Joseph being considered for judgeship

I am told that the California Judicial Nominees Evaluation Commission is considering an appointment of Irwin H. Joseph to a judgeship. Comments can be emailed before May 20 to the commission at jneccf@calbar.ca.gov. I will submit my own, and post them here.

There is a whole web page on Joseph's crimes. I did not follow the details, but it tells the story of how Joseph personally set out to destroy Clive Frank Boustred.

Joseph once threatened to jail me for contempt of court for criticizing him on this blog.

Fellow angry dad Dan Brewington sits in an Indiana jail for conviction on 3 counts, one of which was that he suggested on his blog that readers send complaints about Judge James D. Humphrey to a state ethics adviser named Heidi Humphrey. Heidi turned out to be the judge's wife, and the Humphreys were spooked. Dan got screwed by a vindictive judge.

A second count against Dan Brewington was that he compared Judge Humphrey to a child abuser, because he was using prejudice to force kids to grow up without a dad. The court ruled that it was a felony in Indiana to make this accusation on his blog because it subjected the judge to ridicule when the judge was just doing his job.

I have also blogged that Joseph was like a child abuser. It is still legal for me to say that in California, as far as I know.

In spite of Dan's sad story, I believe that it is 100% legal to post this message. A state agency is considering Joseph for a state appointment, and is accepting comments from the general public. I believe that it would be irresponsible not to inform the commission about his incompetent and corrupt track record, and about what a terrible judge Joseph would be.

Update: The Commission says that it is better to send comments to the lead investigating commissioner, Lara Krieger.

Compared to Rosa Parks

This podcast makes fun of people who compare themselves to Rosa Parks, the Alabama black activist who refused to move to the back of the bus in 1955. She spent a day in jail and became a national hero.

So let's compare her to Dan Brewington, who is sitting in jail for threatening to expose a corrupt family court judge and a psychologist who unjustly took his kids away. He has sacrificed far more than Rosa Parks, and did it for a much bigger and more important issue.

The Hitler analogies also offend people:

The comparisons recently prompted the Anti-Defamation League, a Jewish civil rights group, to call on critics of gun control to keep Hitler and the Nazis out of the debate.

The rhetoric "is such an absurdity and so offensive and just undermines any real understanding of what the Holocaust was about," said Ken Jacobson, the ADL's deputy national director. "If they do believe it, they're making no serious examination of what the Nazi regime was about."

But some gun rights advocates firmly disagree.

"People who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it," said Charles Heller, executive director of Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership, which has long compared U.S. gun control to Nazi tactics. "I guess if you're pro-Nazi, they are right. But if you're pro-freedom, we call those people liars."

Comparing gun control activism to Hitler is not new. In a 1994 book, "Guns, Crime and Freedom," NRA Executive Vice President Wayne LaPierre wrote that "In Germany, firearm registration helped lead to the Holocaust."

I am inclined to agree that these Nazi comparisons are not helpful. But California is actively seizing guns, and considered confiscating a lot more.

Just this week, California was in court defending censorship of psychotherapists in order to further a leftist political cause:

SAN FRANCISCO -- A federal appeals court on Wednesday tussled with the legality of California's unprecedented ban on gay conversion therapy for minors, suggesting it could be upheld despite concerns for the free speech rights of counselors who support the practice.

During nearly two hours of arguments, a three-judge 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals panel grilled lawyers on both sides of the issue, wondering whether the First Amendment applies to psychotherapy ...

Mathew Staver, head of Liberty Counsel, a group challenging the law, called the California ban "breathtakingly broad," insisting there is conflicting evidence on whether it is justified and that it is preventing teens who choose the therapy from getting professional help. Therapists who violate the law risk losing their licenses. ...

The judges, however, also pressed Alexandra Gordon, deputy attorney general, on whether the evidence the Legislature relied upon to enact the ban was too anecdotal to risk eroding free speech protections, citing past court decisions that could be problematic for the state. That includes a recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling striking down California's ban on the sale of violent video games to minors because it violated the First Amendment.

Kozinski, in fact, noted that psychotherapy generally involves "speaking opinion," and he expressed concern about the lack of scientific proof of conversion therapy's harm to minors. "The evidence before the Legislature is weak," Kozinski told Gordon.

The great deniers of civil liberties in the 20th century were the Commies and the Nazis. I have never met a Nazi sympathizer, but I have met dozens of Commie sympathizers. All of our major universities have had professors who were Commie sympathizers. We have free speech for Commies. We do not have free speech for Christians, California psychotherapists, and fathers. Dan Brewington sits in jail for complaining about the crooked officials who took his kids away.

Prosecution expert gets cross-examined

I watched the defense cross-examine the prosecution expert in the Jodi Arias murder trial. I post this as a lesson in how a psychologist can be attacked in court.

The defense asked about a web page for Janeen DeMarte:

Qualifications

Years in Practice: 8 Years
School: Michigan State University
Year Graduated: 2009
License No. and State: 4120 Arizona

The apparent discrepency here is that she did not get her degree until 2009, and got her license in 2010, and yet she still claims to have practiced for 8 years. The simple answer is that she was a student practicing under the supervision of licensed psychologists.

Next the lawyer asked about Jodi scoring a PTSD diagnosis from the PDS test. DeMarte was accused of sharing the copyrighted PDS test questions with the prosecutor, even tho he is not a licensed psychologist and public distribution of the test could invalidate the test.

Here is the list of PDS questions, from an online Jodi Arias discussion:

Below is a list of traumatic events or situations. Please mark YES if you have experienced or witnessed the following events or mark NO if you have not had that experience.

1. Serious accident, fire or explosion ? Yes ? No
2. Natural disaster (tornado, flood, hurricane, major earthquake) ? Yes ? No
3. Non-sexual assault by someone you know (physically attacked/injured) ? Yes ? No
4. Non-sexual assault by a stranger ? Yes ? No
5. Sexual assault by a family member or someone you know ? Yes ? No
6. Sexual assault by a stranger ? Yes ? No
7. Military combat or a war zone ? Yes ? No
8. Sexual contact before you were age 18 with someone who was 5 or more years older than you ? Yes ? No
9. Imprisonment ? Yes ? No
10. Torture ? Yes ? No
11. Life-threatening illness ? Yes ? No
12. Other traumatic event ? Yes ? No

Actually these questions are from the closely related PTSD Symptom Scale (PSS), but the 12 items are essentially the same.

When Jodi did this test for the defense psychologist Samuels, she checked Yes for 1-4 and 12. For #12 she wrote "repeated emotional/psychological abuse". When asked on the PDS which of these was worst, she chose "4. Non-sexual assault by a stranger" and added, "assaulted and life threatened".

At the time that Jodi did the PDS test, she was claiming that strangers killed Travis and tried to kill her. She now admits that this story was a lie. Thus the PTSD diagnosis was based on a lie.

The defense got DeMarte to admit that assault by a non-stranger could also be traumatic.

There was also some discussion of the Trauma Symptom Inventory™-2 (TSI™-2) test. DeMarte used the previous TSI, and was criticized for not using the latest TSI-2 revision.

While DeMarte is younger and less experienced than Samuels and LaViolette, she had the advantage that she could answer a yes-no question with a yes or a no.

The copyright issue seems ridiculous. The defense lawyer put these questions up on the screen where they were shown on HLN TV. It is just a list of traumas. There are also a bunch of questions about how upsetting the trauma was, such as whether it causes nightmares. If someone wants to fake PTSD on the PDS test, it is pretty easy whether she has seen the test or not. Some of the other psychology tests are harder to fake. Probably the most secret thing about the PDS test is the minimum number of lies to tell to get a PTSD diagnosis. But that is essentially what Jodi did, so you could get a good idea by just watching the trial.

