A Psychopath's Brain in the Courtroom

Seamus

Ambassador
Ambassador
FOTCM Member
I heard a story on NPR's morning edition this morning on the way to work entitled A Psychopath's Brain in the Courtroom. I thought it would be of interest to the forum and SOTT. Here is the text from NPR's website:

A Psychopath's Brain In The Courtroom
by Barbara Bradley Hagerty
June 30, 2010

Kent Kiehl has studied hundreds of psychopaths. Kiehl is one of the world's leading investigators of psychopathy and a professor at the University of New Mexico. He says he can often see it in their eyes: There's an intensity in their stare, as if they're trying to pick up signals on how to respond. But the eyes are not an element of psychopathy, just a clue.

Officially, Kiehl scores their pathology on the Hare Psychopathy Checklist, which measures traits such as the inability to feel empathy or remorse, pathological lying, or impulsivity.

"The scores range from zero to 40," Kiehl explains in his sunny office overlooking a golf course. "The average person in the community, a male, will score about 4 or 5. Your average inmate will score about 22. An individual with psychopathy is typically described as 30 or above. Brian scored 38.5 basically. He was in the 99th percentile."

"Brian" is Brian Dugan, a man who is serving two life sentences for rape and murder in Chicago. Last July, Dugan pleaded guilty to raping and murdering 10-year-old Jeanine Nicarico in 1983, and he was put on trial to determine whether he should be executed. Kiehl was hired by the defense to do a psychiatric evaluation.

In a videotaped interview with Kiehl, Dugan describes how he only meant to rob the Nicaricos' home. But then he saw the little girl inside.

"She came to the door and ... I clicked," Kiehl says in a flat, emotionless voice. "I turned into Mr. Hyde from Dr. Jekyll."

On screen, Dugan is dressed in an orange jumpsuit. He seems calm, even normal — until he lifts his hands to take a sip of water and you see the handcuffs. Dugan is smart — his IQ is over 140 — but he admits he has always had shallow emotions. He tells Kiehl that in his quarter century in prison, he believes he's developed a sense of remorse.

"And I have empathy, too — but it's like it just stops," he says. "I mean, I start to feel, but something just blocks it. I don't know what it is."

Kiehl says he's heard all this before: All psychopaths claim they feel terrible about their crimes for the benefit of the parole board.

"But then you ask them, 'What do you mean, you feel really bad?' And Brian will look at you and go, 'What do you mean, what does it mean?' They look at you like, 'Can you give me some help? A hint? Can I call a friend?' They have no way of really getting at that at all," Kiehl says.

Kiehl says the reason people like Dugan cannot access their emotions is that their physical brains are different. And he believes he has the brain scans to prove it.

Brain Scanning In A Mobile MRI

On a crystal clear June morning at Albuquerque's Youth Diagnostic and Development Center, juveniles who have been convicted of violent offenses march by, craning their necks as a huge trailer drives through the gates. This is Kiehl's prize — a $2 million mobile MRI provided by the Mind Research Network at the University of New Mexico. Kiehl transports the mobile MRI to maximum-security prisons around the state, and over the past few years, he has scanned the brains of more than 1,100 inmates, about 20 percent of whom are psychopaths.

For ethical reasons, Kiehl could not allow me to watch an inmate's brain being scanned, so he asked his researchers to demonstrate.

After a few minutes of preparation, researcher Kevin Bache settles into the brain scanner, where he can look up and see a screen. On the screen flashes three types of pictures. One kind depicts a moral violation: He sees several hooded Klansmen setting a cross on fire. Another type is emotional but morally ambiguous: a car that is on fire but you don't know why. Another type of photo is neutral: for example, students standing around a Bunsen burner.

The subjects rate whether the picture is a moral violation on a scale of 1 to 5. Kiehl says most psychopaths do not differ from normal subjects in the way they rate the photos: Both psychopaths and the average person rank the KKK with a burning cross as a moral violation. But there's a key difference: Psychopaths' brains behave differently from that of a nonpsychopathic person. When a normal person sees a morally objectionable photo, his limbic system lights up. This is what Kiehl calls the "emotional circuit," involving the orbital cortex above the eyes and the amygdala deep in the brain. But Kiehl says when psychopaths like Dugan see the KKK picture, their emotional circuit does not engage in the same way.

"We have a lot of data that shows psychopaths do tend to process this information differently," Kiehl says. "And Brian looked like he was processing it like the other individuals we've studied with psychopathy."

Kiehl says the emotional circuit may be what stops a person from breaking into that house or killing that girl. But in psychopaths like Dugan, the brakes don't work. Kiehl says psychopaths are a little like people with very low IQs who are not fully responsible for their actions. The courts treat people with low IQs differently. For example, they can't get the death penalty.

"What if I told you that a psychopath has an emotional IQ that's like a 5-year-old?" Kiehl asks. "Well, if that was the case, we'd make the same argument for individuals with low emotional IQ — that maybe they're not as deserving of punishment, not as deserving of culpability, etc."

Implications Of The Diagnosis

And that's exactly what Dugan's lawyers argued at trial last November. Attorney Steven Greenberg said that Dugan was not criminally insane. He knew right from wrong. But he was incapable of making the right choices.

"Someone shouldn't be executed for a condition that they were born with, because it's not their fault," Greenberg says. "The crime is their fault, and he wasn't saying it wasn't his fault, and he wasn't saying, give [me] a free pass. But he was saying, don't kill me because it's not my fault that I was born this way."

This argument troubles Steven Erickson, a forensic psychologist and legal scholar at Widener University School of Law. He notes that alcoholics have brain abnormalities. Do we give them a pass if they kill someone while driving drunk?

"What about folks who suffer from depression? They have brain abnormalities, too. Should they be entitled to [an] excuse under the law?" he asks. "I think the key idea here is the law is not interested in brain abnormalities. The law is interested in whether or not someone at the time that the criminal act occurred understood the difference between right and wrong."

At trial, Jonathan Brodie, a psychiatrist at NYU Medical School who was the prosecution's expert witness, went further. Even if Dugan's brain is abnormal, he testified, the brain does not dictate behavior.

"There may be many, many people who also have psychopathic tendencies and have similar scans, who don't do antisocial behavior, who don't rape and kill," Brodie says.

Moreover, Brodie told the jury, Dugan's brain scan in 2009 says nothing about what his brain was like when he killed Jeanine Nicarico.

"I don't know with Brian Dugan what was going on in his brain" when he committed his crime, Brodie says. "And I certainly don't know what was going on from a brain scan that was taken 24 years later."

The jury seemed to zero in on the science, asking to reread all the testimony about the neuroscience during 10 hours of deliberation. But in the end, they sentenced Dugan to death. Dugan is appealing the sentence.

In the meantime, this case signals the beginning of a revolution in the courtroom, Kiehl says.

"Neuroscience and neuroimaging is going to change the whole philosophy about how we punish and how we decide who to incapacitate and how we decide how to deal with people," he says, echoing comments of a growing number of leading scholars across the country, including Princeton and Harvard.

Just like DNA, he believes brain scans will eventually be standard fare. And that, he and others say, could upend our notions of culpability, crime and punishment.

It is the second part in a three part series (the third part hasn't been aired yet). The first part is called A Neuroscientist Uncovers A Dark Secret.

*edit* - I added the title, author and date to the quoted article
 
The author of these articles is, Barbara Bradley Hagerty. Here is NPR's official bio:

Barbara Bradley Hagerty is the religion correspondent for NPR, reporting on the intersection of faith and politics, law, science and culture. Her New York Times best-selling book, "Fingerprints of God: The Search for the Science of Spirituality," was published by Riverhead/Penguin Group in May 2009. Among others, Barb has received the American Women in Radio and Television Award, the Headliners Award and the Religion Newswriters Association Award for radio reporting.

Before covering the religion beat, Barb was NPR's Justice Department correspondent between 1998 and 2003. Her billet included the impeachment proceedings against President Clinton, Florida's disputed 2000 election, terrorism, crime, espionage, wrongful convictions and the occasional serial killer. Barbara was the lead correspondent covering the investigation into the September 11 attacks. Her reporting was part of NPR's coverage that earned the network the 2001 George Foster Peabody and Overseas Press Club awards. She has appeared on the PBS programs Washington Week and The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer.

Barb came to NPR in 1995, after attending Yale Law School on a one-year Knight Fellowship. From 1982-1993, she worked at The Christian Science Monitor as a newspaper reporter in Washington, as the Asia correspondent based in Tokyo for World Monitor (the Monitor's nightly television program on the Discovery Cable Channel) and finally as senior Washington correspondent for Monitor Radio.

Barb was graduated magna cum laude from Williams College in 1981 with a degree in economics, and has a masters in legal studies from Yale Law School.
 
Seamas said:
I heard a story on NPR's morning edition this morning on the way to work entitled A Psychopath's Brain in the Courtroom. I thought it would be of interest to the forum and SOTT. Here is the text from NPR's website:

It is the second part in a three part series (the third part hasn't been aired yet). The first part is called A Neuroscientist Uncovers A Dark Secret.

Hi Seamas, this 1st part of the series was posted on SOTT yesterday: http://www.sott.net/articles/show/211245-A-Neuroscientist-Uncovers-A-Dark-Secret
 
Here is a commentary from the blogosphere from 2004.

