find housing with the distancing restriction and thus homelessness among sex offenders is sure to occur in abundance. But so far, the claims have been based on guesswork, not actual incidents of homelessness.
And even now, after Jessica’s Law has been discredited by everyone, Runner is still clinging to his twisted dream. The LA Times reports:
Responding to the criticism that residency restrictions have no benefit to public safety, state Sen. George Runner (R-Lancaster), an author of the initiative, said, “I do believe the general public would say a child molester should not live across the street from a school.”
Of course the general public would say that. But if the general public later found out that it was safer to have a convicted child molester living across the street from a school in plain sight rather than camped out in the woods where no one can find him, one would hope that the general public would change their mind.
Or maybe not. Before the 2006 election, voters also ignored this map which showed that registered sex offenders would be relegated to living in remote, hard-to-track areas (the Iowa problem) or the deserts and mountains (which are uninhabitable). Actually, they probably did see this map and liked what they saw — this is precisely why things like Jessica’s Law should never be put to a popular vote.

Gov. Schwarzenegger, who endorsed Jessica’s Law saw this coming. Earlier this week, before the LA Times story hit, his office issued this press release announcing that pursuant to another provision of Jessica’s Law, all 6,622 paroled sex offenders now wear an GPS ankle bracelet.
What the press release didn’t mention is that the GPS only applies to those 6,622 parolee, not the 80,000 registered sex offenders who have completed parole. The GPS is removed after parole is over, but the residency requirement lasts forever.

SO Case Raises More Questions About Jessica's Law


Published: 2012-03-13

Recent Sex Offender Case Raises Questions about CA Law

The recent settlement between the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) and convicted sex offender Charles Small illustrates come of the problems Jessica’s Law has created regarding diagnosis and appropriate incarceration of sex offenders.
Charles Small is a sex offender who has been difficult to diagnose. His troubled past includes two arrests for indecent exposure, one incident of fondling a woman and a four-year conviction for molesting a nine-year-old girl, as well as marital problems and an addiction to alcohol. His varied past has complicated his present, due in part to Jessica’s Law, the California sex offender law enacted in 2007 that expands law enforcement’s ability to identify, track and arrest sex offenders.
Jessica’s Law requires that certain individuals residing in California who have been convicted of sex crimes live at least 2,000 feet from schools and parks and be monitored by GPS for life. It also requires that sex offenders who violate the conditions of their parole be arrested, evaluated for their degree of sexual violence and possibly returned to prison. Additionally, it increases penalties for violent predators and makes more offenders eligible for civil commitment to a mental health institution instead of parole.
The Case of Charles Small
Small’s encounter with Jessica’s Law occurred four years after he served his sentence for the molestation of a nine-year-old girl. Small was to be released from prison on February 5, 2007, after serving a six-month sentence for an alcohol-related parole violation. Under Jessica’s Law, Small was eligible for evaluation because he violated his parole. Since other state laws allow the CDCR to hold an inmate beyond his or her initial sentence if it has probable cause that the inmate is sexually violent, Small’s release date was extended to March 25th.
Five days before Small was to be released, the Department of Mental Health (DMH) began its evaluation and subjected Small to four rigorous mental health interviews over four days. Three of the four evaluators diagnosed Small with “paraphilia not otherwise specified,” a diagnosis used for those with varied sexual deviances. After reviewing the evaluators’ recommendations, the DMH determined that Small should be civilly committed.
On March 26th, the district attorney filed its petition to commit Small, but it was one day too late, since Small was scheduled to be released on the 25th and state law requires that the civil commitment process be conducted while the inmate is still in custody. The legal proceedings to determine whether or not the petition was valid took almost another year, and Small was held in prison until March 10th, 2008, when the Court of Appeals ruled that the petition was not valid since it was filed the day after Small was supposed to be released.
Wider Implications
Prior to Jessica’s Law, the DMH conducted an average of 50 referrals per month. After the law went into effect, this number jumped to over 720 in January 2007 alone. The district attorney tried to use this influx of cases as the reason for the delay in the petition, but district court and the court of appeals ruled that this was not a viable reason for keeping Small detained an extra 349 days. The CDCR settled with Small in 2011 for the time Small was unlawfully imprisoned.
Small’s case illustrates the problems Jessica’s Law poses for those accused and convicted of sexual offenses. It grants law enforcement a wide berth in identifying and arresting offenders and slaps harsh and lasting punishments on those convicted. Its far-reaching provisions lead to cases like Small’s, where a parole violation for possession of alcohol can lead to an extra year in prison and evaluation of sexual deviances for a crime that occurred almost half a decade earlier.
Jessica’s Law makes it all the more imperative that Californians accused of a sexual offense seek experienced counsel who understands the reach of the law. If you or a loved one has been accused of such a crime, please contact an experienced criminal defense attorney.