While copyright law does allow test-makers to charge money for their tests, public trials use public evidence. These test-makers market their tests for forensic work, so there is no avoiding the public learning how they are used for and against a murder defendant.

I don't think that the defense did much damage to this witness. Criticism about bias and credentials do not impress me much, and nitpicking about hours, scoring methods, and experience does not either. But that is mainly because I put very little stock in these experts' opinions anyway. To me, they are only convincing when they are explaining verifiable facts and textbook knowledge. Much of what they say is just crap. But I am a skeptic, and the jury is probably more gullible.

Psychotherapists being blamed

I have been following the Jodi Arias trial on TV (TruTV and HLN). The prosecution psychologist expert took the position that the defense experts empathized with Jodi Arias, and therefore crossed the line between evaluation and therapy, and showed bias. It is funny to see a psychologist blame other psychotherapists for having too much empathy.

The prosecution expert Janeen DeMarte testified that Arias has a borderline personality disorder, based on a MMPI computer-scored true-false test, and some observations about inappropriate jailhouse behavior. I had to take this test for one of my child custody trials.

The typical juror may just conclude that psychology experts can be bought, and paid to say whatever the lawyers want her to say.

Usually a criminal defendant would not be subject to prosecutor expert psychobabble about how she has a criminal mental profile. But the defense has put forth testimony that she does not, so the prosecution can rebut it. Another except is where a man is accused of domestic violence, as California has a special law saying that the prosecution can present an expert saying that the man matches the profile of a domestic abuser even if his girlfriend denies it.

Meanwhile, leftist Democrats are on a campaign to destroy parental rights, and limit free speech thru the regulation of teachers and psychotherapists.

The San Jose California newspaper reports:

"Parents can teach their children whatever they want," said Guay, now 41, a pastor's son who lived 20 years in San Francisco until moving recently to West Hollywood. "What they don't have a right to is knowingly or unknowingly using the guise of psychotherapy to damage their children."

On Wednesday, a federal appeals court will review whether California's attempt to ban the practice on minors trampled on the rights of families to seek such counseling -- and also whether it improperly threatens professional therapists who risk the loss of licenses and livelihoods if they violate the law.

A group of therapists and parents challenged the law in January, arguing it interferes with religious practices and violates free speech rights by barring gay conversion discussions between young patients and their counselors.

The case has produced a legal standoff between a state's power to regulate what it considers harmful conduct by licensed professionals and supporters of the therapy who insist parents have a right to follow their beliefs in arranging such therapy for their children.

Two Sacramento federal judges have split over the issue, one upholding the law and the other finding it runs afoul of the First Amendment. The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals put the law on hold while the case proceeds.

The showdown is being closely watched as other states, including New Jersey and Massachusetts, move to enact similar laws. Legal experts say the case poses tough questions because the U.S. Supreme Court has not established much precedent on a state's ability to impose such restrictions on the speech of licensed professionals.

"It hasn't really told us to what extent restrictions are constitutional," said Eugene Volokh, a UCLA law professor. "This is not clear."

Most psychotherapy is damaging to children. If psychotherapists were banned from doing anything damaging, then most of them would be out of business. California passed a law banning one type of psychotherapy, but there is no scientific paper saying that it is any more harmful than any other psychotherapy.

Summary of Arias expert problems

I have criticized the experts in the Jodi Arias, but I think that I am understating the case. So I try again. You can watch the trial on Tru TV or HLN TV, or watch excerpts online.

A couple of forensic psychotherapists got exposed when they testified in the 2013 Arizona televised murder trial of Jodi Arias. She drove hundreds of miles to see her ex-boyfriend, seduced him, took naked pictures with his new camera, shot him in the head, stabbed him 29 times, slashed his throat, attempted to destroy the evidence, and discarded her gun in the desert. When police found her, she told a wild story about what happened, and bragged on national TV that no jury would convict her.

At her trial, psychologist Richard Samuels testified that he gave her a computer-scored personality test, and diagnosed her with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Apparently the anxiety of shooting her friend caused her to forget why she stabbed and slashed him, and where she dumped the gun. Samuels concluded that she probably shot in self-defense, because a premeditated murder would be less likely to cause PTSD.

Even more ridiculous testimony came from a well-known domestic violence expert, Alyce LaViolette. She testified that the dead ex-boyfriend was the jealous domestic violence perpetrator, not Arias. Drawing on anecdotes from leading 25 years of California court-ordered (punitive) domestic violence classes, LaViolette testified that emotional abuse is worse than physical abuse, and that the worst emotional abuse is so subtle that only an expert like herself can detect it. Her evidence was mostly emails and text messages with name-calling such as Arias being called a "sociopath", and that his messages were worse than they sound because of the common saying that "90% of all communication is nonverbal".

The problem with these experts is not just that they are hired guns who are biased towards the source of the money, or that they say things that are contrary to common sense. The deeper problem is that their whole testimony is directly contrary to court rules of evidence and procedure.

An ideal expert witness serves to inform the judge and jury on generally accepted published knowledge that is beyond common experience and not easily accessible to the layman. For example, a DNA expert might explain how DNA tests work and the signficance of a DNA match, but leave it to the jury to decide the guilt or innocence of the defendant. The expert testimony should be objectively verifiable by consulting textbooks.

Samuels said that as a psychologist he can only speak in probabilities and not certainties, but he never gave any probabilities for anything. He had no generally accepted knowledge on murderers having PTSD.

LaViolette never even cited any published knowledge, except her own chart showing how all human relationships lie on a "continuum of aggression and abuse". Most of her testimony consisted of arguing that she had sifted thru volumes of hearsay and had determined who was telling the truth and who was lying. She said that she was like an "FBI profiler".

Lie detector tests and FBI profilers are not allowed in court, and for good reason. They are speculative. They can be manipulated. They are unreliable. If the perfect lie detector gets invented someday, then maybe we won't need judges and juries anymore. That day has not arrived.

Samuels and LaViolette had no actual expertise on issues bearing on the guilt of Arias. Samuels could recite the symptoms of PTSD, but had no explanation as to why some particular definition of PTSD would be relevant. LaViolette could not even recite a definition of domestic violence or abuse.

The emptiness of their testimony was revealed by their inability to answer hypothetical questions. Ordinary (non-expert) witnesses testify only about facts, but experts testify about how scientific knowledge can be applied to the facts of the case, but it is the jury that is empowered to decide the facts. Ideally the experts would not express any conclusions about whether the defendant was telling the truth, and leave that to the jury in the light of scientific knowledge.

These experts spent most of their time giving opinions and conclusions on subjects where they have no expertise at all. For example, LaViolette testified about the importance of Mormon baptism and whether various people were faithful to Mormon teachings.

Part of LaViolette's claimed expertise was in conducting California child custody evaluations, and in testifying for family court child custody disputes. Apparently no one has ever explained to a judge how she is ruining families with her bogus testimony.