Tuesday, May 11, 2004
The Ballad of Barbara Bradley Hagerty

A few months ago, Atrios posted about the World Journalism Institute and outed NPR religion reporter Barbara Bradley Hagerty as a member of this right-wing Christian organization.

People began taking a closer look at Hagerty's work, especially her recent report on John Kerry's Eucharistic Issues. Alert Eschaton readers pointed out that the seemingly "random" parishoners Hagerty spoke to were in fact conservative Catholic movers and shakers Hagerty most likely already knew. As far as I know, not one reader who wrote to NPR's Omsbudsman to complain about this has received a reply.

Something about this story still niggled at me, so I started to do some research of my own. What I found was, to say the least, enlightening:

Barbara Bradley Hagerty graduated from Williams College in 1981 with a degree in Economics. She then interned at the Christian Science Monitor and subsequently worked for the paper and its related media for 11 years. She joined NPR in 1995 as a contract reporter after having become a born-again Christian while writing a story for The LA Times Sunday Magazine. She eventually became a full-time employee, reporting on the Justice Department, the Clinton Impeachment, 9-11 and starting last year, religion, replacing Duncan Moon as religion reporter.

Her religion reporting for NPR has focused mainly on Christianity, including a report on the Christian Science Church, in which she did not disclose that she was herself a former member of the Church. (This little tidbit is revealed in "Citizen Bradley," a Washingtonian article from October 2000 about her multimillionaire brother, Atlantic owner David Bradley. The article isn't online, but is available through LexisNexis.)

In addition to her NPR gig and her deal with the World Journalism Institute, Hagerty has been keeping busy with other writing and speaking engagements. She is on the board of directors for Knowing and Doing, the magazine of the C.S.Lewis Institute, which "endeavors to develop desciples who can articulate, defend and live faith in Christ through personal and public life." (emphasis mine)

More troubling still is her association with Howard Ahmanson's Fieldstead and Co. and Fieldstead Foundation. Ahmanson is a California millionaire who uses his trust fund to finance right-wing Christian, anti-gay, anti-evolution groups and politicians. He was previously associated with Christian Reconstructionism, which advocates a Biblically-based governement for the U.S. (Neither Ahmanson nor his philanthropic endeavors have their own websites. Make of that what you will.)

Hagerty has spoken twice at the Summer Institute of Journalism, a program run by the Council for Christian Colleges and University and funded by the Fieldstead Foundation. Student reactions to her talks are here.

Hagerty's keynote address to the 2003 National Student Media Convention was also sponsored by Fieldstead and Co. In 2003 she also spoke at the Baptist Press Student Journalism Conference, along with Terry Mattingly, a Scripps-Howard reporter who is also a Fieldstead grant recipient.

One final Ahmanson-Hagerty connection: Since June of 2003, Hagerty has reported on the Episcopal Church and gay issues 20 times. (Full disclosure: I am a liberal Episcopalian) She has often quoted members of the American Anglican Council, a conservative group seeking to break away from the Episcopal Church USA and join with more orthodox Anglicans worldwide. This group receives major behind the scenes funding from...you guessed it! Howard Ahmanson. (More here.)

Eschaton reader Dreaming Feet brought the NPR Ethics Guide to my attention, especially this portion:

V. Outside work, freelancing, speaking engagements
7. NPR journalists may only accept fees from educational or nonprofit
groups not engaged in significant lobbying or political activity.
Determining whether a group engages in significant lobbying or political
activity is the responsibility of the journalist seeking permission, and
all information must be fully disclosed to the journalist's supervisor.

8. NPR journalists may not speak to groups where the journalist's
appearance might put in question his or her impartiality. Such instances
include situations where the employee's appearance may appear to endorse
the agenda of a group or organization.


Hagerty's outside work certainly seems to violate both her employers ethics and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting's Independence and Integrity II: The Updated Ethics Guide for Public Radio Journalism.

Hagerty likes to say that God is her "employer and audience." She's wrong. God may be her Creator and Savior, but she is employed by the millions of Americans who donate to public radio and finance NPR programming. They deserve better. Contact Jeffery Dvorkin, NPR's Omsbudsman to complain about Hagerty's blatant conflict of interest and violation of professional ethics.

And a more recent commentary from the NPR Check Blog

Monday, October 19, 2009
Barbara Bradley Hagerty - God Help Us
(Update I & II below)
I received a heads up on Facebook regarding Monday morning's piece by Barbara Bradley Hagerty about THE HUGE SCHISM that has atheists ripping each other apart (not). The tip mentioned that Hagerty has been the recipient of a fellowship from the Templeton Foundation (a subject of controversy for being a conservative front organization with a religious devotion to the "free" market and openness to intelligent designers - see Wikipedia). On Hagerty's web site her bio states,

"She was one of 10 journalists selected for a Templeton-Cambridge fellowship in science and religion in 2005, where she and her colleagues spent weeks questioning world-class scientists and theologians at Cambridge University."

The first thing I did was see if Hagerty's "work" had appeared on the NPR Check radar. Well, what do you know, she garnered NPR Check honors twice :

(In May of 2007) Hagerty gave a sympathetic report about the creation museum...seriously. Here is some of what Hagerty noted back then:

* "...the vast majority of scientists say dinosaurs predated man by 65 million years."
* "this is as much a Bible museum as an attempt at science. The museum tries to use scientific evidence to show that Genesis is true"
* "the creation museum argues that everyone works from the same material...they only differ in interpretation, but this interpretation is nothing if not controversial....one of the museum's founders says it's more than educational..."

(In February of 2009) A even more dishonest piece of Hagerty's journalism was on display as she put a positive spin on the San Antonio Independent Christian Film Festival and its organizer, Doug Phillips. Hagerty completely ignored the Christian dominionist Vision Forum that backed the festival.

No surprise then that Hagerty is back this morning trying to stoke anti-atheism by focusing on the most radical actions of atheists (e.g. desecrating communion wafers) and simply conflating it with the more uncompromising positions of popular atheist authors Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens.

The thing that really ticked me off, as an atheist, is that I think there is interesting material for discussion and debate about the more dogmatic approaches of Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens versus a more accommodationist approach. But Hagerty's piece does little justice to this terrain - and her sneering contempt for atheists that runs throughout her feature becomes especially evident when expected interviews fall through at the Center for Inquiry Office in Washington, D.C., and she says

"Now, he could speak his mind, since he's a volunteer. But interviews with others associated with the Washington office were canceled shortly before we arrived — curious for a group that promotes free speech."

Maybe the folks there did a little background check on Hagerty and decided to avoid the hatchet job that her past sympathies indicated was in the works.

Update I: This post by P.Z. Meyers - whom Hagerty interviewed in the story - describes the distortions and dishonesty of the piece. Looks like the folks at the Center for Inquiry were right!

Update II: If unethical journalism was a crime, Ms. Hagerty would have quite a rap sheet:

* March 2004 - Atrios on Hagerty's ties to the "unapologetic Christian point of view" World Journalism Institute.
* May 2004 - Better Angels points out Hagerty's long list of documented mideeds and ties to rightwing Christian organizations.
* May 2004 - About.com's Austin Cline outs Ms. Hagerty's lousy, dishonest reporting.
* May 2005 - Media Matters takes the witness stand.

I find this critique of Ms. Hagerty troubling, as it indicates that she has strong ties to the radical Christian right, and she has a history of slanting her reporting to favor those interests.

How does this tie into her report on psychopaths? In my opinion, the first two parts of her series downplay the dangerous nature of psychopathy. She opens the series with a piece on James Fallon and describes him has having brain scans that match those of a psychopath, but portrays him as otherwise normal because he is not a brutal murderer. In the second article she displays psychopathy as a disability in Brian Dugan. The first article seems to suggest that people who share physical brain traits with psychopaths may be perfectly normal and that they are not dangerous. She mentions the Hare Psychopathy Checklist in the second article, but they did not test Fallon with the checklist. Just because he hasn't murdered anyone does not mean that he isn't dangerous! My understanding, from reading Hare's Mask of Sanity, some of Laura's writing (The Wave, SHOTW, articles) and many threads on this forum is that the malfunctioning psychopaths are the ones who run around murdering people, while the "successful" psychopath is a "snake in a suit" who skips through life destroying the lives of those around him. By comparing the brain scans of the two men, and discussing the science behind the scans in the second article she is laying it out there for us. If Brian Dugan is physically unable to feel empathy towards another human being or tell right from wrong because he "has an emotional IQ that's like a 5-year-old," why would James Fallon be any different?

"And I have empathy, too — but it's like it just stops," he says. "I mean, I start to feel, but something just blocks it. I don't know what it is."

Kiehl says he's heard all this before: All psychopaths claim they feel terrible about their crimes for the benefit of the parole board.

"But then you ask them, 'What do you mean, you feel really bad?' And Brian will look at you and go, 'What do you mean, what does it mean?' They look at you like, 'Can you give me some help? A hint? Can I call a friend?' They have no way of really getting at that at all," Kiehl says.

Kiehl says the reason people like Dugan cannot access their emotions is that their physical brains are different. And he believes he has the brain scans to prove it.

