So I have been following the Clyde Ray Spencer case over the past few years. Brief background, Ray Spencer was a Washington State Police officer who served 20 years for molesting his kids and a step-son. A few years ago those kids, now grown, came forward and said it never happened and that they were coerced by the local police (the investigating officer's supervisor was also having an affair with Ray Spencer's wife at the time). Anyway, the above article notes that he earned a PhD in Psychology while in prison. The only hint I got about the institution was that the article has a closeup of his hands showing a class ring. Please jump in if I'm mistaken, but I believe that ring says "California Coast University."
What a tragedy that case is. Lots of that was going on in the 80s and 90s, a rash of false accusations and fake recovered memories encouraged by well-meaning but incompetent counselors and the like. Good for him for not folding and getting an education.
A terrible era. Many men are now afraid to acknowledge the presence of children. What has improved for the prevalence of social science over the past century?
Thanks for this link. I'm not sure why it didn't occur to me to check and see if he had a LinkedIn. So it looks like he started his program in 89 and graduated in 2008, which could very well explain how he has a PhD from an NA school that presently only awards an EdD (or he could have just labeled his EdD a PhD). Either way, and setting the RA/NA debate aside for the moment, here is a guy who didn't have a B&M option for continuing his education and managed to pull off a doctorate while in prison. That's impressive. I hope he does get to "use" that degree, if he wants to. But I also hope that the county is forced to pay up before he's too old to use the cash. A recent update was that the defendants had appealed to the full circuit for en banc review. I suspect they will refuse to pay until they exhaust all appeals.
What a tragedy that case is. Lots of that is going on all the time, a rash of false accusations and fake recovered memories encouraged by immoral, unethical and incompetent counselors and the like. Good for him for not folding and getting an education. FTFY
I always hate it when the sheep, um, I mean American people start screaming for justice. I am glad OJ got off, I'd rather see a person go free then have any chance they might not be guilty.
This has to do with Prosecutors trying tot make a name for themselves with controversial cases. You see very weak cases make it to trial to often. The grand Jury is not enough safe guard.
Counselors are rarely the root of the problem. Prosecutors know which experts they want to use, and it's not limited to social scientists. Prosecutors have also picked questionable forensic scientists and other experts with scientific backgrounds. I believe the last big story of thousands of cases being thrown out involved a chemist. So, what improvements have been made with the prevalence of social science? Firstly, most of the people on this forum would have been locked up in an asylum and given lobotomies several decades ago. But, on a more serious note, social scientists have been instrumental in discovering the causes behind wrongful convictions i.e. bad practices used by law enforcement to get witnesses to identify suspects and how even subtle coercion can lead to false confessions. It was also not uncommon for judges to blame children for being sexually abused. This sounds hard to believe, but judges had the habit of sending children back to the parents who sexually abused them. They often thought that the parent was suffering from some kind of stress, and the child practically brought the abuse upon himself or herself by being nice and touchy with the parent during that time of stress. Another thing social scientists discovered is that children do worse in foster care. Their practice now is to keep the child in the home unless there is an imminent threat of sexual abuse, serious bodily injury, or death. In Texas, a lot of children were immediately thrown into these private orphanages that were horribly abusive. And, various studies have shown that children in foster care tend to do worse in adulthood than children who are left in moderately dysfunctional homes.
Sure, that too. But the case came out in the 1980s, so that's the time period I addressed, and it was an era infamous for recovered/suppressed memory nonsense that put a lot of people away. I never meant to imply that counselors aren't often immoral and unethical. In fact, I railed against one such counselor on this very forum early in 2016.
I sat on a grand jury, they let me, a recovering lawyer do so. No clue why. The jury voted to true bill about 96 of 99 cases. Everything favors the prosecutor, you don't hear from the defendant, the prosecutor doesn't tell you the full story necessarily. I learned why the old adage goes: "A good prosecutor can convince a grand jury to indict a ham sandwich."
Unfortunately the position of prosecutor is often used as a stepping stone for a political office. In many cases I sit through the evidence is not only flimsy, it is outright fabricated.
Danged shame, reprehensible, because not only are they not supposed to fabricate squat, they're supposed to turn over any exculpatory evidence they come across to the defense. But when you get a sociopath in the prosecutor's office and their desire is to be a sociopath in political office, I suppose little things like the rights of the accused get thrown overboard.
Such stories remind me of this episode of The Rockford Files, "So Help Me God": James Garner Drama can be the best expose.