Saturday, March 10, 2012

Wikipedia - False Accusations of Rape

False accusation of rape
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
    
A false accusation of rape is a false allegation of a forcible sexual assault. Detailed investigations using differing samples and methodologies have found results ranging from 1.5% to 45% of rape accusations being false. As a scientific matter, the frequency of false rape complaints to police or other legal authorities is difficult to determine and the absolute value remains unknown.[1]

Contents

[hide]

[edit] FBI statistics

FBI reports consistently put the number of "unfounded" rape accusations around 8%. The average rate of unfounded reports for Index crimes is 2%.[2] However, “unfounded” is not synonymous with false allegation.[3] Bruce Gross of the Forensic Examiner's says that:
This statistic is almost meaningless, as many of the jurisdictions from which the FBI collects data on crime use different definitions of, or criteria for, "unfounded." That is, a report of rape might be classified as unfounded (rather than as forcible rape) if the alleged victim did not try to fight off the suspect, if the alleged perpetrator did not use physical force or a weapon of some sort, if the alleged victim did not sustain any physical injuries, or if the alleged victim and the accused had a prior sexual relationship. Similarly, a report might be deemed unfounded if there is no physical evidence or too many inconsistencies between the accuser's statement and what evidence does exist. As such, although some unfounded cases of rape may be false or fabricated, not all unfounded cases are false.[4]

[edit] British Home Office

The largest and most rigorous study was commissioned by the British Home Office and based on 2,643 sexual assault cases (Kelly, Lovett, and Regan, 2005). Of these, 8% were classified by the police department as false reports. Yet the researchers noted that some of these classifications were based simply on the personal judgments of the police investigators and were made in violation of official criteria for establishing a false allegation. Closer analysis of this category applying the Home Office counting rules for establishing a false allegation and excluding cases where the application of the cases where confirmation of the designation was uncertain reduced the percentage of false reports to 3%. The researchers concluded that "one cannot take all police designations at face value" and that "[t]here is an over-estimation of the scale of false allegations by both police officers and prosecutors." Moreover, they added:
The interviews with police officers and complainants’ responses show that despite the focus on victim care, a culture of suspicion remains within the police, even amongst some of those who are specialists in rape investigations. There is also a tendency to conflate false allegations with retractions and withdrawals, as if in all such cases no sexual assault occurred. This reproduces an investigative culture in which elements that might permit a designation of a false complaint are emphasised (later sections reveal how this also feeds into withdrawals and designation of ‘insufficient evidence’), at the expense of a careful investigation, in which the evidence collected is evaluated.[5][6]

[edit] Police in Victoria (Australia)

Another large-scale study was conducted in Australia, with the 850 rapes reported to the Victoria police between 2000 and 2003 (Heenan & Murray, 2006). Using both quantitative and qualitative methods, the researchers examined 812 cases with sufficient information to make an appropriate determination, and found that 2.1% of these were classified by police as false reports. All of these complainants were then charged or threatened with charges for filing a false police report.[7]

[edit] Kanin's report

In 1994, Dr. Eugene J. Kanin of Purdue University investigated the incidences of false rape allegations made to the police in one small urban community between 1978 and 1987. He states that unlike those in many larger jurisdictions, this police department had the resources to "seriously record and pursue to closure all rape complaints, regardless of their merits." He further states each investigation "always involves a serious offer to polygraph the complainants and the suspects" and "the complainant must admit that no rape had occurred. She is the sole agent who can say that the rape charge is false." The number of false rape allegations in the studied period was 45; this was 41% of the 109 total complaints filed in this period.[8]

[edit] Criticism

Critics of Dr. Kanin's report include Dr. David Lisak, an associate professor of psychology and director of the Men’s Sexual Trauma Research Project at the University of Massachusetts Boston. In an article in the September/October 2007 issue (vol. 11 no. 1) of the Sexual Assault Report, titled "False allegations of rape: a critique of Kanin," he states "Kanin’s 1994 article on false allegations is a provocative opinion piece, but it is not a scientific study of the issue of false reporting of rape. It certainly should never be used to assert a scientific foundation for the frequency of false allegations." Lisak cites page 13 of Investigating Sexual Assaults from the International Association of Chiefs of Police which says polygraph tests for sexual assault victims are contraindicated in the investigation process and that their use is "based on the misperception that a significant percentage of sexual assault reports are false." Lisak argues that "It is noteworthy that the police department from which Kanin derived his data used or threatened to use the polygraph in every case… The fact that it was the standard procedure of this department provides a window on the biases of the officers who conducted the rape investigations, biases that were then echoed in Kanin’s unchallenged reporting of their findings."
Bruce Gross writes in the Forensic Examiner that Kanin's study is an example of the limitations of existing studies on false rape accusations. "Small sample sizes and non-representative samples preclude generalizability."[4]

[edit] McDowell, 1985

In an Air Force study of 1,128 complaints made on Air Force bases between 1980 and 1984, Charles McDowell found that 45% of allegations were false, here defined as the complainant saying that the complaint was false during the initial investigation, or before taking or after failing a polygraph test.[4] Bruce Gross writes in the Forensic Examiner that McDowell's study is an example of the limitations of existing studies on false rape accusations. "Small sample sizes and non-representative samples preclude generalizability."[4]

[edit] Rumney

A 2006 paper by N.S. Rumney in the Cambridge Law Journal provided an exhaustive account of studies of false reporting in the USA, New Zealand and the UK.[9] A tabulated list of studies on false reporting published between 1968 and 2005 placed the percentage of false reports between a minimum on 1.5% (Theilade and Thomsen, 1986) and a maximum of 90% (Stewart, 1981).
Rumney notes that early researchers tended to accept uncritically Freudian theories which purported to explain the prevalence of false allegations, while in more recent literature there has been "a lack of critical analysis of those who claim a low false reporting rate and the uncritical adoption of unreliable research findings" (p. 157). Rumney concludes that "as a consequence of such deficiencies within legal scholarship, factual claims have been repeatedly made that have only limited empirical support. This suggests widespread analytical failure on the part of legal scholarship and requires an acknowledgment of the weakness of assumptions that have been constructed on unreliable research evidence."

