M5_A1

Module 5 Overview 

In this module, you will examine criminal behavior that causes the most harm to its victims and bystanders, the latter typically being various family members of the victims. How do rapists look at potential victims? Canter and Youngs (2009) propose three roles that victims play in the eyes of a rapist—that of an object (the victim lacks any personhood in the eyes of the offender, who may kill his victim in the end), a vehicle (the victim represents someone from the offender's life), or a person (the offender attempts to interact with the victim prior to and during the offense).

In murder, the offender may be behaving instrumentally or emotionally. The former is most likely planned and well organized; the latter is more impulsive and less organized. Contract killings and serial murders are instrumental; killing of a cheating spouse and his or her lover is emotional.

When conducting a criminal investigation, how would a detective benefit by integrating psychological concepts into his or her questioning? After all, it may be more important to know what questions to ask than to hear the answers. When conducting an investigation of a particularly grisly murder, a detective may wonder about the relationship between mental illness and criminal behavior. This module addresses the questions an investigator may ask with the help of investigative psychology.

In this module, you will look at the presence, or absence, of criminality among the mentally ill people. You will also examine the misinterpretation of scientific data by inexperienced attorneys, judges, and other court experts. The following proportions are all the same—0.01, 1%, and 1 out of 100. However, people typically do not understand them in the same manner. Many attorneys focus on particular responses to a few items from a test, such as the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory-2 (MMPI-2), which is composed of 567 items.

Some forensic experts attempt to explain these individual responses. Yet, the test is not designed in such a way that individual responses can be interpreted, and experts should know that in the first place.

Some experts argue that a certain psychological test profile, such as one obtained on the MMPI-2, indicates that the individual is not a sex offender or a murderer or capable of a number of different crimes.

Other experts testify just the opposite. However, such profiles do not exist and an expert testifying about a profile should know better. MMPI-2 profiles may indicate depression, anxiety, hypervigilance, paranoia, and many other symptoms, but they do not show someone to be a murderer or a child molester. Any forensic psychology expert should know that.

The job of a forensic psychology professional is to provide research-based, valid, and reliable information when he or she testifies in court and, in the process, educate the attorneys, the judge, and the jury.

For the first assignment in this module, you will continue your analysis of the research on death row inmates and evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of the findings. For the RA, you will develop detailed forensic profiles for a list of five offenses. For your forensic profiles, you will recommend tests and measures that can be used to gather information. Finally, you will discuss the different ethical considerations one must follow as an investigator and as a psychologist or a medical health professional.

Read Robber in Disguise

Ethical Dilemmas; Confidentiality

Psychologists have an obligation to protect confidential information.

Review the scenario that follows and answer the related questions.

The Missing Child

Mrs. Smith is a criminal defense attorney. She is divorced and has legal custody of Jimmy, her eleven-year-old son. Her ex-husband, Mr. Smith, is a businessman, who travels extensively and is frequently out of town.

The former spouses have had many verbal altercations regarding the upbringing of their son. Mrs. Smith is now seeing another man, Mr. Wilson, and hopes to marry him. Mr. Wilson does not like the little boy and repeatedly tells Mrs. Smith that their life would be easier without him. One day, Mrs. Smith calls the police and reports that Jimmy never came home from school. She tells the police that she suspects foul play. The police start an investigation and put together a list of likely suspects through profiling. Among them are Mrs. Smith, Mr. Wilson, Mr. Smith, Mr. Paine (Mrs. Smith's former disgruntled client and a criminal, now serving a ten-year prison sentence), and members of a local juvenile gang, who have been picking on Jimmy when he walked home from school.

The day after the missing child report was made, detectives come to interview Dr. Jones, a psychologist, who is a neighbor and friend of Mr. Smith. Dr. Jones is aware of the problems Mr. Smith has had with his ex-wife, whom he considers a poor parent. Dr. Jones is not home or at the office, so the detectives leave a message for him to contact them.