Yesterday, the Arias trial had a hearing over whether a defense photograph enhancement expert had testimony meeting the Daubert standard. The expert was indeed skilled at using Photoshop tools to enhance photos, and had applied his skills to magnify a reflection of Jodi in Travis's cornea, as he was naked in the shower shortly before she killed him. The dispute was over a hand-drawn outline around a blurry image. Prosecutor Martinez said that the image looked like a dog to him, and that there are no scientific standards for drawing such outlines. The defense argued that the outline is necessary because the video equipment in the courtroom is not as good as what the expert has in the lab. It seems to me that if they can spend $2M on a trial, then they could rent a hi-res display for a couple of days. The judge wanted to consult Arizona Rule 702. Testimony by Experts :

If scientific, technical, or other specialized knowledge will assist the trier of fact to understand the evidence or to determine a fact in issue, a witness qualified as an expert by knowledge, skill, experience, training, or education, may testify thereto in the form of an opinion or otherwise.

This was amended last year to adopt the federal rule. The fact at issue, I guess, is whether Jodi had both hands on the camera as she was taking the picture, and no knife or gun. I question excluding the jury from this hearing. The jury ought to be told the arguments for and against reliability of the testimony. Anyway the prosecutor ended up conceding that Jodi did not have a weapon when she took the picture.

The picture was taken just a couple of minutes before the dropped camera picture, according to the metadata, and Jodi says that the dropped camera led to the fight that resulted in death. The right half of the above picture has Travis's eye magnified and enhanced, and the expert tried to draw in an outline of Joidi. It seems absurd to me to draw any conclusions about Jodi from it, but I guess the prosecutor was not willing to contest the expert.

Mandated fertility coverage

A proposed new gay rights law, California AB-460, says:

(g) Coverage for the treatment of infertility shall be offered and provided without discrimination on the basis of age, ancestry, color, disability, domestic partner status, gender, gender expression, gender identity, genetic information, marital status, national origin, race, religion, sex, or sexual orientation.

I am trying to wrap my head around this. Suppose I am a single (unattached) man, and I complain that I cannot get pregnant. A fertility clinic says that this condition can be treated by having a surrogate mother bear the pregnancy. Will this have to be covered?

Suppose a woman cannot get pregnant because she is too old, or is in a wheelchair, or has a serious genetic illness, or used to be a man. That also has to be treated?

I suppose that gay couples think that it is unfair if opposite sex married couples get fertility treatments, and they are stuck with mismatched organs. Maybe it is unfair. But can someone please explain this remedy to me? These grand non-discrimination principles sound noble in principle, but what are the consequences here? The proposed law defines:

(b) For purposes of this section, “infertility” means either (1) the presence of a demonstrated condition recognized by a licensed physician and surgeon as a cause of infertility, or (2) the inability to conceive a pregnancy or to carry a pregnancy to a live birth after a year or more of regular sexual relations without contraception.

So if a man changes his "gender expression" or "gender identity" to female, would his lack of ovaries be a "demonstrated condition" entitle him/her to non-discrimination under this?

And what is "regular sexual relations"? I would assume that means normal male-female coitus, but then people accuse me of being a heterosexist bigot when I say stuff like that. I am guessing that a gay couple could complain that they have had regular sexual relations for a year, and no one got pregnant, so they are entitled to medical assistance.

The Weekly Standard says:

AB 460, of course, does not arise in a social vacuum. It reflects the modern tendency to use health care law to enact social policy. In the United Kingdom, for example, the National Health Service provides IVF (which in the United States typically costs between $12,000 and $15,000) to women up to age 42 free of charge, even though aging naturally reduces fertility from the late thirties on. As under AB 460, lesbians in the United Kingdom are entitled to receive a sophisticated form of artificial insemination at no cost as a means of erasing discrimination based on sexual orientation.

The UK policy discriminates on sex and age, so would not comply with AB 460. We will soon have laws mandating all medical services for everyone, until the system runs out of money.

DV expert widely criticized

I pointed out below that there is an organized campaign to destroy the career of folk singer Michelle Shocked, because she once shocked a San Fran audience with a Christian anti-homosexual rant. California liberals can be remarkably intolerant sometimes, but I don't have a dog in that fight.

The Jodi Arias experts are widely despised for their televised testimony. USA Today
reports:

For three days this week, a domestic violence expert witness named Alyce LaViolette held her own against prosecutor Juan Martinez in the Jodi Arias murder case in Maricopa County Superior Court.

But LaViolette was annihilated in cyberspace. ...

The barrage of cyberstalking was the subject of lengthy meetings in a judge's chambers on Monday. It sent LaViolette to the emergency room last weekend.

Legal observers are not certain if it constitutes witness tampering, slander, or just an expression of free speech.

"It's the electronic version of a lynch mob," said retired Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Kenneth Fields.

Anxiety sent her to the emergency room?

I hate to pile on, but the LaViolette is evil. She is not just expressing a personal opinion like Ms. Shocked. She is being paid by the government to tell lies under oath. She has spent her whole life trying to ruin the lives of good men by exaggerating the significance of trivial incidents.

Alyce D. LaViolette inspired this Change.org petition:

Alyce LaViolette should no longer be given the opportunity to speak at abuse seminars based on her testimony in The State vs. Jodi Arias Murder trial. In her testimony, she named Travis Alexander as an abuser without ever having met him. This man was stabbed over two dozen times, shot in the head and nearly decapitated by Jodi Arias slitting his throat. Based on the words of admitted liar and killer, Jodi Arias, Ms. LaViolette has tarnished the reputation of Travis Alexander in front of his grieving family. Her inability to see that the murder victim was also the victim of other abuse by Jodi Arias should disqualify her from speaking on the subject of domestic violence indefinitely.

Her Amazon book listing now has 100s of 1-star (lowest rating) reviews, such as this:

I am saddened and disgusted by how men in general are portrayed by LaViolette. This woman has taken the most innocent of actions and has made them out to be abuse, and I lack the understanding as to why she has done this. So many simple actions are now twisted to the point where if a man doesn't call a woman right away after a date or a sexual encounter, he is emotionally abusive, or if a man just so happens to become angry in traffic, it's a precursor to violent behavior and abuse. I'm totally up in arms! Look, I was in a very violent and abusive marriage, and I am absolutely sickened by what this author has done to genuinely TRUE DV victims. She has set this issue back at least 30 years. She wonders why DV is rarely taken seriously? Well Ms. LaViolette, the reason this is true is all due to people like you.

There are also 100s of other negative Amazon comments.

I don't usually advocate boycotts, but LaViolette is a menace. She makes her living from the state by pretending to be a domestic violence expert, but there is no factual backing to anything she says. It is just anti-man opinion. The state is paying her and she is doing harm. Her phony propaganda should be rebutted at every opportunity.

Backstabbing sister to call CPS

Here is yesterday's bad newspaper advice column about CPS. I post it because it is likely that there are busybodies everywhere who might backstab you in order to take your kids.

Dear Annie: My sister, "Suzie," has always been a bit of a flower child, and my parents think it's funny. Suzie dropped out of high school to pursue her "career" in something — art, music, dance, yoga, whatever. ...

Suzie insists that the children be fed only vegan and organic products. When the boys stay with us, which is fairly often lately, we feed them healthy balanced meals that they wolf down like they're starving. The oldest boy told me they usually eat oatmeal with some peanut butter in it. I believe both boys are anemic. ...

She's leaving the boys with me for two weeks this summer, and I'm tempted to have Child Protective Services evaluate them. My wife agrees. My parents don't. I'm scared Suzie will bolt with the kids if she gets wind of my suspicions. She's done it before.

I want the best for my nephews. How do I go about it? — W.C.

Dear W.C.: Don't wait until summer. Call Child Protective Services anonymously, and ask them to investigate the home environment now. (You need not inform your parents.) ...