[edit] Lisak

Dr. David Lisak's study, published in 2010 in Violence Against Women, classified 8 out of the 136 (5.9%) reported rapes at Northwestern University over a ten year period to be false.[10]

[edit] Other

DiCanio (1993) states that while researchers and prosecutors do not agree on the exact percentage of false allegations, they generally agree on a range of 2% to 8%.[11]
Taylor (1987) wrote that "suspicion and disbelief of women who charge men with rape have for centuries had a stranglehold on [...] laws nominally designed to protect women against rape. As a result, many women did not report or prosecute rapes because the process was so often humiliating."[12]

[edit] See Also

[edit] References

  1. ^ The Legacy of the Prompt Complaint Requirement, Corroboration Requirement, and Cautionary Instructions on Campus Sexual Assault Forthcoming
  2. ^ Crime Index Offenses Reported[dead link] 1996
  3. ^ http://www.oregonsatf.org/resources/docs/False_Allegations.pdf
  4. ^ a b c d False Rape Allegations: An Assault On Justice
  5. ^ A gap or a chasm? Attrition in reported rape cases Home Office Research - February 2005
  6. ^ Cybulska B (July 2007). "Sexual assault: key issues". J R Soc Med 100 (7): 321–4. doi:10.1258/jrsm.100.7.321. PMC 1905867. PMID 17606752. http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?tool=pmcentrez&artid=1905867.
  7. ^ "Abstracts Database - National Criminal Justice Reference Service". Ncjrs.gov. http://www.ncjrs.gov/app/abstractdb/AbstractDBDetails.aspx?id=243182. Retrieved 2010-12-31.
  8. ^ Kanin, Eugene J., "False Rape Allegations", Archives of Sexual Behavior, Vol. 23, No. 1, Feb 1994, p. 81. (MS Word document at the Internet Archive)
  9. ^ Rumney, N.S., "False Allegations of Rape", Cambridge Law Journal, 65, March, 2006, pp.128-158
  10. ^ Lisak D., Gardinier L., Nicksa SC., Cote AM. (2010). False allegations of sexual assualt: an analysis of ten years of reported cases. Violence Against Women. 2010 Dec; 16(12):1318-34.
  11. ^ DiCanio, M. (1993). The encyclopedia of violence : origins, attitudes, consequences. New York : Facts on File
  12. ^ Taylor, J. Rape and women's credibility: Problems of recantations and false accusations echoed in the case of Cathleen Crowell Webb and Gary Dotson. Harvard Women's Law Journal (now Harvard Journal of Law & Gender), 1987, volume 10, page 59

National Center for Reason and Justice - Links of Interest

From: National Center for Reason and Justice http://ncrj.org/

 

Links of Interest

Freeing the Innocent

Preventing Wrongful Convictions

Reforming the Law

General

Human Rights Watch Investigation

Thanks Sex Offender Issues: http://sexoffenderissues.blogspot.com/

Human Rights Watch Project - The harmful impact of sex offender registration and notification laws on children

I am conducting a nationwide investigation for Human Rights Watch on the harmful impact of sex offender registration and notification laws on children. This project will focus on documenting and advocating against the human rights violations that stem from subjecting children to such laws. Three general concerns are:


  1. First, the laws can be overbroad in scope and overlong in duration, requiring child offenders to register who pose no safety risk.
  2. Second, given the easy public access to online sex offender registries, registrants may be subjected to public humiliation, harassment, and violence. In certain cultural or religious communities, the registration requirements can harm a young person’s ability to practice their religion or enjoy their cultural rights.
  3. Third, residency restrictions can have the effect of banishing registrants from entire geographical areas, forcing them to live far from their homes and families. The risk of public humiliation, family separation, and de facto community banishment can be particularly harmful for youth, including by harming the mental health and developmental progress of youth. The subjects I am looking to interview include, but are not limited to, persons with information relevant to the concerns outlined above who meet the following characteristics and categories;
    • Children (under the age of 18) who have been adjudicated delinquent or convicted as an adult of a sex offense that either;
      • Subjects (or subjected them) to sex offender registration and notification laws. This can include residency restrictions, zoning restrictions, housing restrictions, etc.
      • Were subjected to registration or notification laws but successfully petitioned to get off the registry
      • Were subject to registration and notification laws but aged out of the juvenile justice system and no longer are required to register.
    • Family Members affected by a child relative subject to registration and notification. Family members can also include siblings, cousins, grandparents, aunts/uncles, coaches, clergy, foster parents, teacher, principals, or anyone in a guardian/mentor-like position in the child’s life that was indirectly affected by the child’s registration status.
    • Attorneys representing children in underlying criminal proceedings or adjudications.
    • Government Officials A Government official in this case can be a probation officer, a judge, prosecutor, mandatory sex offender treatment provider, sex offender registration group treatment provider, police officer, interstate compact on juvenile official, etc.