Yet she is willing to take James Fallon's word:

As for the psychopaths he studies, Fallon feels some compassion for these people who, he says, got "a bad roll of the dice."

"It's an unlucky day when all of these three things come together in a bad way, and I think one has to empathize with what happened to them," he says.

I can't wait to hear/read the third part of the series!

Seamas
 
The following part of the article exercises me to some extent:

"What if I told you that a psychopath has an emotional IQ that's like a 5-year-old?" Kiehl asks. "Well, if that was the case, we'd make the same argument for individuals with low emotional IQ — that maybe they're not as deserving of punishment, not as deserving of culpability, etc."

Implications Of The Diagnosis

And that's exactly what Dugan's lawyers argued at trial last November. Attorney Steven Greenberg said that Dugan was not criminally insane. He knew right from wrong. But he was incapable of making the right choices.

"Someone shouldn't be executed for a condition that they were born with, because it's not their fault," Greenberg says. "The crime is their fault, and he wasn't saying it wasn't his fault, and he wasn't saying, give [me] a free pass. But he was saying, don't kill me because it's not my fault that I was born this way."

This argument troubles Steven Erickson, a forensic psychologist and legal scholar at Widener University School of Law. He notes that alcoholics have brain abnormalities. Do we give them a pass if they kill someone while driving drunk?

"What about folks who suffer from depression? They have brain abnormalities, too. Should they be entitled to [an] excuse under the law?" he asks. "I think the key idea here is the law is not interested in brain abnormalities. The law is interested in whether or not someone at the time that the criminal act occurred understood the difference between right and wrong."

Now, if we consider the Law of Three, there is good and there is evil, and there is the specific situation that determines which is which, obviously, the law, as Steven Erickson above sees it is not human or humane. Yes, we should consider the brain chemistry of alcoholics and yes we should consider depression as a mitigating circumstance and, finally, I do think we should consider psychopathy as a mitigating circumstance. But, we should also consider such mitigating circumstances as condemning a person to have to deal with their problems each in a special way.

For example, the alcoholic should be placed in a treatment program and his progress monitored so that he will never drink again. If necessary, he may be put in prison for life if he keeps drinking and doing things. If a person commits a crime due to depression, they too should be treated AND punished appropriately. It should be understood that a diagnosis of psychopathy means that a person will NEVER be set free and that they must submit to castration so that the hormones that can exacerbate their condition will be curtailed and it will be certified that they will never reproduce.

But killing them? The more I think about it, the fewer instances I can think of where execution is the right choice.
 
Here's the full text from the first part of the series:

A Neuroscientist Uncovers A Dark Secret
by Barbara Bradley Hagerty


The criminal brain has always held a fascination for James Fallon. For nearly 20 years, the neuroscientist at the University of California-Irvine has studied the brains of psychopaths. He studies the biological basis for behavior, and one of his specialties is to try to figure out how a killer's brain differs from yours and mine.

About four years ago, Fallon made a startling discovery. It happened during a conversation with his then 88-year-old mother, Jenny, at a family barbecue.

"I said, 'Jim, why don't you find out about your father's relatives?' " Jenny Fallon recalls. "I think there were some cuckoos back there."

Fallon investigated.

"There's a whole lineage of very violent people — killers," he says.

One of his direct great-grandfathers, Thomas Cornell, was hanged in 1667 for murdering his mother. That line of Cornells produced seven other alleged murderers, including Lizzy Borden. "Cousin Lizzy," as Fallon wryly calls her, was accused (and controversially acquitted) of killing her father and stepmother with an ax in Fall River, Mass., in 1882.

A little spooked by his ancestry, Fallon set out to see whether anyone in his family possesses the brain of a serial killer. Because he has studied the brains of dozens of psychopaths, he knew precisely what to look for. To demonstrate, he opened his laptop and called up an image of a brain on his computer screen.

"Here is a brain that's not normal," he says. There are patches of yellow and red. Then he points to another section of the brain, in the front part of the brain, just behind the eyes.

"Look at that — there's almost nothing here," Fallon says.

This is the orbital cortex, the area that Fallon and other scientists believe is involved with ethical behavior, moral decision-making and impulse control.

"People with low activity [in the orbital cortex] are either free-wheeling types or sociopaths," he says.

Fallon's Scans

He's clearly oversimplifying, but Fallon says the orbital cortex puts a brake on another part of the brain called the amygdala, which is involved with aggression and appetites. But in some people, there's an imbalance — the orbital cortex isn't doing its job — perhaps because the person had a brain injury or was born that way.

"What's left? What takes over?" he asks. "The area of the brain that drives your id-type behaviors, which is rage, violence, eating, sex, drinking."

Fallon says nobody in his family has real problems with those behaviors. But he wanted to be sure. Conveniently, he had everything he needed: Previously, he had persuaded 10 of his close relatives to submit to a PET brain scan and give a blood sample as part of a project to see whether his family had a risk for developing Alzheimer's disease.

After learning his violent family history, he examined the images and compared them with the brains of psychopaths. His wife's scan was normal. His mother: normal. His siblings: normal. His children: normal.

"And I took a look at my own PET scan and saw something disturbing that I did not talk about," he says.

What he didn't want to reveal was that his orbital cortex looks inactive.

"If you look at the PET scan, I look just like one of those killers."

Fallon cautions that this is a young field. Scientists are just beginning to study this area of the brain — much less the brains of criminals. Still, he says the evidence is accumulating that some people's brains predispose them toward violence and that psychopathic tendencies may be passed down from one generation to another.

The Three Ingredients

And that brings us to the next part of Jim Fallon's family experiment. Along with brain scans, Fallon also tested each family member's DNA for genes that are associated with violence. He looked at 12 genes related to aggression and violence and zeroed in on the MAO-A gene (monoamine oxidase A). This gene, which has been the target of considerable research, is also known as the "warrior gene" because it regulates serotonin in the brain. Serotonin affects your mood — think Prozac — and many scientists believe that if you have a certain version of the warrior gene, your brain won't respond to the calming effects of serotonin.

Fallon calls up another slide on his computer. It has a list of family members' names, and next to them, the results of the genotyping. Everyone in his family has the low-aggression variant of the MAO-A gene, except for one person.

"You see that? I'm 100 percent. I have the pattern, the risky pattern," he says, then pauses. "In a sense, I'm a born killer."

Fallon's being tongue-in-cheek — sort of. He doesn't believe his fate or anyone else's is entirely determined by genes. They merely tip you in one direction or another.

And yet: "When I put the two together, it was frankly a little disturbing," Fallon says with a laugh. "You start to look at yourself and you say, 'I may be a sociopath.' I don't think I am, but this looks exactly like [the brains of] the psychopaths, the sociopaths, that I've seen before."

I asked his wife, Diane, what she thought of the result.

"I wasn't too concerned," she says, laughing. "I mean, I've known him since I was 12."

Diane probably does not need to worry, according to scientists who study this area. They believe that brain patterns and genetic makeup are not enough to make anyone a psychopath. You need a third ingredient: abuse or violence in one's childhood.

"And fortunately, he wasn't abused as a young person," Diane says, "so I've lived to be a ripe old age so far."

The New World of 'Neurolaw'

Jim Fallon says he had a terrific childhood; he was doted on by his parents and had loving relationships with his brothers and sisters and entire extended family. Significantly, he says this journey through his brain has changed the way he thinks about nature and nurture. He once believed that genes and brain function could determine everything about us. But now he thinks his childhood may have made all the difference.

"We'll never know, but the way these patterns are looking in general population, had I been abused, we might not be sitting here today," he says.

As for the psychopaths he studies, Fallon feels some compassion for these people who, he says, got "a bad roll of the dice."

"It's an unlucky day when all of these three things come together in a bad way, and I think one has to empathize with what happened to them," he says.

But what about people who rape and murder — should we feel empathy for them? Should they be allowed to argue in court that their brains made them do it? Enter the new world of "neurolaw" — in which neuroscience is used as evidence in the courtroom.
 
1984 said:
Seamas said:
I heard a story on NPR's morning edition this morning on the way to work entitled A Psychopath's Brain in the Courtroom. I thought it would be of interest to the forum and SOTT. Here is the text from NPR's website:

It is the second part in a three part series (the third part hasn't been aired yet). The first part is called A Neuroscientist Uncovers A Dark Secret.

Hi Seamas, this 1st part of the series was posted on SOTT yesterday: http://www.sott.net/articles/show/211245-A-Neuroscientist-Uncovers-A-Dark-Secret

hi 1984,

Thanks for the heads up! I will take a look at that thread. Should this thread be merged with that one? I apologize for further posting after your reply, I didn't see it until now.

Seamas
 
Hi again, 1984,

I obviously did not read your post very carefully as this doesn't make much sense:

Seamas said:
1984 said:
Seamas said:
I heard a story on NPR's morning edition this morning on the way to work entitled A Psychopath's Brain in the Courtroom. I thought it would be of interest to the forum and SOTT. Here is the text from NPR's website:

It is the second part in a three part series (the third part hasn't been aired yet). The first part is called A Neuroscientist Uncovers A Dark Secret.

