STORY: " Psychologists should reject their growing role in death-penalty sentencing," by Sana Sheikh, published by Jacobin on June 6, 2016. Sana Sheikh, PhD, is a psychologist in training in Boston. A Wikipedia entry indicates that "Jacobin is a quarterly magazine based in New York. Its self-styled raison d’être is as a "leading voice of the American left, offering socialist perspectives on politics, economics, and culture". The publication began as an online magazine released in September 2010,[1] but expanded into a print journal later that year."
GIST: "Last year’s Hoffman Report, which came out of an independent review of the world’s largest organization of psychologists, the American Psychological Association (APA), made waves in the field of psychology. The reviewers found that the APA’s leadership had colluded with national intelligence agencies and the Department of Defense to allow psychologists to take part in and facilitate the torture of detainees as part of the state’s counter-terrorism efforts This wasn’t news to the dissident psychologists from organizations like the Coalition for Ethical Psychology and Psychologists for Social Responsibility who had been trying to spotlight this practice for over a decade. Nonetheless, soon after its release, numerous APA leaders resigned or were fired, and some have publicly apologized. The organization also implemented policy reforms, banning psychologists from conducting, supervising, attending, or assisting in any national security interrogations for military or other intelligence agencies, including private contractors working on their behalf. The APA now has one of the strongest anti-torture policies of any health care profession. The Hoffman Report was a big victory, but psychology isn’t in the clear. Psychologists continue to operate, largely unnoticed, in other spaces — most notably the legal system — that promote immediate harm. Here, psychologists routinely provide expert testimony to help courts render decisions. These decisions are often directly detrimental to defendants, resulting in a range of negative outcomes including the loss of benefits, the categorization of juvenile defendants as adults, and even death.........IQ tests also bring their notorious history of racial bias into the courtroom. Psychologists have long been aware that black, Latino, and Native American test-takers score on average lower than white test-takers, attributing the gap to broader disparities in household income and educational resources and the tests’ preference for certain forms of (Western, white, middle-class) knowledge. These flaws haven’t stopped IQ scores from being used to prop up scientific racism (a recent example is Nicholas Wade’s A Troublesome Inheritance). And rather than address the fundamental limitations of the test, psychologists instead make post-test changes to correct for these biases, essentially raising black and Latino test-takers’ scores by using discrete scoring systems for each group. Psychologists defend this quick fix, arguing that adjusting IQ scores shields the test-taker from the consequences of the current tests’ inherent limitations. But these corrections — called “ethnic adjustments” in the legal field — can turn deadly when brought into the courtroom because they make it easier for courts to give disadvantaged minorities the death penalty. For example, after being convicted of murder in Texas, Ramiro Hernandez underwent testing to determine whether he would be eligible for the death penalty. His raw IQ score was 62, well in the range of intellectual disability, but after an “ethnic adjustment” — Hernandez was born and raised in Mexico — his score jumped to 70. The court opted to use his ethnic adjustment score, and he was executed soon afterwards. Hernandez’s case is not isolated. Revising IQ scores based on the defendant’s race or ethnicity is becoming a widespread practice in courts nationwide, making it substantially more difficult to exempt minority defendants from the death penalty. Many psychologists raise these concerns during their testimony, but not all. In fact there have been cases of psychological assessments’ misuse. In 2011, Texas reprimanded psychologist George Denkowski for using improper methods to assess the intellectual ability of at least twenty-five death row prisoners. Prior to the reprimand Denkowski’s expert testimony put at least fourteen defendants on death row, two of whom were later executed. Disturbingly, while Denkowski has been barred from assessing criminal defendants, he has escaped censure and retains his license to practice as a psychologist."
The entire story can be found at:
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2016/06/psychology-hoffman-report-torture-death-row-executions/
PUBLISHER'S NOTE:
I have added a search box for content in this blog which now encompasses several thousand posts. The search box is located near the bottom of the screen just above the list of links. I am confident that this powerful search tool provided by "Blogger" will help our readers and myself get more out of the site.
The Toronto Star, my previous employer for more than twenty incredible years, has put considerable effort into exposing the harm caused by Dr. Charles Smith and his protectors - and into pushing for reform of Ontario's forensic pediatric pathology system. The Star has a "topic" section which focuses on recent stories related to Dr. Charles Smith. It can be found at:
http://www.thestar.com/topic/
Information on "The Charles Smith Blog Award"- and its nomination process - can be found at:
http://smithforensic.blogspot.
Please send any comments or information on other cases and issues of interest to the readers of this blog to: hlevy15@gmail.com;
Harold Levy;
Publisher: The Charles Smith Blog;