Interviews with a wide variety of people from the above categories is essential to the success of this investigation and publication of findings. Every interviewee will have the right to refuse participation and / or to provide information confidentially.

Please contact me by email or phone with the name and contact information of the potential interviewees. If the subject is homeless or does not have access to email or phone, please contact me so we can discuss alternate ways to reach out to them.


NICOLE PITTMAN, ESQ.
Soros Senior Justice Advocacy Fellow
HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH
1441 Sansom Street #729
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19102
Tel: (267) 765-6766
Fax: (267) 765-6981

CA RSOL Meeting March 24,2012

California RSOL

California Reform Sex Offender Laws

CA RSOL TO MEET IN ORANGE COUNTY MARCH 24


California RSOL will conduct its first meeting of registrants, family members and supporters in Orange County on March 24. The meeting will begin at 1 p.m. and be held at Holy Ground Church, 7699 9th Street, Suite 106, Buena Park 90621. The meeting is free and will focus upon challenges experienced by registrants. Speakers will include attorneys, psychotherapists, and registrants who have successfully obtained relief from residency restrictions.

Friday, March 9, 2012

Barbaric Penile Plethysmography Testing

From: False Rape Society
http://falserapesociety.blogspot.com/2011/01/barbaric-penile-plethysmograph.html

Barbaric penile plethysmography testing (requiring the subjects to masturbate) motivated by a desire to humiliate male sex offenders

We hear about so many terrible injustices in writing this blog that we've developed a relatively high threshold for being thoroughly disgusted. What disgusts us most are government policies that endanger the liberty of men and boys, or otherwise chip away at their rights. The subject of this post thoroughly disgusts us.

Men accused of rape are often subjected to polygraphs as a condition to having even flimsy charges dropped. (Rape accusers are, of course, legally exempted from taking them.) Moreover, polygraphs are routinely used to insure that sex offenders, predominantly male, are adhering to the terms of their probation, and a refusal to take the polygraph will land the refusing party in jail.

But there is something far more invasive that men and boys convicted of sex offenses are forced to endure as a condition of their probation: penile plethysmograph testing, clinically called "PPG" testing and non-clinically called "Peter Meter" testing. In PPG testing, men and boys are subjected to a sort a junk science polygraph of their penises, which typically requires them to masturbate (and no, I'm not making that up).

PPG testing is a procedure that "involves placing a pressure-sensitive device around a man's penis, presenting him with an array of sexually stimulating images, and determining his level of sexual attraction by measuring minute changes in his erectile responses." Jason R. Odeshoo, Of Penology and Perversity: The Use of Penile Plethysmography on Convicted Child Sex Offenders, 14 Temp.Pol.&Civ.Rts.Rev. 1, 2 (2004). Such testing has become routine in adult sexual offender treatment programs, with perhaps 25 percent of adult sex offender programs employing the procedure to varying degrees. It is often imposed as a condition of supervised release (probation), and is used to determine treatment and even as a basis to decide whether someone should be released from custody or from a treatment program. The device is routinely used at civil commitment facilities where thousands of sex offenders are confined or restricted beyond their prison terms under civil commitment laws on the books in numerous states. And, yes, boys as young as twelve are sometimes subjected to the procedure.

I can assure you that many an innocent man or boy has been forced to endure this humiliating procedure. It is also wrong, by any measure, that men and boys who were properly convicted of sex offenses are forced to tolerate a procedure that a witch doctor would feel comfortable with just to achieve his liberty. It is well to note that results of such testing are not admissible in criminal trials because the testing is considered unreliable due to the absence of standardization, results that are not sufficiently accurate, results that are subject to faking and voluntary control by test subjects, the high incidence of false negatives and false positives, and the fact that results are open to interpretation. Yet, this horrid device is allowed to be used to affect the liberty of significant numbers of men and boys. And hardly anyone gives a damn.

Ask yourself whether women's groups would tolerate a procedure that forces women and girls to masturbate as a condition of their probations. The question scarcely survives its statement.

Let's describe the "testing" by quoting extensively from a law review article written by someone familiar with it. Read this, and remind yourself that you are not reading "Clockwork Orange" or some erotic science fiction:

Sex offenders may be required to undergo PPG examinations during various phases of the criminal justice process. For example, when an individual is convicted of committing a sex crime and sentenced to a term of imprisonment, he may be required by prison authorities (on pain of losing various inmate privileges) to participate in a sex offender treatment program of which PPG is a component. Similarly, when a convicted sex offender becomes eligible for parole, a court may condition his release into the community upon his willingness to undergo periodic PPG examinations. In some cases, probation or pretrial services recommends the test; in others, the test is recommended by clinicians working in court-ordered treatment programs. The procedure can cost up to $ 1000 per session to administer, and subjects are typically required to pay the expense. The number of sessions and the intervals between them varies from one defendant to the next.

PPG examinations are customarily performed in a prison or, particularly in the case of parolees, in privately-operated treatment facilities under contract with government probation services. The degree of privacy afforded to subjects during the procedure varies considerably. In many cases, those undergoing the test are stationed in a private room and cannot be seen by the clinician. Communication is maintained via microphone. In other cases, subject and clinician are separated only by a curtain. Still other researchers suggest that it is optimal for the administrator to be able to monitor the client through a window or one-way mirror during testing. In rare instances, administrators have apparently even attempted to videotape the procedure.