And if CPS determines that the kids need to be removed from Suzie's care, we hope you will offer to take them.

This is wrong on several levels. I don't doubt that Suzie has some substandard child-rearing practices, but then I disagrree with most parents on some issues. The problem here is in thinking that CPS is some sort of useful authority, in calling CPS anonymously, in betraying her own sister, in taking a rash action against the judgment of their parents, in accepting a CPS opinion as decisive, and in scheming to take custody of the kids.

Here, there are much better alternatives. The writer can re-assess the situation in the summer. She can schedule a family conference with the parents (ie, grandparents). She could take the boys this summer contingent on getting an opinion from a neutral third party. She could get a medical test for anemia. An anonymous call to CPS is the worst of all choices.

Reader of this blog probably do not get their advice from a Dear Annie column. But you may have a sister who takes this advice seriously, and is planning to betray you.

Cultural differences in child-rearing

One problem with family courts and child custody evaluations is that the judges and shrinks are completely incompetent to legitimate differences in child-rearing philosophies. Everyone has opinions about child-rearing, but they usually do not have any understanding about how their opinions are better or worse than others, or even how they are different from others.

Nicholas Day writes in Slate:

Sara Harkness, a professor of human development at the University of Connecticut, has spent decades compiling and analyzing the answers of parents in other cultures. They have a lot of answers, it turns out. ...

Every society has what it intuitively believes to be the right way to raise a child, what Harkness calls parental ethnotheories. (It is your mother-in-law, enlarged to the size of a country.) These are the choices we make without realizing that we’re making choices. Not surprisingly, it is almost impossible to see your own parental ethnotheory: As I write in Baby Meets World, when you’re under water, you can’t tell that you’re wet.

But ethnotheories are distinct enough, at least to an outsider, that they are apparent in the smallest details. If you look just at the words parents use to describe their children, you can almost always predict where you are in the world. In other words, your most personal observations of your child are actually cultural constructions. ...

Every society interprets its children in its own way: The Dutch, for example, liked to talk about long attention spans and “regularity,” or routine and rest. (In the Dutch mind, asking lots of questions is a negative attribute: It means the child is too dependent.) The Spanish talked about character and sociality, the Swedes about security and happiness. And the Americans talked a lot about intelligence. Intelligence is Americans’ answer. In various studies, American parents are always seen trying to make the most of every moment—to give their children a developmental boost. From deep inside the belly of American parenthood, this is so obvious it isn’t even an observation. It is only by looking at other societies that you can see just how anomalous such a focus is.

So suppose a judge or evaluator has to decide between a Dutch parent and a Spanish parents about the best interest of the child (BIOTCh). It is impossible.

Currently the hottest NY Times article is about an experiment on the benefits of talking to babies:

The disparity was staggering. Children whose families were on welfare heard about 600 words per hour. Working-class children heard 1,200 words per hour, and children from professional families heard 2,100 words. By age 3, a poor child would have heard 30 million fewer words in his home environment than a child from a professional family. And the disparity mattered: the greater the number of words children heard from their parents or caregivers before they were 3, the higher their IQ and the better they did in school. TV talk not only didn’t help, it was detrimental.

I suppose that this is a polite way of saying that black people don't talk to their kids, combined with a naive leftoid belief that social problems can be solved by teaching blacks to talk more. Pres. Obama is even babbling about Head Start again. No, that doesn't work either. I would like to tell you that there is scientific evidence on good child-rearing, but it is not much better than common sense, and the usual advice from experts is worse.

Long-term evolution of marriage

Science Friday discussed a new book:

In The Bonobo and the Atheist: In Search of Humanism Among the Primates, primatologist Frans de Waal explores traits like empathy and fairness in our closest relatives, bonobos and chimpanzees, and argues that human morality is not the product of rational thought or religion, but evolved long ago.

A reader sent this review:

One of the world's leading primatologists believes his decades of research with apes answers a question that has plagued humans since the beginning of time.

Are we moral because we believe in God, or do we believe in God because we are moral?

Frans de Waal argues in his latest book that the answer is clearly the latter. The seeds for moral behavior preceded the emergence of our species by millions of years, and the need to codify that behavior so that all would have a clear blueprint for morality led to the creation of religion, he argues.

I am very skeptical about drawing moral lessons from apes. First, we are equally closely related to chimps and bonobos, but they are completely different in their social structures, customs, sex practices, etc.

Second, it is very difficult to detect something like empathy or morals in a wild animal.

Third, animals do all sorts of things that we do not tolerate in humans. Besides stealing, killing, etc, the male apes are all deadbeat dads. They do not support their young. They are much more concerned with fighting off rival males.

A genetic analysis paper claims to discover the Evolutionary History of Hunter-Gatherer Marriage Practices. A summary says:

Regardless of the ancestral state of early humans, arranged marriages probably have an evolutionary history going back at least 50,000 years.

I did not follow the logic on how they could deduce 50k years of arranged marriages. But if so, does that mean arranged marriages are natural and good? Certainly not.

So maybe we had 5M years of living like apes, then 50k years of arranged marriages, then 500 years of modern civilization with nuclear families, and now we are embarking on a grand social experiment where the family is being destroyed and managed by the state. Human nature is not changing, but our social structures are radically changing. I am not optimistic.

Penney campaign flopped

One of my most controversial posts last year was the JC Penney ad for Fathers Day. See also updates here and here. This was a gay ad that was part of a gay campaign led by their new CEO. He came from Apple Computer, the gayest of the Silicon Valley companies. Apple CEO Tim Cook is gay, according to Out.com.

The Penney strategy was a big failure:

You gotta figure that getting canned as CEO is bad enough, but consider former Apple store guru Ron Johnson. Just the rumor that J.C. Penney had cut him loose as CEO caused the retailer’s stock to shoot up nearly 11 percent. ...

As the Daily Finance piece pointed out, Johnson didn’t test market his ideas, instead issuing the refrain, “We didn’t test at Apple.”

The NY Times reports:

Mr. Johnson liked to tell employees that there were two kinds of people: believers and skeptics, and at Apple, there were only believers. He wanted the same at Penney: when employees pushed back on Mr. Johnson’s strategies, they got nowhere, according to several former executives. ...

“Ron’s response at the time was, just like at Apple, customers don’t always know what they want,” said an executive who advocated testing. “We’re not going to test it — we’re going to roll it out.”

Again, I don't object to Penney marketing to gays. Gays need clothes also. My gripe was about the lousy Fathers Day messages. I do not like these ideological attacks on dads.

Anyway, I hope JC Penney returns to being in the business of customer satisfaction, instead of trying to force ideologies on people.

Update: The NY Times reports:

But that was just one more bit of downbeat news in what has been a downbeat few months. All told, $290 billion has been wiped off Apple’s value since September. It might seem difficult to believe, but Apple now ranks among the biggest losers in the stock market over the last seven months, right next to the J. C. Penney Company, that sick man of American department stores. The last time Apple was trading this low was in November 2011. Steve Jobs had just died and everyone wondered how Apple would carry on without its visionary leader.

New precedent for expert testimony

A big problem with the family court is its sloppy use of experts, like psychologists. To my surprise, the Jodi Arias murder trial has had some of the same problems. In federal court, expert testimony is limited by the much stricter FRE 702:

A witness who is qualified as an expert by knowledge, skill, experience, training, or education may testify in the form of an opinion or otherwise if:

(a) the expert’s scientific, technical, or other specialized knowledge will help the trier of fact to understand the evidence or to determine a fact in issue;

(b) the testimony is based on sufficient facts or data;

(c) the testimony is the product of reliable principles and methods; and

(d) the expert has reliably applied the principles and methods to the facts of the case.