Hi Seamas, this 1st part of the series was posted on SOTT yesterday: http://www.sott.net/articles/show/211245-A-Neuroscientist-Uncovers-A-Dark-Secret

hi 1984,

Thanks for the heads up! I will take a look at that thread. Should this thread be merged with that one? I apologize for further posting after your reply, I didn't see it until now.

Seamas

I guess I was in too much of a hurry to apologize.
 
Laura said:
Now, if we consider the Law of Three, there is good and there is evil, and there is the specific situation that determines which is which, obviously, the law, as Steven Erickson above sees it is not human or humane. Yes, we should consider the brain chemistry of alcoholics and yes we should consider depression as a mitigating circumstance and, finally, I do think we should consider psychopathy as a mitigating circumstance. But, we should also consider such mitigating circumstances as condemning a person to have to deal with their problems each in a special way.

For example, the alcoholic should be placed in a treatment program and his progress monitored so that he will never drink again. If necessary, he may be put in prison for life if he keeps drinking and doing things. If a person commits a crime due to depression, they too should be treated AND punished appropriately. It should be understood that a diagnosis of psychopathy means that a person will NEVER be set free and that they must submit to castration so that the hormones that can exacerbate their condition will be curtailed and it will be certified that they will never reproduce.

These were my thoughts exactly. It's interesting that defense lawyers try to use the fact that psychopaths are born that way as an EXCUSE for their behavior, as if they shouldn't be punished because they can't control what they do or how they were born. But that's not the issue. The issue is what they've done. If a person can't control what they do, because they've been born that way, it means they can't change and shouldn't be allowed to interact with normal society. I've been rereading Ponerology and there's so much Lobaczewski says that applies. For example, the law is totally schizoidal. It doesn't take into account the Law of Three, and it doesn't take into account what it means to be human. It's like the Talmud. What is needed is legal and penal reform, based on adequate knowledge of psychological differences and how to protect society from all the causes of ponerogenesis, whether primary (as in the case of psychopathies and severe characteropathies) and secondary (psychological damage caused by, and influenced by, pathological individuals). Without that knowledge, the legal and penal systems operate on doctrinaire concepts, don't take into account normal human psychology, don't adequately protect from the damage caused by psychopathologies, and react in a moralistic way, e.g. the death penalty.

But killing them? The more I think about it, the fewer instances I can think of where execution is the right choice.

The line of force of this series of articles seems to be advancing a couple concepts that serve the pathocratic agenda: one, the idea that psychopathy only applies to violent criminals (i.e. a person can resemble a psychopath, but not be dangerous), and two, that the death penalty is the way to go for violent psychopaths. But this is dangerous. For one, it means that successful psychopaths are seen as normal ("But I'm not violent, I just work on Wall Street!"), and that the death penalty can and will be applied to whoever is scanned as a psychopath. In the wrong hands, a normal person can be made to look like a psychopath. All you need is a psychiatrist willing to give false data. Evidence can then be manufactured against this person (i.e. they're a violent, or potentially violent, terrorist) and they'll be put to death.
 
Part three

Can Your Genes Make You Murder?
by BARBARA BRADLEY HAGERTY
July 1, 2010

When the police arrived at Bradley Waldroup's trailer home in the mountains of Tennessee, they found a war zone. There was blood on the walls, blood on the carpet, blood on the truck outside, even blood on the Bible that Waldroup had been reading before all hell broke loose.

Assistant District Attorney Drew Robinson says that on Oct. 16, 2006, Waldroup was waiting for his estranged wife to arrive with their four kids for the weekend. He had been drinking, and when his wife said she was leaving with her friend, Leslie Bradshaw, they began to fight. Soon, Waldroup had shot Bradshaw eight times and sliced her head open with a sharp object. When Waldroup was finished with her, he chased after his wife, Penny, with a machete, chopping off her finger and cutting her over and over.

"There are murders and then there are ... hacking to death, trails of blood," says prosecutor Cynthia Lecroy-Schemel. "I have not seen one like this. And I have done a lot."

Prosecutors charged Waldroup with the felony murder of Bradshaw, which carries the death penalty, and attempted first-degree murder of his wife. It seemed clear to them that Waldroup's actions were intentional and premeditated.

"There were numerous things he did around the crime scene that were conscious choices," Lecroy-Schemel says. "One of them was [that] he told his children to 'come tell your mama goodbye,' because he was going to kill her. And he had the gun, and he had the machete."

It was a pretty straightforward case. Even Waldroup said so during his trial last year. He said on the murderous night, he just "snapped," and he admitted that he killed Leslie Bradshaw and attacked his wife. "I'm not proud of none of it," Waldroup said.

"It wasn't a who done it?" says defense attorney Wylie Richardson. "It was a why done it?"

A Dangerous Mix

Richardson says he realized that the testimony at trial would be "very graphic." The defense team, he says, did not try to dismantle the graphic evidence but rather sought to "give a broader and fuller picture of what that was."

How to do that? The answer, it turned out, lay in Bradley Waldroup's genes.

Immediately, Richardson went to forensic psychiatrist William Bernet of Vanderbilt University and asked him to give Waldroup a psychiatric evaluation. Bernet also took a blood sample and brought it to Vanderbilt's Molecular Genetics Laboratory. Since 2004, Bernet and laboratory director Cindy Vnencak-Jones have been analyzing the DNA of people like Waldroup.

They've tested some 30 criminal defendants, most of whom were charged with murder. They were looking for a particular variant of the MAO-A gene — also known as the warrior gene because it has been associated with violence. Bernet says they found that Waldroup has the high-risk version of the gene.

"His genetic makeup, combined with his history of child abuse, together created a vulnerability that he would be a violent adult," Bernet explains.

Over the fierce opposition of prosecutors, the judge allowed Bernet to testify in court that these two factors help explain why Waldroup snapped that murderous night.

"We didn't say these things made him become violent, but they certainly constituted a risk factor or a vulnerability," Bernet says.

Bernet cited scientific studies over the past decade that found that the combination of the high-risk gene and child abuse increases one's chances of being convicted of a violent offense by more than 400 percent. He notes that other studies have not found a connection between the MAO-A gene and violence — but he told the jury that he felt the genes and childhood abuse were a dangerous cocktail.

"A person doesn't choose to have this particular gene or this particular genetic makeup," Bernet says. "A person doesn't choose to be abused as a child. So I think that should be taken into consideration when we're talking about criminal responsibility."

Genetics, Or Smoke And Mirrors?

The genetic testing was only one piece of Waldroup's defense. His attorneys also argued that Waldroup was depressed, suffered from "intermittent explosive disorder" and acted in the heat of passion. Still, defense co-attorney Shari Tayloe Young says the genetic evidence was critical.

"I think if that wasn't out there, then all the jury would have seen are all these terrible pictures where he took a machete and hacked at his wife," she says. "And they would have thought, he's the worst of the worst, and that's what the death penalty is for — the worst of the worst. But because they heard all the mental issues, they understood what was going on in him and understood why he did what he did."

Prosecutor Drew Robinson thinks this genetic evidence is "smoke and mirrors," aimed at confusing the jury.

"The more of this information that you put before a jury, the [greater the] chances of confusing them and drawing their attention away from the facts and onto some other aspects of the case," Robinson says. "You always run that risk. And I just think that's asking the jury to grasp ahold of a little bit too much."

To rebut Bernet's testimony, Robinson called in his own expert: psychiatrist Terry Holmes, the clinical director of Moccasin Bend Mental Health Institute in Chattanooga, Tenn. Holmes urged the jury to ignore it.

"This was somebody who was intoxicated and mad and was gonna hurt somebody," Holmes says. "And it had little to nothing to do with his genetic makeup."

Holmes says it's way too early to use this research in a court of law. And he believes Bernet is spinning the data.

But jurors say they weren't spun. Sheri Lard, one of the 12, says it was just one piece of evidence that weighed heavily for some — and for others, not at all.

"We had your good old boys who wanted to stick it to him," Lard says, laughing. "You had your grandmother types who felt sorry for him. And then you had the medical ones. The medical ones were the ones who wanted to do due diligence."

Genetic Evidence A Factor

But Lard says the genetic evidence did figure into a major decision — whether to find Waldroup guilty of murder and impose the death penalty. The jurors concluded that his actions were not premeditated and agreed with the defense argument that Waldroup just exploded.

"I remember when we were talking as a jury, the comment was brought up, 'You know, if I were in this situation, I would snap.' But there was more to it. There was more to his whole life that led to that moment," Lard says.

Including his genes?

"Oh I'm sure," Lard says. "And his background — nature vs. nurture."

Another juror, Debbie Beaty, says the science helped persuade her that Waldroup was not entirely in control of his actions.

"Evidently it's just something that doesn't tick right," Beaty says. "Some people without this would react totally different than he would."

And even though prosecutors tried to play down the genetic evidence, Beaty felt it was a major factor.

"A diagnosis is a diagnosis, it's there," she says. "A bad gene is a bad gene."

After 11 hours of deliberation, the jury convicted Waldroup of voluntary manslaughter — not murder — and attempted second-degree murder.

Prosecutor Drew Robinson was stunned.

"I was just flabbergasted. I did not know how to react to it," Robinson says.

Nor did fellow prosecutor Cynthia Lecroy-Schemel. She worries that this sort of defense is the wave of the future.