Prior to beginning the test, the subject is typically given instructions about what the procedure entails. He is then asked to place the device on his penis and is instructed to become fully aroused, either via self-stimulation or by the presentation of so-called "warm-up stimuli," in order to derive a baseline against which to compare later erectile measurements. After the individual returns to a state of detumescence, he is presented with various erotic and non-erotic stimuli. He is instructed to let himself become aroused in response to any of the materials that he finds sexually exciting. These stimuli come in one of three modalities - slides, film/video clips, and auditory vignettes - though in some cases different types of stimuli are presented simultaneously. The materials depict individuals of different ages and genders - in some cases even possessing different anatomical features - and portray sexual scenarios involving varying degrees of coercion. The stimuli may be presented for periods of varying length - from mere seconds to four minutes or longer.

Changes in penile dimension are recorded after the presentation of each stimulus, and can be measured in multiple ways: either in terms of milliliters off baseline, percentage of full erection, or in terms of z-scores. The plethysmograph is capable of measuring changes in tumescence long before the subject himself becomes aware of them. It is very rare for a subject to become fully aroused during an examination. Instead, an increase of about forty percent is considered to indicate a high degree of attraction. An increase of less than ten percent, on the other hand, is typically considered statistically insignificant. In this way, the plethysmograph provides a detailed profile of a person's sexual desires: his level of attraction to men and/or women, to boys and/or girls of various ages, as well as to different forms of sexual coercion and violence.

J. Odeshoo, Of Penology and Perversity: The Use of Penile Plethysmography on Convicted Child Sex Offenders, 14 Temp. Pol. & Civ. Rts. L. Rev. 1 (2004).

A female judge writing for the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in United States v. Weber, 2006 U.S. App. LEXIS 15111 (9th Cir. 2006) wrote: ". . . this test is not a run-of-the-mill medical procedure. Plethysmograph testing not only encompasses a physical intrusion but a mental one, involving not only a measure of the subject's genitalia but a probing of his innermost thoughts as well." She also wrote: "It is true that cavity searches and strip searches are deeply invasive, but [plethysmograph testing] is substantially more invasive. Cavity searches do not involve the minute monitoring of changes in the size and shape of a person's genitalia. Nor do such searches last anywhere near the two or three hours required for penile plethysmography exams. Nor do cavity or strip searches require a person to become sexually aroused, or to engage in sexual self-stimulation."

Did you get that? Two to three hours for the testing.

Judge John T. Noonan wrote separately in the same case and eloquently said the following: ". . . the Orwellian procedure at issue to be always a violation of the personal dignity of which prisoners are not deprived. The procedure violates a prisoner's bodily integrity by affecting his genitals. The procedure violates a prisoner's mental integrity by intruding images into his brain. The procedure violates a prisoner's moral integrity by requiring him to masturbate. By committing a crime and being convicted of it, a person does not cease to be a person. A prisoner is not a mere tool of the state to be manipulated by it to achieve the purposes the law has determined appropriate in punishment. The prisoner retains his humanity and therefore has purposes transcending those of the state. A prisoner, for example, cannot be forced into prostitution to aid the state in securing evidence. A prisoner, for example, cannot be made to perjure himself in order to assist a prosecution. Similarly, a prisoner should not be compelled to stimulate himself sexually in order for the government to get a sense of his current proclivities. There is a line at which the government must stop. Penile plethysmography testing crosses it."

The men subjected to it describe it as "humiliating." See here: http://www.seattlepi.com/local/388073_sexoffenders17.html. In prison, the humiliation factor is even greater. One prisoner described being taken into a room where he "was made to sit in a chair naked from the waist to the knees. A clamp was put on -- midshank on the penis" and then he was forced to listen to an audio description of vile, disgusting sex scenes. Inmates who refuse to participate are transferred to the maximum-security area, where more violent and dangerous inmates are held, and the parole board discriminates against convicted sex offenders who do not complete the program. See here: http://www.pitch.com/2000-10-05/news/the-penile-system/.

In Canada, boys as young at twelve had been subjected to it for twenty years until the government put the kibosh on it. The tests involved attaching a penile plesthysmograph to adolescent boys' penises to measure sexual responses. The youths, aged 12 to 17, were shown photographs of naked or semi-naked adults, children and infants. The government "nipped the program after learning about the creepy Clockwork Orange nature of penis-measurement science, alongside revelations of a Youth Services medical technician charged with an unrelated sexual offense." http://bulletproofcourier.blogspot.com/2010/07/mary-polak-peter-meter-permanently.html. See also here: http://www.upi.com/Top_News/World-News/2010/07/29/British-Columbia-re-examines-sex-test/UPI-77281280439622/#ixzz1BOfeapCl

So what's really behind this nonsense? Obviously, financially interested companies that make the machines and administer the testing want to see it continue. The feminist community that dominates the public discourse about rape and sex offenses seems to have precisely zero concern about this method of controlling male sexuality. Law and order types are just fine with it.