When Dr. Jones returns home later that night from a two-day fishing trip, he finds two messages on his home answering machine. The second one is from the police detectives. The first one is from Mr. Smith: "Hi Dr. Jones, how are you. I figured I can share this with you in confidence since you are a psychologist and will not tell anyone. I am flying to Australia for work and will be away for a while. I took Jimmy with me. I cannot believe how my ex-wife and that loser boyfriend of hers treat my son. I am not going to let them have him back." Right before Mr. Smith hangs up, Dr. Jones can hear Jimmy's voice, "Bye Dr. Jones; Dad promised me to go see the kangaroos."

Q1: What should Dr. Jones do? Give reasons for your answer.

Since Dr. Jones is a neighbor and a friend of Mr. Smith, doctor-patient confidentiality does not exist. Mr. Smith was mistaken in his assumption. Psychologists do have an obligation to protect confidential information but only in their professional capacity. Therefore, Dr. Jones can reveal to the police what he knows.

 Sex Crimes

The now-classic sex offender typology was developed by Nicholas Groth and Jean Birnbaum in 1979 (National Center for Women and Policing, n.d.). One limitation of this typology is that it is based on research on incarcerated sex offenders and was most often applied to cases with an unknown rapist. Another important consideration is the realization that a sex offender may not fit neatly into one category but, instead, may exhibit characteristics from multiple categories or none at all. As such, all typologies such as this must be considered a gross simplification of real-world offenders.

When considering the application of this typology to a case in the field, the National Center for Women and Policing (n.d.) strongly recommends that:

Investigators should review all available information to assess an offender's typology, including: victim/witness statements, any suspect statements made to the responding officer, evidence, modus operandi, reports of previous offenses, and the suspect's criminal history. This assessment will help you organize your investigation, prioritize your leads, support a search warrant, and determine how best to investigate a particular offender. However, experienced investigators know that a suspect should never be eliminated solely because he doesn't fit a typology. (p. 2)

This sex offender typology at the broadest level categorizes sex offenders as power rapists, anger rapists, and sadistic ritualistic rapists (National Center for Women and Policing, n.d.).

Power rapists are convinced of their sexual prowess. They typically exhibit less aggression in both sexual and nonsexual situations than other kinds of rapists. The power rapist typically does not apply force beyond what is necessary to achieve the rape. This force may include verbal intimidation, use of a weapon, or actual physical force. The power rapist does not want to harm the victim physically but desires to "own her sexually and achieve sexual submission."

Anger rapists may direct their anger exclusively at women, or they may be equally as aggressive with men. The anger rapist tends to be more unpredictable in terms of the degree of violence that he exhibits connected to the rape—this may range from verbal abuse all the way to murder. The amount of force and violence used by anger rapists is considered excessive to what is necessary to achieve submission. Anger rapists often cause significant physical injury beyond the sexual assault. Often, these rapists desire to humiliate and degrade their victims.

Sadistic/ritualistic rapists are considered extremely rare, and the hallmark of this category is that they display sexual aggression fuelled by erotic, destructive fantasies. For them, sexuality and aggression are totally merged. Aggression itself becomes eroticized. Their motive is to achieve sexual gratification through causing mental and physical pain and suffering. They increase the violence to achieve further arousal. Sexual areas of the victim's body become a specific focus of injury and abuse.

Bizarre acts like dismemberment and sexual acts with the corpse may occur in extreme cases. Sadistic rapists tend to be opportunistic, attack suddenly, and often kidnap their victims.

Reference:

National Center for Women and Policing. (n.d.). Successfully investigating
           acquaintance sexual assault: A national training manual for law
           enforcement (Grant #97-WE-VX-K004). Retrieved from http://www.
           hawaii.edu/hivandaids/Suspect%20Typology%20%20%20Profiling
           %20the%20Sex%20Offender.pdf

Ethics

The first question with regard to ethics and criminal profiling concerns which professional code of ethics should be relied upon by those doing the profiling. As you have seen in the course, there are at least three major groupings of profilers: law enforcement professionals, psychologists/mental health professionals, and information technology professionals. Obviously, these three disparate groups of professionals would not follow the same code of ethics. These issues complicate any discussion of ethics with regard to criminal profiling.