"Anything that defense attorneys can have to latch onto to save their client's life or to lessen their client's culpability, they will do it," Lecroy-Schemel says.

Waldroup's attorney, Wylie Richardson, says she's right.

"I would use it again" under the right circumstances, he says. "It seemed to work in this case."

The judge in the case sentenced Waldroup to 32 years in prison. At the hearing, Judge Carroll Ross told Waldroup he should think twice about appealing. The state might not mind trying this again and asking for the death penalty, the judge said. You might not be as fortunate with a jury the next time.

Scientists and legal experts expect to see more cases like this as neuroscience makes inroads into the courtroom, and presents guilt and innocence — not in terms of black and white — but in shades of gray.

The title of part two was changed from A Psychopath's Brain on the Courtroom to Inside A Psychopath's Brain: The Sentencing Debate
 
from article said:
"A person doesn't choose to have this particular gene or this particular genetic makeup," Bernet says. "A person doesn't choose to be abused as a child. So I think that should be taken into consideration when we're talking about criminal responsibility."

Yes, it should be taken into consideration and the person should be dealt with appropriately. Unfortunately, the law doesn't have a verdict: guilty of the deed but diminished responsibility due to genetics, therefore lifetime incarceration and castration". Basically, all they have is guilty of a lesser offence that means a lighter sentence.
 
Laura said:
It should be understood that a diagnosis of psychopathy means that a person will NEVER be set free and that they must submit to castration so that the hormones that can exacerbate their condition will be curtailed and it will be certified that they will never reproduce.

I found this thread from 2010 when looked if we had any articles by Barbara Bradley Hagerty. It's interesting to reread them in light of the recent psychopathy books.

As it happens, Barbara Bradley Hagerty wrote another article in July 2017 on the topic of psychopathy. This time about a child psychopath. The subtitle says: "The condition has long been considered untreatable. Experts can spot it in a child as young as 3 or 4. But a new clinical approach offers hope." Well, obviously they isn't much hope, and the author doesn't really give any. Their so called "hope" isn't a hope for recovery, but really a hope that their cognitive training will hold, and the psycho child won't harm anyone. This is more like a disaster waiting to happen, while psycho kids learn how to hide and manipulate better. But it was interesting to read about the "Mendota facility", and the author quotes Raine numerous times.

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/06/when-your-child-is-a-psychopath/524502/

This is a good day, Samantha tells me: 10 on a scale of 10. We’re sitting in a conference room at the San Marcos Treatment Center, just south of Austin, Texas, a space that has witnessed countless difficult conversations between troubled children, their worried parents, and clinical therapists. But today promises unalloyed joy. Samantha’s mother is visiting from Idaho, as she does every six weeks, which means lunch off campus and an excursion to Target. The girl needs supplies: new jeans, yoga pants, nail polish.

At 11, Samantha is just over 5 feet tall and has wavy black hair and a steady gaze. She flashes a smile when I ask about her favorite subject (history), and grimaces when I ask about her least favorite (math). She seems poised and cheerful, a normal preteen. But when we steer into uncomfortable territory—the events that led her to this juvenile-treatment facility nearly 2,000 miles from her family—Samantha hesitates and looks down at her hands. “I wanted the whole world to myself,” she says. “So I made a whole entire book about how to hurt people.”

Starting at age 6, Samantha began drawing pictures of murder weapons: a knife, a bow and arrow, chemicals for poisoning, a plastic bag for suffocating. She tells me that she pretended to kill her stuffed animals.

“You were practicing on your stuffed animals?,” I ask her.

She nods.

“How did you feel when you were doing that to your stuffed animals?”

“Happy.”

“Why did it make you feel happy?”

“Because I thought that someday I was going to end up doing it on somebody.”

“Did you ever try?”

Silence.

“I choked my little brother.”

Samantha’s parents, Jen and Danny, adopted Samantha when she was 2. They already had three biological children, but they felt called to add Samantha (not her real name) and her half sister, who is two years older, to their family. They later had two more kids.

From the start, Samantha seemed a willful child, in tyrannical need of attention. But what toddler isn’t? Her biological mother had been forced to give her up because she’d lost her job and home and couldn’t provide for her four children, but there was no evidence of abuse. According to documentation from the state of Texas, Samantha met all her cognitive, emotional, and physical milestones. She had no learning disabilities, no emotional scars, no signs of ADHD or autism.

But even at a very young age, Samantha had a mean streak. When she was about 20 months old, living with foster parents in Texas, she clashed with a boy in day care. The caretaker soothed them both; problem solved. Later that day Samantha, who was already potty trained, walked over to where the boy was playing, pulled down her pants, and peed on him. “She knew exactly what she was doing,” Jen says. “There was an ability to wait until an opportune moment to exact her revenge on someone.”

When Samantha got a little older, she would pinch, trip, or push her siblings and smile if they cried. She would break into her sister’s piggy bank and rip up all the bills. Once, when Samantha was 5, Jen scolded her for being mean to one of her siblings. Samantha walked upstairs to her parents’ bathroom and washed her mother’s contact lenses down the drain. “Her behavior wasn’t impulsive,” Jen says. “It was very thoughtful, premeditated.”

“I want to kill all of you,” Samantha told her mother.

Jen, a former elementary-school teacher, and Danny, a physician, realized they were out of their depth. They consulted doctors, psychiatrists, and therapists. But Samantha only grew more dangerous. They had her admitted to a psychiatric hospital three times before sending her to a residential treatment program in Montana at age 6. Samantha would grow out of it, one psychologist assured her parents; the problem was merely delayed empathy. Samantha was impulsive, another said, something that medication would fix. Yet another suggested that she had reactive attachment disorder, which could be ameliorated with intensive therapy. More darkly—and typically, in these sorts of cases—another psychologist blamed Jen and Danny, implying that Samantha was reacting to harsh and unloving parenting.

One bitter December day in 2011, Jen was driving the children along a winding road near their home. Samantha had just turned 6. Suddenly Jen heard screaming from the back seat, and when she looked in the mirror, she saw Samantha with her hands around the throat of her 2-year-old sister, who was trapped in her car seat. Jen separated them, and once they were home, she pulled Samantha aside.

“What were you doing?,” Jen asked.

“I was trying to choke her,” Samantha said.

“You realize that would have killed her? She would not have been able to breathe. She would have died.”

“I know.”

“What about the rest of us?”

“I want to kill all of you.”

Samantha later showed Jen her sketches, and Jen watched in horror as her daughter demonstrated how to strangle or suffocate her stuffed animals. “I was so terrified,” Jen says. “I felt like I had lost control.”

Four months later, Samantha tried to strangle her baby brother, who was just two months old.

Jen and Danny had to admit that nothing seemed to make a difference—not affection, not discipline, not therapy. “I was reading and reading and reading, trying to figure out what diagnosis made sense,” Jen tells me. “What fits with the behaviors I’m seeing?” Eventually she found one condition that did seem to fit—but it was a diagnosis that all the mental-health professionals had dismissed, because it’s considered both rare and untreatable. In July 2013, Jen took Samantha to see a psychiatrist in New York City, who confirmed her suspicion.

“In the children’s mental-health world, it’s pretty much a terminal diagnosis, except your child’s not going to die,” Jen says. “It’s just that there’s no help.” She recalls walking out of the psychiatrist’s office on that warm afternoon and standing on a street corner in Manhattan as pedestrians pushed past her in a blur. A feeling flooded over her, singular, unexpected. Hope. Someone had finally acknowledged her family’s plight. Perhaps she and Danny could, against the odds, find a way to help their daughter.

Samantha was diagnosed with conduct disorder with callous and unemotional traits. She had all the characteristics of a budding psychopath.

Psychopaths have always been with us. Indeed, certain psychopathic traits have survived because they’re useful in small doses: the cool dispassion of a surgeon, the tunnel vision of an Olympic athlete, the ambitious narcissism of many a politician. But when these attributes exist in the wrong combination or in extreme forms, they can produce a dangerously antisocial individual, or even a cold-blooded killer. Only in the past quarter century have researchers zeroed in on the early signs that indicate a child could be the next Ted Bundy.

Researchers shy away from calling children psychopaths; the term carries too much stigma, and too much determinism. They prefer to describe children like Samantha as having “callous and unemotional traits,” shorthand for a cluster of characteristics and behaviors, including a lack of empathy, remorse, or guilt; shallow emotions; aggression and even cruelty; and a seeming indifference to punishment. Callous and unemotional children have no trouble hurting others to get what they want. If they do seem caring or empathetic, they’re probably trying to manipulate you.

Researchers believe that nearly 1 percent of children exhibit these traits, about as many as have autism or bipolar disorder. Until recently, the condition was seldom mentioned. Only in 2013 did the American Psychiatric Association include callous and unemotional traits in its diagnostic manual, DSM-5. The condition can go unnoticed because many children with these traits—who can be charming and smart enough to mimic social cues—are able to mask them.

More than 50 studies have found that kids with callous and unemotional traits are more likely than other kids (three times more likely, in one study) to become criminals or display aggressive, psychopathic traits later in life. And while adult psychopaths constitute only a tiny fraction of the general population, studies suggest that they commit half of all violent crimes. Ignore the problem, says Adrian Raine, a psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania, “and it could be argued we have blood on our hands.”