But how on earth does a supposedly civilized society tolerate it? Let us again quote Mr. Odeshoo's article:

Perhaps the decision to require PPG examinations is driven by motives and factors generally unacknowledged by its proponents. Indeed, one might wonder whether some authorities require PPG tests precisely because of the procedure's unpleasant character. Some, for example, might regard the humiliation and embarrassment that the procedure involves as a legitimate form of punishment for the offender's crimes. Some might also tacitly approve of the procedure's intrusive character because it serves to remind the offender of the state's power and signals to him the government's ability to put even the most private aspects of his mental and physical existence under surveillance. But to the extent that such unspoken considerations play a role in policies requiring sex offenders to undergo PPG tests, they ought to be stated openly and their merits debated freely, rather than attempting to cloak the procedure in the mantle of science. And when all of the relevant considerations are taken into account, the procedure's use cannot stand. Whether or not PPG must be discontinued because of the indignity it visits on sex offenders, the procedure should be rejected because of the manner in which it debases the state. Particularly when viewed alongside the many other ways in which the government actively fuels pedophilic desire in the name of preventing the sexual abuse of children, PPG tests indicate that, like the offenders it seeks to treat, the state may at times have its own morbid preoccupation with deviant sexuality. Requiring sex offenders to undergo penile plethysmography casts the government in the role of child pornographer, provocateur, and voyeur. These roles are morally wrong when assumed by ordinary citizens; they do not cease to be so simply because they are assumed by the government and its agents.

The Penile Plethysmograph is Bullshit !

From: The Skeptics Dictionary
http://www.skepdic.com/penilep.html

penile plethysmograph (PPG)