Because all ethical codes share common ethical principles like beneficence and nonmaleficence, we will begin our ethical analysis with these two principles. Beneficence is generally thought to mean drawing a balance between the benefits of the procedure or treatment and the risks. This principle of doing good would require any professional to evaluate the benefits of what he or she is doing against the potential harm to those involved. Nonmaleficence is a closely related principle that is often thought of as "do no harm." Considering these principles in the context of criminal profiling, one must weigh the risks of creating a profile that could lead to a false arrest or take the focus off a potential suspect who could continue his or her criminal behavior and activity while the spotlight is directed elsewhere. The question that a profiling professional must consider is, are these procedures reliable enough to make the risk of violating the principles of beneficence and nonmaleficence low when compared to the likelihood of catching the actual offender though the profiling efforts?

One only needs to think as far back as the Washington, DC, sniper case to find a case where the profile offered by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) of a white male in his twenties to early thirties was proven to be quite wrong when law enforcement finally apprehended two African American males—John Muhammad, also known as (aka) John Williams, forty-one; and Lee Boyd Malvo, aka John Lee Malvo, seventeen. To read more about the case, refer to the category DC Sniper Case in the Webliography.

Another case involving a faulty profile was Timothy Masters, who spent nine years in prison after being falsely convicted of the murder of Peggy Hettrick in Colorado in 1987 on the basis of a report and the testimony of J. Reid Meloy, a psychologist specializing in sexual homicide, before being exonerated by deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) evidence implicating someone else in the murder.

Refer to the Webliography of this course to read about exonerations.

Most scholarly reviews of criminal profiling indicate that the validity and reliability of these techniques are rather limited, even questioning whether these techniques should even be utilized at all (Snook, Cullen, Bennell, Taylor, & Gendreau, 2008).

Reference:

Snook, B., Cullen, R. M., Bennell, C., Taylor, P. J., & Gendreau, P. (2008). The
           criminal profiling illusion: What's behind the smoke and mirrors? Criminal
           Justice and Behavior, 35(10), 1257–1276. Retrieved from http://www.
           sagepub.com/bartol3e/study/articles/Snook.pdf

Despite the popularity of criminal profiling in the media and the use of these techniques by the FBI and law enforcement in the investigation of serial and sexual crimes, criminal courts in the United States have generally not permitted their use in the prosecution or defense of criminal defendants. The courts have almost unanimously concluded that profiles are either an "impermissible use of character evidence or inappropriate subjects for expert testimony" (Ingram, 1998, p. 261). As a result, trial courts that have admitted profiles as evidence have done so at the cost of reversal.

More recently, George (2008) has noted that profiling evidence has been admitted "when the prosecution introduces it as expert testimony related to crime scene analysis, which can effectively disguise its prejudicial features" (p. 260).

References:

George, J. A. (2008). Offender profiling and expert testimony: Scientifically valid
           or glorified results? Vanderbilt Law Review, 61(1), 221–260.

Ingram, S. (1998). If the profile fits: Admitting criminal psychological profiles into
           evidence in criminal trials. Washington University Journal of Urban and
           Contemporary Law, 54, 239–266. Retrieved from http://digitalcommons.
           law.wustl.edu/urbanlaw/vol54/iss1/12

Conclusion

The focus of this module has been upon reviewing some examples of cases and particular classifications of crimes where criminal profiling has been used more extensively. We focused on serial sex crimes as these, along with serial murder, are among the most common cases where criminal profiling is employed. We also focused on the lack of scientific support for the reliability and validity of criminal profiling. This lack of support creates several ethical concerns related to beneficence and nonmaleficence. Finally, we reviewed the courts' reluctance to admit profiles as evidence in criminal trials.