Researchers believe that two paths can lead to psychopathy: one dominated by nature, the other by nurture. For some children, their environment—growing up in poverty, living with abusive parents, fending for themselves in dangerous neighborhoods—can turn them violent and coldhearted. These kids aren’t born callous and unemotional; many experts suggest that if they’re given a reprieve from their environment, they can be pulled back from psychopathy’s edge.

“I don’t know what you call this emotion,” one psychopathic prisoner said, looking at a photo of a fearful face, “but it’s what people look like just before you stab them.”

But other children display callous and unemotional traits even though they are raised by loving parents in safe neighborhoods. Large studies in the United Kingdom and elsewhere have found that this early-onset condition is highly hereditary, hardwired in the brain—and especially difficult to treat. “We’d like to think a mother and father’s love can turn everything around,” Raine says. “But there are times where parents are doing the very best they can, but the kid—even from the get-go—is just a bad kid.”

Still, researchers stress that a callous child—even one who was born that way—is not automatically destined for psychopathy. By some estimates, four out of five children with these traits do not grow up to be psychopaths. The mystery—the one everyone is trying to solve—is why some of these children develop into normal adults while others end up on death row.

A trained eye can spot a callous and unemotional child by age 3 or 4. Whereas normally developing children at that age grow agitated when they see other children cry—and either try to comfort them or bolt the scene—these kids show a chilly detachment. In fact, psychologists may even be able to trace these traits back to infancy. Researchers at King’s College London tested more than 200 five-week-old babies, tracking whether they preferred looking at a person’s face or at a red ball. Those who favored the ball displayed more callous traits two and a half years later.

As a child gets older, more-obvious warning signs appear. Kent Kiehl, a psychologist at the University of New Mexico and the author of The Psychopath Whisperer, says that one scary harbinger occurs when a kid who is 8, 9, or 10 years old commits a transgression or a crime while alone, without the pressure of peers. This reflects an interior impulse toward harm. Criminal versatility—committing different types of crimes in different settings—can also hint at future psychopathy.

But the biggest red flag is early violence. “Most of the psychopaths I meet in prison had been in fights with teachers in elementary school or junior high,” Kiehl says. “When I’d interview them, I’d say, ‘What’s the worst thing you did in school?’ And they’d say, ‘I beat the teacher unconscious.’ You’re like, That really happened? It turns out that’s very common.”

We have a fairly good idea of what an adult psychopathic brain looks like, thanks in part to Kiehl’s work. He has scanned the brains of hundreds of inmates at maximum-security prisons and chronicled the neural differences between average violent convicts and psychopaths. Broadly speaking, Kiehl and others believe that the psychopathic brain has at least two neural abnormalities—and that these same differences likely also occur in the brains of callous children.

The first abnormality appears in the limbic system, the set of brain structures involved in, among other things, processing emotions. In a psychopath’s brain, this area contains less gray matter. “It’s like a weaker muscle,” Kiehl says. A psychopath may understand, intellectually, that what he is doing is wrong, but he doesn’t feel it. “Psychopaths know the words but not the music” is how Kiehl describes it. “They just don’t have the same circuitry.”

In particular, experts point to the amygdala—a part of the limbic system—as a physiological culprit for coldhearted or violent behavior. Someone with an undersize or underactive amygdala may not be able to feel empathy or refrain from violence. For example, many psychopathic adults and callous children do not recognize fear or distress in other people’s faces. Essi Viding, a professor of developmental psychopathology at University College London recalls showing one psychopathic prisoner a series of faces with different expressions. When the prisoner came to a fearful face, he said, “I don’t know what you call this emotion, but it’s what people look like just before you stab them.”

Why does this neural quirk matter? Abigail Marsh, a researcher at Georgetown University who has studied the brains of callous and unemotional children, says that distress cues, such as fearful or sad expressions, signal submission and conciliation. “They’re designed to prevent attacks by raising the white flag. And so if you’re not sensitive to these cues, you’re much more likely to attack somebody whom other people would refrain from attacking.”

Psychopaths not only fail to recognize distress in others, they may not feel it themselves. The best physiological indicator of which young people will become violent criminals as adults is a low resting heart rate, says Adrian Raine of the University of Pennsylvania. Longitudinal studies that followed thousands of men in Sweden, the U.K., and Brazil all point to this biological anomaly. “We think that low heart rate reflects a lack of fear, and a lack of fear could predispose someone to committing fearless criminal-violence acts,” Raine says. Or perhaps there is an “optimal level of physiological arousal,” and psychopathic people seek out stimulation to increase their heart rate to normal. “For some kids, one way of getting this arousal jag in life is by shoplifting, or joining a gang, or robbing a store, or getting into a fight.” Indeed, when Daniel Waschbusch, a clinical psychologist at Penn State Hershey Medical Center, gave the most severely callous and unemotional children he worked with a stimulative medication, their behavior improved.

The second hallmark of a psychopathic brain is an overactive reward system especially primed for drugs, sex, or anything else that delivers a ping of excitement. In one study, children played a computer gambling game programmed to allow them to win early on and then slowly begin to lose. Most people will cut their losses at some point, Kent Kiehl notes, “whereas the psychopathic, callous unemotional kids keep going until they lose everything.” Their brakes don’t work, he says.

Faulty brakes may help explain why psychopaths commit brutal crimes: Their brains ignore cues about danger or punishment. “There are all these decisions we make based on threat, or the fear that something bad can happen,” says Dustin Pardini, a clinical psychologist and an associate professor of criminology at Arizona State University. “If you have less concern about the negative consequences of your actions, then you’ll be more likely to continue engaging in these behaviors. And when you get caught, you’ll be less likely to learn from your mistakes.”

Researchers see this insensitivity to punishment even in some toddlers. “These are the kids that are completely unperturbed by the fact that they’ve been put in time-out,” says Eva Kimonis, who works with callous children and their families at the University of New South Wales, in Australia. “So it’s not surprising that they keep going to time-out, because it’s not effective for them. Whereas reward—they’re very motivated by that.”

This insight is driving a new wave of treatment. What’s a clinician to do if the emotional, empathetic part of a child’s brain is broken but the reward part of the brain is humming along? “You co-opt the system,” Kiehl says. “You work with what’s left.” 



With each passing year, both nature and nurture conspire to steer a callous child toward psychopathy and block his exits to a normal life. His brain becomes a little less malleable; his environment grows less forgiving as his exhausted parents reach their limits, and as teachers, social workers, and judges begin to turn away. By his teenage years, he may not be a lost cause, since the rational part of his brain is still under construction. But he can be one scary dude.

Like the guy standing 20 feet away from me in the North Hall of Mendota Juvenile Treatment Center, in Madison, Wisconsin. The tall, lanky teenager has just emerged from his cell. Two staff members cuff his wrists, shackle his feet, and begin to lead him away. Suddenly he swivels to face me and laughs—a menacing laugh that gives me chills. As young men yell expletives, banging on the metal doors of their cells, and others stare silently through their narrow plexiglass windows, I think, This is as close as I get to Lord of the Flies.

The psychologists Michael Caldwell and Greg Van Rybroek thought much the same thing when they opened the Mendota facility in 1995, in response to a nationwide epidemic of youth violence in the early ’90s. Instead of placing young offenders in a juvenile prison until they were released to commit more—and more violent—crimes as adults, the Wisconsin legislature set up a new treatment center to try to break the cycle of pathology. Mendota would operate within the Department of Health Services, not the Department of Corrections. It would be run by psychologists and psychiatric-care technicians, not wardens and guards. It would employ one staff member for every three kids—quadruple the ratio at other juvenile-corrections facilities.

Caldwell and Van Rybroek tell me that the state’s high-security juvenile-corrections facility was supposed to send over its most mentally ill boys between the ages of 12 and 17. It did, but what Caldwell and Van Rybroek didn’t anticipate was that the boys the facility transferred were also its most menacing and recalcitrant. They recall their first few assessments. “The kid would walk out and we would turn to each other and say, ‘That’s the most dangerous person I’ve ever seen in my life,’ ” Caldwell says. Each one seemed more threatening than the last. “We’re looking at each other and saying, ‘Oh, no. What have we done?,’ ” Van Rybroek adds.

What they have done, by trial and error, is achieve something most people thought impossible: If they haven’t cured psychopathy, they’ve at least tamed it.

Many of the teenagers at Mendota grew up on the streets, without parents, and were beaten up or sexually abused. Violence became a defense mechanism. Caldwell and Van Rybroek recall a group-therapy session a few years ago in which one boy described being strung up by his wrists and hung from the ceiling as his father cut him with a knife and rubbed pepper in the wounds. “Hey,” several other kids said, “that’s like what happened to me.” They called themselves the “piñata club.”

But not everyone at Mendota was “born in hell,” as Van Rybroek puts it. Some of the boys were raised in middle-class homes with parents whose major sin was not abuse but paralysis in the face of their terrifying child. No matter the history, one secret to diverting them from adult psychopathy is to wage an unrelenting war of presence. At Mendota, the staff calls this “decompression.” The idea is to allow a young man who has been living in a state of chaos to slowly rise to the surface and acclimate to the world without resorting to violence.