"A prisoner should not be compelled to stimulate himself sexually in order for the government to get a sense of his current proclivities." --U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals Judge John Noonan
The penile plethysmograph (pluh-THIZ-muh-graf) (PPG) is a machine for measuring changes in the circumference of the penis. A stretchable band with mercury in it is fitted around the subject's penis. The band is connected to a machine with a video screen and data recorder. Any changes in penis size, even those not felt by the subject, are recorded while the subject views sexually suggestive or pornographic pictures, slides, or movies, or listens to audio tapes with descriptions of such things as children being molested. Computer software is used to develop graphs showing "the degree of arousal to each stimulus." The machine cost about $8,000 when first developed in Czechoslovakia to prevent draft dodgers from claiming they were gay just to avoid military duty. Farrall Instruments Inc., of Grand Island, Nebraska, manufactures the device and in 1993 had sold most of the 400 units then in use in sex-offender treatment centers in some 40 states. Medical Monitoring Systems of New Jersey is also one of the leading PPG manufacturers. Another vendor of the PPG is Behavioral Technology Inc. in Salt Lake City. In addition to the United States, the device is being used in China, Hong Kong, Norway, Britain, Brazil and Spain.
The theory behind the device is described by Dr. Eugenia Gullick
The plethysmograph . . . directly measures the outside evidence of sexual arousal. We know-- it's established throughout the literature that when a man becomes sexually aroused--there is engorgement of the penis. It's a one-to-one relationship.
In a polygraph, galvanic skin responses are measured, and we have to make a leap of logic to think that galvanic skin response is related to anxiety, and therefore truthfulness. And it is that jump in logic that leads to a lack of reliability at times with that instrument . . . .
We know when the penis becomes engorged, we are measuring sexual arousal. So it's much more akin to ... blood pressure measurement. (State of North Carolina v. Robert Earl Spencer, 1995)
This much everyone seems to agree on: the device measures penile engorgement. Any male who has awakened with an erection knows, however, that penile engorgement is not always a measure of sexual arousal or sexual desire. On the other hand, most males would probably acknowledge that penile engorgement occurring while watching pornographic movies is due to sexual arousal.
What utility could such a device possibly have? Two uses have already been mentioned: to weed out false gays and to treat sex-offenders. The latter is sometimes done in conjunction with aversion therapy, which involves subjecting patients to electric shocks or foul odors while being shown sexually suggestive pictures. The hope is that the treatment will dull the patient's interest in sexy materials. The device can also be used in conjunction with cognitive behavioral therapy in which the patient allegedly learns how to control his responses to situations that might trigger sexual arousal or desire. Psychologists use the PPG to measure the success of the therapy.
Submission to a PPG has been made a condition of parole for certain sex offenders. The PPG has been used in child-custody cases to determine that a father is or is not likely to abuse his child, and in sentencing decisions for sex offenders. It has even been given to children as young as 10 who had abused other children. The latter was done in Phoenix, Arizona, with no evidence either that the test was useful or that it would not be harmful when given to children. Not everyone submits quietly to the PPG requirements, however. Officials in Old Town, Maine, had to pay nearly a million dollars to a policeman who was threatened with firing for refusing to submit to a PPG.
Despite the lack of a theoretical basis for interpreting the data gathered using the PPG, Professor Henry E. Adams et al. of the University of Georgia used the PPG to measure arousal of heterosexual men who were divided into homophobes and non-homophobes. They published their results in the Journal of Abnormal Psychology in 1996:
The results of this study indicate that individuals who score in the homophobic range and admit negative affect toward homosexuality demonstrate significant sexual arousal to male homosexual erotic stimuli.*
In their study of 64 exclusively heterosexual men (self-identified), 66 percent of the non-homophobic group showed no significant arousal while watching a male homosexual video, while only 20 percent of the homophobic men showed little or no evidence of arousal.
Adams notes that there are at least two competing explanations for the fact that homophobic men would be aroused by "male homosexual erotic stimuli." One is the Freudian explanation in terms of latent homosexuality. Despite their protests, these heterosexual homophobes are secret homosexuals. Another explanation, however, is that
viewing homosexual stimuli causes negative emotions such as anxiety in homophobic men but not in non-homophobic men. Because anxiety has been shown to enhance arousal and erection, this theory would predict increases in erection in homophobic men. Furthermore, it would indicate that a response to homosexual stimuli is a function of the threat condition rather than sexual arousal per se.
There may be other explanations, as well, but we have no way at present to determine which, if any, are valid.
Also,
there is an area where this device makes a valuable contribution: that of sorting out organic from psychogenic impotence. This is done by measuring changes in penile circumference during sleep, with increases expected during REM sleep. Men with psychogenic impotence still show erections, while those with an organic problem don't. It works. (Dave Bunnell, personal correspondence, who says he once set up a lab in the psychiatry department at the University of Pennsylvania to do this.)
Finally, there are some therapists who claim that chemical castration will significantly reduce or eliminate sexual arousal that leads to criminal behavior by sexual predators. However, clinical psychologist Jesus Padilla, who works with sexual predators at Atascadero State Hospital, "measured arousal rates of men who had been chemically castrated against men who had not by using a device that shows the men photographs of children and women in various nonsexual poses. He found no difference in arousal rates between Atascadero patients who had been castrated and those who had not" (Sacramento Bee, Special Report on Sexual Predators, February 14, 2006). While the Bee does not describe the device used in this test, it was likely the plethysmograph. In 1996, California implemented a law that keeps Sexually Violent Predators (SVPs) after they've served their sentences. SVPs are those who are "deemed likely to commit sexually violent acts in the future following completion of their prison sentences." A treatment program for SVPs was instituted and part of the treatment includes "a willingness to complete specific assessment procedures such as a plethysmograph evaluation."* [The state of California has not revealed much about this program, but Mareva Brown and Sam Stanton of the Sacramento Bee did a detailed investigative report on it. Part 1, Feb. 12, 2006; Part 2, Feb. 13; Part 3, Feb. 14.]
where's the science?
Scientifically, what are we to make of such a device? Well, the machine can measure response time to a stimulus and it can measure change in penile girth over time. Apparently, it is assumed that the more quickly aroused and the greater the engorgement the higher the "arousal level." Apparently, it is also assumed by many practitioners that any "arousal level" when viewing or listening to descriptions of naked children or adults having sex with children is "deviant." Yet, according to studies done by the inventor of the PPG, Dr. Kurt Freund, "many so called normal men who have not committed illegal sex acts show considerable arousal to stimuli depicting naked children or children involved in sexual activity."* And, in one court case (State of North Carolina v. Robert Earl Spencer, 1995), Dr. William Michael Tyson, a clinical and forensic psychologist specializing in the field of sexual criminal behavior, testified that "the vast majority of individuals who commit sexual offenses against children are not sexually aroused by stimulus material involving children." His expert adversary in that case, Dr. Gullick, claimed that "the plethysmograph has been extensively studied and recently shown to be ninety-five percent accurate in discriminating between individuals who had committed sexual offenses against children and a control group that was randomly drawn from the population." Yet, other experts have claimed that there are "studies in which the devices have failed to detect nearly one out of three known sex offenders tested."