See this Bernstein paper for an up-to-date discussion of how the federal rule is applied. This rule replaced the looser 1923 Frye rule about 15 years ago.

California has stuck to the Frye rule, and calls it the Kelly-Frye rule after a 1976 California case called Kelly. Here is how the rule is codified:

801. If a witness is testifying as an expert, his testimony in the form of an opinion is limited to such an opinion as is:

(a) Related to a subject that is sufficiently beyond common experience that the opinion of an expert would assist the trier of fact; and

(b) Based on matter (including his special knowledge, skill, experience, training, and education) perceived by or personally known to the witness or made known to him at or before the hearing, whether or not admissible, that is of a type that reasonably may be relied upon by an expert in forming an opinion upon the subject to which his testimony relates, unless an expert is precluded by law from using such matter as a basis for his opinion.

Now the California supreme court has moved a little closer to the federal standard in a Nov. 2012 case, Sargon v USC (.doc file).

We construe this to mean that the matter relied on must provide a reasonable basis for the particular opinion offered, and that an expert opinion based on speculation or conjecture is inadmissible. ...

Thus, under Evidence Code sections 801, subdivision (b), and 802, the trial court acts as a gatekeeper to exclude expert opinion testimony that is (1) based on matter of a type on which an expert may not reasonably rely, (2) based on reasons unsupported by the material on which the expert relies, or (3) speculative. Other provisions of law, including decisional law, may also provide reasons for excluding expert opinion testimony.

[footnote] In People v. Leahy (1994) 8 Cal.4th 587, 604, this court held that the “general acceptance” test for admissibility of expert testimony based on new scientific techniques (see People v. Kelly (1976) 17 Cal.3d 24) still applies in California courts despite the United States Supreme Court’s rejection, in Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals, Inc. (1993) 509 U.S. 579, of a similar test in federal courts. Nothing we say in this case affects our holding in Leahy regarding new scientific techniques.

The way I read this, if an expert is testifying based on novel scientific techniques, then those techniques must have been published in the generally accepted scientific literature. Otherwise, the judge is supposed to follow this new "gatekeeper" re-interpretation of the California rule, and exclude unreliable testimony.

If the California family court took its own rules of evidence seriously, then most of the child custody evaluations and other such expert testimony would be excluded as being unsupported and speculative. The child custody evaluators have never been able to show any reliability to their recommendations, and that should make their reports inadmissible. This Calif. supreme court case is a step in the right direction.

This is wishful thinking on my part, as I am sure that the family courts will ignore this decision. But in the long run, these quacks/experts will be seen as no better than astrologers.

Just look at the sloppy testimony that Arizona is allowing for Jodi Arias. I guess that the judge is bending over backwards so that the appeals court will agree that she got a fair trial and had every chance to make every argument. But the experts should have had to clearly explain what makes their testimony admissible. How do these experts have knowledge that is sufficiently beyond common experience? Where are they relying on generally accepted knowledge? How does that assist in the determination of facts?

About all I see is that Samuels could administer a multiple-choice computer-scored personality test, and read the DSM-IV symptoms for PTSD. LaViolette has no specific expertise, except maybe to say that a wide variety of behaviors can be reported as abuse. Everyone else is just unsupported opinion that is no better than astrology, and should not be admissible.

Yesterday, prosecutor Martinez more directly attacked the validity of the testimony of the domestic violence expert LaViolette, after making fun of her Snow White analysis and lecture. He asked if her opinion was subjective, and she seemed to not understand the question, and even argued that her testimony was as objective as any other testimony. Of course she was forced to admit that she was less objective than DNA expert testimony.

She then compared herself to an FBI profiler. This was a stupid analogy, because we would never convict someone from the word of an FBI profiler. He asked her if FBI profiler testimony is admitted in court, and she said that she did not know.

He went on to show that she made dozens of inferences about who was telling the truth, and he argued that these possibly-faulty inferences influence her conclusions.

She even said that her Continuum of Aggression and Abuse is used in California (730) child custody evaluations! Sigh.

I am not sure that the jury, or even the judge, understands this last point. The ideal expert witness would not make any factual inferences, and leave that to the jury. She might explain, for example, how PTSD or domestic violence is diagnosed and let jury decide whether the criteria are met. She might give recognized published data on how PTSD or DV relate to murder. She might even give condition testimony, such as saying that a particular conclusion is valid assuming that a story about an incident is true. But the jury gets to decide whether the jury is true.

LaViolette testified that Travis had a pattern of lying and that Jodi did not. Travis is dead. Jodi lied on national television, and proved that she can be a convincing liar.

Usually it is the responsibility of the judge, not the jury, to decide on the rules of evidence. But this case is out of control, and it will be up to the jury to make sense of it.

Update: (Tues, midday) The DV expert LaViolette continues to testify badly. She is quite evasive when asked about the possibility of secondary gain, ie, that Jodi was lying for the purpose of improving her legal situation. This is a crucial point, as the jury is making its own assessment of whether Jodi is telling the truth. LaViolette admits that lying is always possible, but refuses to explain how she finds Jodi credible. She only says that she did 44 hours of interviews, read a lot of documents, and formed an opinion.

A good expert witness would figure out a way to convey her expert knowledge about domestic violence, without injecting her personal opinion about Jodi's credibility. LaViolette has completely failed to do that.

With the jury outside the courtroom, LaViolette is confronted with the fact that Jodi's own parents told the police that Jodi has never been honest since she was 14 years old. Of course Jodi's parents' opinion is of dubious admissibility also, and has not been allowed.

The legal point here is that the judge has to drawn the line on hearsay evidence, or else the trial can break down to a lot of reputation trashing by outside parties. But this judge is allowing an expert to testify as just a way to sneak in a lot of inadmissible hearsay. The court needs to stick to the rules about expert testimony, in which case LaViolette would not be allowed.

NY Times against straight parents

NY Times editor Bill Keller writes an op-ed in favor of judicially imposed same-sex marriage:

The history of this issue is filled with stories of hardship and heartbreak befalling children whose parents are not recognized as — well, as parents. There are the cases of mothers and fathers turned away from a child’s hospital bed because they are not “family.” There are the cases of beloved adults denied visitation rights after a breakup. Many states restrict the ability of a gay parent to adopt or to respond to a child’s medical emergency.

This kind of argument makes me mad. No mothers and fathers are ever turned away from a child’s hospital bed because they are not family. They are only turned away because a vindictive ex-spouse gets a restraining order based on a phony abuse accusation.

I have been treated worse than any gay or lesbian parent in the nation. So have thousands of others, if not millions. And yet these leftist editors will only speak up for LGBTQIA activists, as if that promotes some sort of equality principle. It does not. People like Keller are out to destroy parental rights.

But it is fair to say that the research shows no significant disadvantage associated with being raised by lesbian mothers or gay fathers — not in academic performance, not in psychological health, not in social or sexual development, not in violent behavior or substance abuse. And the research leaves little doubt that stable, two-parent households (of whatever flavor) are likely to be better off financially, more attentive to the upbringing of children and more secure than single-parent households.

Sure, a couple of gay men adoptive parents probably do better than a slutty heterosexual single mom at child-rearing. But that's not the issue. What the studies overwhelmingly show is that kids do better with their two natural fit parents than all other alternatives. And that is what family courts are systematically denying for millions of parents and kids today.