Caldwell mentions that, two weeks ago, one patient became furious over some perceived slight or injustice; every time the techs checked on him, he would squirt urine or feces through the door. (This is a popular pastime at Mendota.) The techs would dodge it and return 20 minutes later, and he would do it again. “This went on for several days,” Caldwell says. “But part of the concept of decompression is that the kid’s going to get tired at some point. And one of those times you’re going to come there and he’s going to be tired, or he’s just not going to have any urine left to throw at you. And you’re going to have a little moment where you’re going to have a positive connection there.”

Cindy Ebsen, the operations director, who is also a registered nurse, gives me a tour of Mendota’s North Hall. As we pass the metal doors with their narrow windows, the boys peer out and the yelling subsides into entreaties. “Cindy, Cindy, can you get me some candy?” “I’m your favorite, aren’t I, Cindy?” “Cindy, why don’t you visit me anymore?”

She pauses to banter with each of them. The young men who pass through these halls have murdered and maimed, carjacked and robbed at gunpoint. “But they’re still kids. I love working with them, because I see the most success in this population,” as opposed to older offenders, Ebsen says. For many, friendship with her or another staff member is the first safe connection they’ve known.

Forming attachments with callous kids is important, but it’s not Mendota’s singular insight. The center’s real breakthrough involves deploying the anomalies of the psychopathic brain to one’s advantage—specifically, downplaying punishment and dangling rewards. These boys have been expelled from school, placed in group homes, arrested, and jailed. If punishment were going to rein them in, it would have by now. But their brains do respond, enthusiastically, to rewards. At Mendota, the boys can accumulate points to join ever more prestigious “clubs” (Club 19, Club 23, the VIP Club). As they ascend in status, they earn privileges and treats—candy bars, baseball cards, pizza on Saturdays, the chance to play Xbox or stay up late. Hitting someone, throwing urine, or cussing out the staff costs a boy points—but not for long, since callous and unemotional kids aren’t generally deterred by punishment.

I am, frankly, skeptical—will a kid who knocked down an elderly lady and stole her Social Security check (as one Mendota resident did) really be motivated by the promise of Pokémon cards? But then I walk down the South Hall with Ebsen. She stops and turns toward a door on our left. “Hey,” she calls, “do I hear internet radio?”

“Yeah, yeah, I’m in the VIP Club,” a voice says. “Can I show you my basketball cards?”

Ebsen unlocks the door to reveal a skinny 17-year-old boy with a nascent mustache. He fans out his collection. “This is, like, 50 basketball cards,” he says, and I can almost see his reward centers glowing. “I have the most and best basketball cards here.” Later, he sketches out his history for me: His stepmother had routinely beat him and his stepbrother had used him for sex. When he was still a preteen, he began molesting the younger girl and boy next door. The abuse continued for a few years, until the boy told his mother. “I knew it was wrong, but I didn’t care,” he says. “I just wanted the pleasure.”

At Mendota, he has begun to see that short-term pleasure could land him in prison as a sex offender, while deferred gratification can confer more-lasting dividends: a family, a job, and most of all, freedom. Unlikely as it sounds, this revelation sprang from his ardent pursuit of basketball cards.

After he details the center’s point system (a higher math that I cannot follow), the boy tells me that a similar approach should translate into success in the outside world—as if the world, too, operates on a point system. Just as consistent good behavior confers basketball cards and internet radio inside these walls, so—he believes—will it bring promotions at work. “Say you’re a cook; you can [become] a waitress if you’re doing really good,” he says. “That’s the way I look at it.”

He peers at me, as if searching for confirmation. I nod, hoping that the world will work this way for him. Even more, I hope his insight will endure.

In fact, the program at Mendota has changed the trajectory for many young men, at least in the short term. Caldwell and Van Rybroek have tracked the public records of 248 juvenile delinquents after their release. One hundred forty-seven of them had been in a juvenile-corrections facility, and 101 of them—the harder, more psychopathic cases—had received treatment at Mendota. In the four and a half years since their release, the Mendota boys have been far less likely to reoffend (64 percent versus 97 percent), and far less likely to commit a violent crime (36 percent versus 60 percent). Most striking, the ordinary delinquents have killed 16 people since their release. The boys from Mendota? Not one.

“We thought that as soon as they walked out the door, they’d last maybe a week or two and they’d have another felony on their record,” Caldwell says. “And when the data first came back that showed that that wasn’t happening, we figured there was something wrong with the data.” For two years, they tried to find mistakes or alternative explanations, but eventually they concluded that the results were real.

The question they are trying to answer now is this: Can Mendota’s treatment program not only change the behavior of these teens, but measurably reshape their brains as well? Researchers are optimistic, in part because the decision-making part of the brain continues to evolve into one’s mid‑20s. The program is like neural weight lifting, Kent Kiehl, at the University of New Mexico, says. “If you exercise this limbic-related circuitry, it’s going to get better.”

To test this hypothesis, Kiehl and the staff at Mendota are now asking some 300 young men to slide into a mobile brain scanner. The scanner records the shape and size of key areas of the boys’ brains, as well as how their brains react to tests of decision-making ability, impulsivity, and other qualities that go to the core of psychopathy. Each boy’s brain will be scanned before, during, and at the end of their time in the program, offering researchers insights into whether his improved behavior reflects better functioning inside his brain.

No one believes that Mendota graduates will develop true empathy or a heartfelt moral conscience. “They may not go from the Joker in The Dark Knight to Mister Rogers,” Caldwell tells me, laughing. But they can develop a cognitive moral conscience, an intellectual awareness that life will be more rewarding if they play by the rules. “We’re just happy if they stay on this side of the law,” Van Rybroek says. “In our world, that’s huge.”

How many can stay the course for a lifetime? Caldwell and Van Rybroek have no idea. They’re barred from contacting former patients—a policy meant to ensure that the staff and former patients maintain appropriate boundaries. But sometimes graduates write or call to share their progress, and among these correspondents, Carl, now 37, stands out.

Carl (not his real name) emailed a thankful note to Van Rybroek in 2013. Aside from one assault conviction after he left Mendota, he had stayed out of trouble for a decade and opened his own business—a funeral home near Los Angeles. His success was especially significant because he was one of the harder cases, a boy from a good home who seemed wired for violence.

“I remember when I bit my mom really hard, and she was bleeding and crying,” Carl says. “I remember feeling so happy, so overjoyed.”
Carl was born in a small town in Wisconsin. The middle child of a computer programmer and a special-education teacher, “he came out angry,” his father recalls during a phone conversation. His acts of violence started small—hitting a classmate in kindergarten—but quickly escalated: ripping the head off his favorite teddy bear, slashing the tires on the family car, starting fires, killing his sister’s hamster.

His sister remembers Carl, when he was about 8, swinging their cat in circles by its tail, faster and faster, and then letting go. “And you hear her hit the wall.” Carl just laughed.

Looking back, even Carl is puzzled by the rage that coursed through him as a child. “I remember when I bit my mom really hard, and she was bleeding and crying. I remember feeling so happy, so overjoyed—completely fulfilled and satisfied,” he tells me on the phone. “It wasn’t like someone kicked me in the face and I was trying to get him back. It was more like a weird, hard-to-explain feeling of hatred.”

His behavior confused and eventually terrified his parents. “It just got worse and worse as he got bigger,” his father tells me. “Later, when he was a teenager and occasionally incarcerated, I was happy about it. We knew where he was and that he’d be safe, and that took a load off the mind.”

By the time Carl arrived at Mendota Juvenile Treatment Center in November 1995, at age 15, he had been placed in a psychiatric hospital, a group home, foster care, or a juvenile-corrections center about a dozen times. His police record listed 18 charges, including armed burglary and three “crimes against persons,” one of which sent the victim to the hospital. Lincoln Hills, a high-security juvenile-corrections facility, foisted him on Mendota after he accumulated more than 100 serious infractions in less than four months. On an assessment called the Youth Psychopathy Checklist, he scored 38 out of a possible 40—five points higher than the average for Mendota boys, who were among the most dangerous young men in Wisconsin.

Carl had a rocky start at Mendota: weeks of abusing staff, smearing feces around his cell, yelling all night, refusing to shower, and spending much of the time locked in his room, not allowed to mix with the other kids. Slowly, though, his psychology began to shift. The staff’s unruffled constancy chipped away at his defenses. “These people were like zombies,” Carl recalls, laughing. “You could punch them in the face and they wouldn’t do anything.”

He started talking in therapy and in class. He quit mouthing off and settled down. He developed the first real bonds in his young life. “The teachers, the nurses, the staff, they all seemed to have this idea that they could make a difference in us,” he says. “Like, Huh! Something good could come of us. We were believed to have potential.”

Carl wasn’t exactly in the clear. After two stints at Mendota, he was released just before his 18th birthday, got married, and at age 20 was arrested for beating up a police officer. In prison, he wrote a suicide note, fashioned a makeshift noose, and was put on suicide watch in solitary confinement. While there, he began reading the Bible and fasting, and one day, he says, “something very powerful shifted.” He began to believe in God. Carl acknowledges that his lifestyle falls far short of the Christian ideal. But he still attends church every week, and he credits Mendota with paving the way for his conversion. By the time he was released, in 2003, his marriage had dissolved, and he moved away from Wisconsin, eventually settling in California, where he opened his funeral home.