It seems to be the case that the device has been the subject of many scientific studies and the results have been mixed, to put it kindly. The reliability and utility of the device have been argued in court and penile plethysmographic evidence has been declared inadmissible because of its "questionable reliability." The case in which Dr. Tyson testified was heard by the North Carolina Court of Appeals. That Appeals Court upheld a lower court's exclusion of testimony by Dr. Gullick because her testimony was based on the use of the penile plethysmograph. The defendant in the case was accused of sexually molesting his 5-year old stepdaughter. He called Dr. Gullick to testify that his "arousal pattern" when tested on the plethysmograph indicated that he was not aroused by children. Presumably, the defense believed that this was strong evidence that he didn't molest the child. The trial court ruled that "Dr. Gullick would be permitted to testify as to any opinions which were not based on the plethysmograph." The Appeals Court agreed with the trial court that "the instrument was of questionable reliability; that the testimony was not relevant; and that even if relevant, its probative value was outweighed by its prejudicial effect."
We agree with the trial court that the evidence before it by no means established the reliability of the plethysmograph; there is a substantial difference of opinion within the scientific community regarding the plethysmograph's reliability to measure sexual deviancy....
In the present case, plethysmograph testing formed the basis for Dr. Gullick's opinion that defendant was not sexually aroused by children, thereby making it less likely that he committed the acts charged. In view of the lack of general acceptance of the plethysmograph's validity and utility and therefore, its reliability for forensic purposes in the scientific community in which it is employed, we hold that the trial court did not abuse its discretion in finding defendant's plethysmograph testing data insufficiently reliable to provide a basis for the opinion testimony which defendant sought to elicit from Dr. Gullick. (State of North Carolina v. Robert Earl Spencer)
Dr. Tyson testified in the Spencer case that it was "generally accepted in the mental health community by both proponents and opponents of the plethysmograph that the plethysmograph data do not give any evidence that is useful in determining whether an individual did or did not commit a specific act. He also noted that "there is substantial disagreement as to the extent to which the penile response is subject to voluntary control and as to whether the penile response as measured by the plethysmograph can then be generalized to anything else pertaining to sexual behavior." Putting it mildly, Dr. Tyson claims that the plethysmograph has very limited forensic utility. It seems clear that evidence based on the PPG has no business in the courtroom, either to exculpate or incriminate.
Nevertheless, there is a growing industry of therapists who treat sex offenders and think the PPG will assist them "in determining whether someone who has committed a sex crime has a pattern of deviant sexual interests." Therapists use the PPG to help them devise treatment programs and to measure the success of their treatment. All this is done without any concern, apparently, that there is no compelling evidence that sexual arousal or non-arousal from pictures or sounds significantly correlates with criminal deviant behavior. There is no compelling evidence that a person who gets aroused by pictures or sounds is significantly more likely to commit sex crimes than one who does not get aroused. On the other hand, there is no compelling evidence that a person who does not get aroused by pictures or sounds is significantly less likely to commit sex crimes than one who does get aroused.
Still, the PPG can provide some information which might prove useful to a sex-offender therapist. The computer software used with the PPG enables the tester to develop graphs that indicate whether the subject is more aroused by males than by females, by children than by adults, by coerced than by consensual sex, etc. The therapeutic controversy begins, however, as soon as the therapist tries to convert "arousal levels" to anything meaningful, such as claims that a sex-offender is "cured" or is "responding positively to treatment." This is in addition to the controversy already mentioned over using the PPG in conjunction with aversion therapy or cognitive/behavioral therapy.
One glaring problem with the use of the PPG is the lack of standardized materials to use as stimuli for subjects, a factor that clearly biases the data. Therapists vary greatly in the kind of materials they use to arouse subjects. Some materials are rather tame, e.g., nude adults, children in underwear or bathing suits. Others use hardcore pornography, including depictions of rape and pedophilia. Furthermore, there is no standard of "deviancy" for arousal. Worse, if therapists can define certain arousal as deviant, they can then suggest treatments for the deviancy as well as having the power to declare when the "deviant" is "cured." Convicted sex-offenders are in no position to protest either declarations that they have "deviant arousals" or treatments forced on them in the name of curing them of the "disease" of "deviant arousal."
More objectionable than the questionable scientific validity of the device, however, are the moral and legal questions its use raises. Some of the materials would probably be illegal on the open market because they constitute child pornography. Much of the material is morally objectionable. Some of the uses of the device raise constitutional issues. For example, submission to the PPG test as a condition for employment, for enlistment in the armed forces, or for being granted custody of children. Some penal institutions have made submission to the PPG a condition of parole, even though the device's usefulness as a predictor of behavior is unproven. The practice has been upheld by the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals (1995). Parole Boards have great latitude in establishing conditions for parole. These conditions do not have to meet the same rigorous standards as are required before something allegedly scientific can be admitted as evidence in a trial. Nor do the normal liberties and constitutional protections of citizenship automatically apply to one being paroled.
From a scientific, moral, and legal point of view, what should matter is whether a person gives in to perverse desires and commits sex crimes. It is neither immoral nor a crime to get aroused. Furthermore, being aroused is not identical to having a desire. A man or woman may be aroused by the sight of animals copulating or be aroused by a film of a woman eating a banana and a man eating a fig in particularly provocative ways. Still, they may have no desire to engage in bestiality or have sex with a bowl of fruit or have sex at all. A heterosexual man or woman may be aroused by the sight of lesbians engaging in oral sex but have no desire to have sex with lesbians or in the presence of lesbians. And, if Dr. Tyson is correct, apparently there are many "normal" men who are aroused by photos of naked children but have no desire to have sex with children. There are many pedophiles who are not aroused by photos of naked children. The PPG measures arousal, not desire, though many sex-offender therapists seem to identify arousal with desire. These therapists, therefore, may be engaging in little more than wishful thinking when they think that because they witness a decrease in arousal they have evidence for a decrease in desire, which they correctly correlate with a decreased likelihood of acting on that desire. Decreased arousal may not be strong evidence for decreased tendency to engage in criminal sex acts. Strong arousal need not imply strong desire for what causes the arousal; and weak arousal need not imply weak desire. Furthermore, no test can determine whether a person will act on his feelings and desires. Nevertheless, many of those who treat sex offenders swear by the PPG even though there is no compelling evidence that PPG readings validly indicate a tendency to commit or not commit sex crimes.
In case you are wondering, there is a similar device for measuring female arousal. G. Sintchak and J. H. Geer created a vaginal plethysmograph in 1975, but vaginal probing for signs of arousal is no more reliable than penile measurements. There is no sound theoretical basis for interpreting what the vaginal photoplethysmographmeasurements mean (Meston 2000). "A vaginal photoplethysmograph is more complicated, because it measures the amount of blood in the genitalia by monitoring minor changes in skin color inside the vagina. It is essentially similar to a lie detector that measures blush response."*