When a lesbian couple schemes to get legal parental rights, it is often at the expense of some real dad, and to the detriment of some kid who gets deprived of having a dad. There is not a shred of evidence that any child has ever benefited from such an arrangement. I guess that there are a few examples of lesbians rearing test-tube babies successfully, but that does not imply that lesbianism is good social policy, and it ignores the far greater problem of fatherless homes.

As mentioned here, studies indicated that LGBT parents do worse. Keller says that the leading study was rebutted by a sociology professor in this article, saying that the study should not have been published because its definition of lesbian mother included bisexuals, and because three of the six reviewers are on record as opposing same-sex marriage. Furthermore, the journal editor has received a steady stream of angry e-mails, from both colleagues and irate strangers. Apparently there are academic hate groups that will try to end your career if you publish anything unfavorable about LGBTQIA households.

As I've said, I really don't care about the private lives of LGBTQIA folks. I do care that their activists are out to destroy parental rights for the rest of us, and forcing kids to grow up without dads.

Dilbert robot empathy

From the Dilbert comic strip.

Movement to limit gay freedoms

NY Times columnist (and Obama supporter) David Brooks writes:

I don’t think we’ve paused sufficiently to celebrate the wonderful recent defeat for the cause of personal freedom. After all, these sorts of defeats don’t happen every day.

Over the past 40 years, personal freedom has been on a nearly uninterrupted winning streak. In the 1960s, we saw a great expansion of social and lifestyle freedom.

So what is he talking about? Several paragraphs later, he explains his point:

But last week saw a setback for the forces of maximum freedom. A representative of millions of gays and lesbians went to the Supreme Court and asked the court to help put limits on their own freedom of choice. They asked for marriage.

Marriage is one of those institutions — along with religion and military service — that restricts freedom. Marriage is about making a commitment that binds you for decades to come. It narrows your options on how you will spend your time, money and attention.

Whether they understood it or not, the gays and lesbians represented at the court committed themselves to a certain agenda. They committed themselves to an institution that involves surrendering autonomy. They committed themselves to the idea that these self-restrictions should be reinforced by the state. They committed themselves to the idea that lifestyle choices are not just private affairs but work better when they are embedded in law.

No, the LGBTQIA agenda does not include decades of commitment or loss of sexual freedom. Those aspects of marriage have already been abolished. We have so-called no-fault divorce, where either spouse can get a divorce at any time for any reason. We have also abolished laws against adultery.

What we have had, since the 1960s, is the dramatic rise of the family courts and their infringement of the freedoms of parents, whether they are married or not. Brooks and his allies seem completely blind to this.

I suspect that this shift in public acceptance will be permanent, unless it turns out that marriages are more unstable when two people of the same gender are involved.

More unstable? Of course those marriages will turn out to be more unstable. But that will not matter.

Assuming the court forces same-sex marriage on us, it will never achieve that public acceptance. It will be just another example of elite liberals trying to force values on us. Previous examples are forced racial busing, late term abortions, legalized flag burning, and abolishing capital punishment.

As the court's most radical feminist argues:

With two same-sex marriage cases before the Supreme Court, numerous commentators have latched on to remarks by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg critical of the court’s 1973 Roe v. Wade decision that legalized abortion nationwide. It is not the judgment that was wrong, but “it moved too far, too fast,” she said at Columbia Law School last year, a view she has expressed in various speeches and law review articles.

That's right, and the court will never have broad respect until it admits its error.

Note: LGBTQIA stands for Lesbian; Gay; Bisexual; Transsexual, Transgender, or Transvestite; Questioning or Queer; Intersex; and Ally or Asexual.

The Snow White defense of Jodi Arias

The Jodi Arias trial for the Killing of Travis Alexander continues to go off the rails. The prosecutor is attacking Alyce LaViolette lecture on 10/16/08 YouTube, Gender Fairytales and Domestic Violence. The questioning concerns whether Snow White was a battered woman.

Arizona prosecutor Juan Martinez challenged domestic violence expert Alyce LaViolette’s opinion that Arias was a victim of domestic violence at the hands of her former boyfriend, slaying victim Travis Alexander, 30. LaViolette gave a presentation in 2012 that found Snow White was a battered woman, which the prosecutor said shows the expert can find abuse in situations she knows very little about, including "myths."

"What this shows us is that even if it’s a myth -- all made up -- you can come up with the opinion that the person is a victim of domestic violence," Martinez said.

I am not sure about prosecutor Martinez's strategy, but LaViolette is someone who sees domestic violence in any man, and leaps to abuse conclusions without regard to facts or scientific knowledge. He seemed content to just ridicule her.

LaViolette testified that Jodi was a "battered woman" in an "abusive relationship".

The evidence was very weak. I did not hear any actual quotes that were abusive. There are no police reports, medical treatments, corroborating evidence, or anything like that. There are hundreds of pages of emails, diaries, text messages, and voicemails. LaViolette just argued that her impression was that there was abuse.

LaViolette claimed that Travis once called Jodi a "sociopath", he said she "can't get off lazy butt", he "doesn't want her apology", and he understands how evil she is. These are quotes from LaViolette, not Travis, and no context for these remarks was given. She described the abuse as "character assassination, not name-calling", and therefore a higher level of abuse. She also accepted Jodi's stories that Travis choked, slapped, and broke her finger.

There was also testimony that Jodi and Travis had many good times together, and enjoyed fun trips.

LaViolette also complained that Travis flirted with women, and made sexualized suggestions to them. He even implied that was less sexually experienced that he was, and he had violated Mormon teachings about abstaining from sexual relations before marriage.

LaViolette told one story about how Travis and Jodi had broken up, they were still communicating, Travis told Jodi he did not want to hear about her other dates, Jodi accidentally forwarded a message to him from messages with another boyfriend, Travis was "upset" with this and asks her not to do that, and Jodi was apologetic. LaViolette says this shows that Travis is jealous, controlling, angry, fearful, overreactive, threatening, and critical. In other words, abusive.

Travis also once said that he was "merciful" to her, and LaViolette said that is an example of how abusers perceive things different from others.

I still don't see much relevance to the expert testimony. If Jodi committed premeditated murder against Travis, then she had some motivation. If Martinez is right, then it was a jealous rage. If LaViolette is right, then Jodi was not jealous at all, but was unhappy about the relationship because Travis occasionally called her a skank or some other negative term. Does that make it better?

Usually the battered woman defense is given when the woman is supposedly trapped in a marriage, and feels that she cannot leave because of financial dependency, care for the kids, social pressure, emotional dependency, or loyalty. But none of applies here, as Jodi was living in another state and occasionally dating other men.

I just learned that the DSM-5 creates the relational disorder. This means a cuople might have no individual disorrders, but there relationship is disordered. I didn't know that psychologists ever diagnosed anything but individual problems. So perhaps Travis and Jodi had a relational disorder, but there was nothing wrong with Travis individually.

If I were the prosecutor, I would have directly attacked the scientific basis of the defense expert testimony, because there is none. However, I don't know whether that would be more effective with the jury. Maybe that would be taking LaViolette too seriously, and she does not deserve it.

Arias expert tells stupid frog story

A defense expert at the Jodi Arias trial testified:

Psychotherapist Alyce LaViolette: Most of us, when we do things that we want, either in a relationship or a job, and we are compromised, we lose part of who we are when that happens. And you see this a little at a time, it is gradual.
So nobody is losing all of themself at once.