Carl cheerfully admits that the death business appeals to him. As a child, he says, “I had a deep fascination with knives and cutting and killing, so it’s a harmless way to express some level of what you might call morbid curiosity. And I think that morbid curiosity taken to its extreme—that’s the home of the serial killers, okay? So it’s that same energy. But everything in moderation.”

Of course, his profession also requires empathy. Carl says that he had to train himself to show empathy for his grieving clients, but that it now comes naturally. His sister agrees that he’s been able to make this emotional leap. “I’ve seen him interact with the families, and he’s phenomenal,” she tells me. “He is amazing at providing empathy and providing that shoulder for them. And it does not fit with my view of him at all. I get confused. Is that true? Does he genuinely feel for them? Is he faking the whole thing? Does he even know at this point?”

After talking with Carl, I begin to see him as a remarkable success story. “Without [Mendota] and Jesus,” he tells me, “I would have been a Manson-, Bundy-, Dahmer-, or Berkowitz-type of criminal.” Sure, his fascination with the morbid is a little creepy. Yet here he is, now remarried, the father of a 1-year-old son he adores, with a flourishing business. After our phone interview, I decide to meet him in person. I want to witness his redemption for myself.

The night before I’m scheduled to fly to Los Angeles, I receive a frantic email from Carl’s wife. Carl is in police custody. His wife tells me that Carl considers himself polyamorous, and had invited one of his girlfriends over to their apartment. (This woman denies ever being romantically involved with Carl.)* They were playing with the baby when his wife returned. She was furious, and grabbed their son. Carl responded by pulling her hair, snatching the baby out of her arms, and taking her phone to prevent her from calling the police. She called from a neighbor’s house instead. (Carl says he grabbed the baby to protect him.) Three misdemeanor charges—spousal battery, abandonment and neglect of a child, and intimidation of a witness—and the psychopath who made good is now in jail.

I go to Los Angeles anyway, in the naive hope that Carl will be released on bail at his hearing the next day. A few minutes before 8:30 a.m., his wife and I meet at the courthouse and begin the long wait. She is 12 years Carl’s junior, a compact woman with long black hair and a weariness that ebbs only when she gazes at her son. She met Carl on OkCupid two years ago while visiting L.A. and—after a romance of just a few months—moved to California to marry him. Now she sits outside the courtroom, one eye on her son, fielding calls from clients of the funeral home and wondering whether she can make bail.

“I’m so sick of the drama,” she says, as the phone rings again.

Carl is a tough man to be married to. His wife says he’s funny and charming and a good listener, but he sometimes loses interest in the funeral business, leaving most of the work to her. He brings other women home for sex, even when she’s there. And while he’s never seriously beaten her up, he has slapped her.

“He would say sorry, but I don’t know if he was upset or not,” she tells me.

“So you wondered if he felt genuine remorse?”

“Honestly, I’m at a point where I don’t really care anymore. I just want my son and myself to be safe.”

Finally, at 3:15 p.m., Carl shuffles into the courtroom, handcuffed, wearing an orange L.A. County jumpsuit. He gives us a two-handed wave and flashes a carefree smile, which fades when he learns that he will not be released on bail today, despite pleading guilty to assault and battery. He will remain in jail for another three weeks.

Carl calls me the day after his release. “I really shouldn’t have a girlfriend and a wife,” he says, in what seems an uncharacteristic display of remorse. He insists that he wants to keep his family together, and says that he thinks the domestic-violence classes the court has mandated will help him. He seems sincere.

When I describe the latest twist in Carl’s story to Michael Caldwell and Greg Van Rybroek, they laugh knowingly. “This counts as a good outcome for a Mendota guy,” Caldwell says. “He’s not going to have a fully healthy adjustment to life, but he’s been able to stay mostly within the law. Even this misdemeanor—he’s not committing armed robberies or shooting people.”

His sister sees her brother’s outcome in a similar light. “This guy got dealt a shittier hand of cards than anybody I’ve ever met,” she tells me. “Who deserves to have started out life that way? And the fact that he’s not a raving lunatic, locked up for the rest of his life, or dead is insane. ”

I ask Carl whether it’s difficult to play by the rules, to simply be normal. “On a scale of 1 to 10, how hard is it?” he says. “I would say an 8. Because 8’s difficult, very difficult.”

I’ve grown to like Carl: He has a lively intellect, a willingness to admit his flaws, and a desire to be good. Is he being sincere or manipulating me? Is Carl proof that psychopathy can be tamed—or proof that the traits are so deeply embedded that they can never be dislodged? I honestly don’t know.

At the san marcos Treatment Center, Samantha is wearing her new yoga pants from Target, but they bring her little joy. In a few hours, her mother will leave for the airport and fly back to Idaho. Samantha munches on a slice of pizza and suggests movies to watch on Jen’s laptop. She seems sad, but less about Jen’s departure than about the resumption of the center’s tedious routine. Samantha snuggles with her mom while they watch The BFG, this 11-year-old girl who can stab a teacher’s hand with a pencil at the slightest provocation.

Watching them in the darkened room, I contemplate for the hundredth time the arbitrary nature of good and evil. If Samantha’s brain is wired for callousness, if she fails to experience empathy or remorse because she lacks the neural equipment, can we say she is evil? “These kids can’t help it,” Adrian Raine says. “Kids don’t grow up wanting to be psychopaths or serial killers. They grow up wanting to become baseball players or great football stars. It’s not a choice.”

Samantha knows that her thoughts about hurting people are wrong, and she tries to suppress them. But the cognitive training cannot always compete.

Yet, Raine says, even if we don’t label them evil, we must try to head off their evil acts. It’s a daily struggle, planting the seeds of emotions that usually come so naturally—empathy, caring, remorse—in the rocky soil of a callous brain. Samantha has lived for more than two years at San Marcos, where the staff has tried to shape her behavior with regular therapy and a program that, like Mendota’s, dispenses quick but limited punishment for bad behavior and offers prizes and privileges—candy, Pokémon cards, late nights on weekends—for good behavior.

Jen and Danny have spotted green shoots of empathy. Samantha has made a friend, and recently comforted the girl after her social worker quit. They’ve detected traces of self-awareness and even remorse: Samantha knows that her thoughts about hurting people are wrong, and she tries to suppress them. But the cognitive training cannot always compete with the urge to strangle an annoying classmate, which she tried to do just the other day. “It builds up, and then I have to do it,” Samantha explains. “I can’t keep it away.”

It all feels exhausting, for Samantha and for everyone in her orbit. Later, I ask Jen whether Samantha has lovable qualities that make all this worthwhile. “It can’t be all nightmare, can it?,” I ask. She hesitates. “Or can it?”

“It is not all nightmare,” Jen responds, eventually. “She’s cute, and she can be fun, and she can be enjoyable.” She’s great at board games, she has a wonderful imagination, and now, having been apart for two years, her siblings say they miss her. But Samantha’s mood and behavior can quickly turn. “The challenge with her is that her extreme is so extreme. You’re always waiting for the other shoe to drop.”

Danny says they’re praying for the triumph of self-interest over impulse. “Our hope is that she is able to have a cognitive understanding that ‘Even though my thinking is different, my behavior needs to walk down this path so that I can enjoy the good things that I want.’ ” Because she was diagnosed relatively early, they hope that Samantha’s young, still-developing brain can be rewired for some measure of cognitive morality. And having parents like Jen and Danny could make a difference; research suggests that warm and responsive parenting can help children become less callous as they get older.

On the flip side, the New York psychiatrist told them, the fact that her symptoms appeared so early, and so dramatically, may indicate that her callousness is so deeply ingrained that little can be done to ameliorate it.

Samantha’s parents try not to second-guess their decision to adopt her. But even Samantha has wondered whether they have regrets. “She said, ‘Why did you even want me?,’ ” Jen recalls. “The real answer to that is: We didn’t know the depth of her challenges. We had no idea. I don’t know if this would be a different story if we were looking at this now. But what we tell her is: ‘You were ours.’ ”

Jen and Danny are planning to bring Samantha home this summer, a prospect the family views with some trepidation. They’re taking precautions, such as using alarms on Samantha’s bedroom door. The older children are larger and tougher than Samantha, but the family will have to keep vigil over the 5-year-old and the 7-year-old. Still, they believe she’s ready, or, more accurately, that she’s progressed as far as she can at San Marcos. They want to bring her home, to give it another try.

Of course, even if Samantha can slip easily back into home life at 11, what of the future? “Do I want that child to have a driver’s license?,” Jen asks. To go on dates? She’s smart enough for college—but will she be able to negotiate that complex society without becoming a threat? Can she have a stable romantic relationship, much less fall in love and marry? She and Danny have had to redefine success for Samantha: simply keeping her out of prison.

And yet, they love Samantha. “She’s ours, and we want to raise our children together,” Jen says. Samantha has been in residential treatment programs for most of the past five years, nearly half her life. They can’t institutionalize her forever. She needs to learn to function in the world, sooner rather than later. “I do feel there’s hope,” Jen says. “The hard part is, it’s never going to go away. It’s high-stakes parenting. If it fails, it’s going to fail big.”
 
Back
Top Bottom