There is an analogy that if you throw a frog in a pot of boiling water, the frog is gonna boil, but it is gonna jump out. But if you put a frog in a pot of water and slowly turn up the flame, the frog gets boiled because its gradual and it doesn't know what's happening.

LaViolette: Defense lawyer: Oh, okay. So can I guess to abusive relationships, when they're gradual like this, the person doesn't necessarily have that reckoning, that it is happening to them? Is that what you mean?

Yes, that is what I mean.

No, the boiling frog story is not true. I did the experiment myself, even tho I got some criticism from some animal rights sympathizers. If you don't believe me, do the experiment. Or look it up.

So what is this woman's expertise? Much of what she says is common knowledge, such as saying that relationships have ups and downs, or that one might be more in love than the other. But when she makes some claim, she has no facts to back it up. Here it is just a bogus myth to back up her conclusion.

Later she shows some knowledge when she says:

LaViolette: It's a mandatory report to the police [when a domestic violence medical injury is treated in California] ...

What I find to be most true is that there is not a lot of record of medical or police calls in a lot of domestic violence cases, that when people are intending to stay together, they don't call the police, because they don't want their partners arrested, they don't want a record, that kind of thing. ... That will go for victims of either gender.

There is some truth to this. The broader principle is called the law of unintended consequences. California feminists and liberals can pass a law requiring reporting, and the result can be less reporting, because the reports have severe and unfair consequences that people want to avoid.

Of course LaViolette does not have any data that would allow applying to this case.

She also testified:

LaViolette: I also, by the way, have people who are sophisticated enough that they are not doing physical abuse because they know that they can be arrested for it. And much more of the abuse is controlling behavior and psychological.

Defense lawyer: You mean you have actually seen perpetrators do that:

LaViolette: Yes.

So if laws against girlfriend beating are enforced, then men will do it less. But in her view, the psychological abuse is worse, so I guess these laws are counter-productive.

LaViolette was asked about the Conflict tactics scale. She said she had several disagreements with it. This drew an objection, but the defense successfully argued that an expert is allowed to give her opinion.

The trouble with this line of argument is that an expert is supposed to be following generally accepted knowledge. Once she starts disagreeing with the accepted knowledge, it leaves the jury confused. Are they supposed to follow the accepted knowledge or the disagreement?

And ultimately LaViolette's testimony is based on her impression of a lot of hearsay, while there is no direct admissible evidence for her premises. For example she assumes that Jodi was abused by her parents, and those parents are sitting in the courtroom without having testified.

A lot of what LaViolette says seems just plain wrong. For example, she testified that the evidence shows that Travis was jealous, and there is no trace of Jodi being jealous. But Jodi's diary said:

I certainly wasn't thrilled - no - I was DEVASTATED when I discovered that he wasn't being faithful to me. I just don't get why men cheat!!! ... Infidelity is so awful and causes rediculous [sic] pain. ... Each time the transgressor seemed grieved that I got hurt.

This proves that Jodi was jealous. LaViolette also testified that Jodi did not write about her being abused because she believed in the law of attraction. But the above diary shows that Jodi did write negative things about Travis.

Update: The defense complained about the release of documents and videos, and asked that the jury be sequestered. The judge said no. The documents and video seem to contradict what the defense experts are saying, and the defense does not want the jury to see that.

Expert says victim was an abuser

I continue to be baffled at how the Jodi Arias domestic violence expert LaViolette is taken seriously.

If the man she killed, Travis Alexander, were an abuser, then that might be a motive for Jodi to kill him. But it would still be murder. They were not married or living together, and she was not particularly dependent on him. She could have easily walked away.

But the purpose of the testimony seems to be that the abuse from Travis was so subtle that only an expert would recognize it. Jodi did not know that she was being abused.

Here is the abuse. Travis is accused of flirting with women. Travis once called Jodi a "skank" in a text message. Travis had anal sex with Jodi, including once after Jodi had a Mormon baptism.

Jodi did not like being called a skank, but Travis apologized so Jodi did not take it as abuse. Jodi thought that the anal sex was less sinful than the vaginal sex, and she enjoyed it with two other boyfriends also. This showed that she did not realize that the anal sex was abusive.

The expert testified that anal sex is inappropriate after a Mormon baptism.

Jodi once emailed one boyfriend saying that she was loyal to Travis, and then forwarded the email to Travis. This supposedly shows that while Travis said that their relationship was not exclusive, he somehow preferred Jodi to not have other boyfriends.

This all is supposed to explain why Jodi never told anyone about the abuse. The abuse was so subtle that no one would have belleve that it was abusive. Her friends might tell her, for example, that Travis was not being abusive when he told her that she could date other men.

Her biggest argument was that an email showed that Jodi was more in love with Travis than Travis was in love in Jodi. This created a power inbalance in the relationship, and such relationships are inherently abusive.

I thought that LaViolette is making a fool out of herself, but I afraid that I am wrong. My guess is that her client list and rates will go way up after this trial.

Here are some of her buzz phrases: "learned hopefulness", for Jodi sometimes hoping for marriage with Travis and sometimes not, and "variable interval reinforcement", for Travis sometimes being nicer than at other times, "loving respite" and "honeymoon phase", for making up after an argument.

LaViolette somehow finds Travis to be deceptive, manipulative, and jealous. As far as I can see, there is no actual evidence on the record of any of those things. Those terms apply much more to Jodi. It seems to me that LaViolette is just a man-hater, and that she could call Travis abusive no matter what he did. The only psychological diagnosis here to be made is that Jodi is a psychopath, and these experts would say so if they were honest and competent.

Correction: HLN TV just broadcast the police interviews of Jodi's parents, and they told the police that Jodi was bipolar. So yes, there is another possible diagnosis.

Google down-ranks unnatural links

I mentioned that this blog is blocked by some filtering software. Now I get this email, about Google's censoring policies:

Hi George,

We would like to discuss an important matter with you regarding your site.

It has come to our attention that Google has penalized our site due to our backlink profile. Unfortunately, a link to our site on your website may be considered unnatural by Google and may be partially responsible for our penalization.

Because of this, we request that you remove the link to our site that is located here and says: ...

Apparently this firm posted some spam in my blog comments a couple of years ago, and now Google is penalizing them for it. So now they want me to remove the comments.

Perhaps I should be happy that Google is discouraging spam, but who appointed Google the policeman of the web? I am using Google to filter the spam, so if some got thru, I blame Google. (Occasionally a legitimate comment gets held up by mistake.)

The questionable practice here is that Google penalizes sites for what it considers unnatural links. Apparently I could punish a site I don't like by putting a bunch of unnatural links to it on my blog. They would be left begging me to remove the links, as the above letter does. I could refuse.

Google complains a lot about censorship in China and elsewhere, but it does its own form of censorship when it down-ranks web sites out of disapproval of the links to those sites.

Criminal court experts can also be bad

I have been following the Jodi Arias trial, and I may have to reassess some things I've said here in the past. I have long complained that the family court allows expert testimony of the sort that would not be admissible in a criminal court. For example, I wrote in Dec. 2011:

Power corrupts, and the psychologists are not reliable. I got a Palo Alto psychologist named Ken Perlmutter and he gave testimony that would never be admissible in a real court. He did not apply any psychological expertise at all, and just gave an incompetent opinion. I have detailed his incompetence and bias on this blog. Maybe someday the legal system will recognize that a crook like Perlmutter should never testify in court.

And in Nov. 2011:

But a conclusory statement is one that tries to give some sort of conclusion without supporting evidence. In a real court, testimony is dismissed as soon as the lawyer points out that it is conclusory. The quack court shrinks write conclusory reports that no legitimate judge would accept.

Jodi gives shrink the finger. HLN TV blurred it.

But the Jodi Arias defense experts are shockingly bad, and the judge and prosecution meekly put up with them.

Maybe this judge has just lost control of the case. Maybe she (yes, judge Sherry Stephens is a woman) is scared that a death penalty verdict will not withstand appeal unless she bends over backwards to allow the defense to do whatever it wants. I doubt it, because this trial is a train wreck that probably will not have a death penalty verdict anyway. There is overwhelming evidence of premeditated first degree murder, but it will be hard for the jury to stay focused on the real issues.

It appears that the problem with expert psychotherapist testimony is much more widespread than I thought.

One of the basic rules of American justice is the hearsay rule. It is shown in the Sixth Amendment:

In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial,... to be confronted with the witnesses against him; ...

The idea here is that you cannot be convicted based on someone's out-of-court accusations, or even affidavits under oath. All statements have to come from witnesses who testify in court, and are cross-examined when confronted in court.

The Jodi Arias trial violates the hearsay rule at least 20 times a day. The defense domestic violence expert LaViolette is testifying that Travis (the victim) was an abuser based entirely on hearsay.

Normally, testimony of abuse has to come from an eyewitness. Jodi could testify that she was abused. A voicemail or email could be admitted only if the author testifies about what he meant by the message. Since Travis is dead, his emails would be hearsay but might be admitted under a hearsay exception.

You sometimes hear about a trial witness being murdered before he can testify at a gangster trial. That is because all his police statements, affidavits, and depositions are all hearsay unless he actually testifies in the court trial.

But LaViolette has read emails from Jodi and Travis and argued that they are evidence of abuse. The judge has ruled that this is admissible provided that LaViolette does not quote from the emails. As long as she paraphrases an email or draws her own factual conclusions, the testimony is allowed.

This is backwards. The emails do not even show any abuse. LaViolette's theory is that the abuse is so subtle that only an expert like herself can recognize it. But she does not even have any expertise in reading emails.

LaViolette might think that anal sex is abusive. I doubt that it was, as Jodi herself testified that she enjoyed anal sex with other boyfriends. But that is up to the jury, and this witness's opinion is irrelevant unless she has some data or other generally accepted expert knowledge about anal sex to inform the jury. But LaViolette has no expertise in anal sex and has not presented any knowledge on the subject. She just has her opinion.

Occasionally the prosecutor makes a hearsay objection by saying, "objection foundation". He is not allowed to say any more before the jury because the judge has forbidden "talking objections". If such an objection is sustained, then the defense lawyer merely backtracks slightly by asking something like, "Is this email important to you? ... Please explain why." Whereupon the witness says that the email shows abuse or whatever the defense wanted, and usually without objection. Thus the defense has managed to get in all of the hearsay as evidence.

This goes against what I thought that I knew about criminal procedure. There is supposed to be some linkage between the witness's expert knowledge, and some factual question at issue in the trial. Here, there is none.

This trial is costing millions:

The Jodi Arias murder trial became even more of a spectacle Thursday as defense attorneys argued that the prosecutor committed misconduct by signing autographs and posing for pictures with fans outside court. ...

The argument played out as officials revealed that the cost of Arias' defense to taxpayers has exceeded $1.4 million to date. Arias is represented by court-appointed attorneys at a rate of up to $250 per hour after she was unable to afford her own defense.

This does not include the tax money spent by police, prison, prosecutor, and court.

The press reports:

LaViolette said many victims of domestic violence don't leave their abusers because "shame and humiliation will keep people stuck."

During her 18 days on the witness stand, Arias described repeated instances of Alexander physically abusing her, once even choking her into unconsciousness.

LaViolette explained that it's typical for a battered woman not to tell anyone about the abuse.

"They want people to like their partner," she said. "They don't want anybody to think they have lousy taste."

Typical? It would be more useful to say that first degree murderers lie about their crimes.

If she were really an expert on this, she would tell us what percent of women are abused, and what percent do not tell anyone. And also she would tell us about all the women who make up a phony abuse story in court, when her lawyer advises her that it is to her legal advantage.

A real expert would tell us whether she can distinguish real abuse from phony abuse, and give some verifiable procedure for measuring her accuracy. LaViolette cannot do anything of the kind, of course.

Most ourtageiously, she claimed that an "email string" showed abuse, but was unable to point to any specific words or sentences that were abusive. She explained this by saying that she heard somewhere that 90% of communication is nonverbal, so she was inferring abuse from the emails without necessarily having verbal evidence.

Prosecutor Juan Martinez is widely praised as a tough cross-examiner, but I do not think that he is competent enough to pick apart LaViolette. We will see. And if he is, I do not think that Judge Stephens is smart enough to understand just how bad LaViolette is.

Here is how the testimony was reported:

LaViolette was referencing email exchanges between Arias, Alexander and his longtime friends Chris and Sky Hughes.

LaViolette was not allowed to quote from the emails and they were not shown to the jury, but she was allowed to paraphrase the content and offer her opinion on it.

"The question with regard to whether or not the Hugheses thought Mr. Alexander had previously been abusive with women, is that important to you?" Arias’ defense attorney, Jennifer Willmott, asked LaViolette.

"Yes, it is," LaViolette replied.

"Does that help you to formulate an opinion ultimately about the type of relationship this ended up to be?" asked Willmott.

"Yes it does," said LaViolette.

"And so, in this e-mail, is there information about whether or not Mr. Alexander's closest friends thought he had issues with women?" Willmott asked.

"Yes, there is," said LaViolette.

Isn't this obviously bogus? If Alexander's friends thought he had issues, and if those issues were somehow related to his killing, then the friends could be called in to testify under oath. For some shlock expert to testify that he had issues based on some emails is crazy. And it is even worse that the jury is not allowed to see the emails.

California passed Evidence Code 1107 just to grease the wheels for domestic violence experts:

1107. (a) In a criminal action, expert testimony is admissible by either the prosecution or the defense regarding intimate partner battering and its effects, including the nature and effect of physical, emotional, or mental abuse on the beliefs, perceptions, or behavior of victims of domestic violence, except when offered against a criminal defendant to prove the occurrence of the act or acts of abuse which form the basis of the criminal charge.

(b) The foundation shall be sufficient for admission of this expert testimony if the proponent of the evidence establishes its relevancy and the proper qualifications of the expert witness. Expert opinion testimony on intimate partner battering and its effects shall not be considered a new scientific technique whose reliability is unproven.

... it refers to "intimate partner battering and its effects" in place of "battered women's syndrome."

This law does require "relevancy", and therefore defense lawyers argued that the prosecution should not be allowed the use domestic violence experts unless there is some evidence of domestic violence. This law was written to make it easier to convict men of domestic violence.

However the California Supreme Court removed ine relevancy requirement in People v. Brown (2004), which decided (also reported here):

Expert testimony on battered women's syndrome may be introduced at domestic violence trials, even in the absence of prior evidence of abuse, the California Supreme Court ruled Monday. Such evidence can be admitted, the court held, because the judge could use it in evaluating the credibility of a victim's courtroom testimony. A domestic violence counselor testified that 80 percent to 85 percent of battered women recant their testimony before or at trial.

Sometimes a man is charged with domestic violence, and the only witness is his wife or girlfriend  and she testifies that he did not abuse her or refuses to testify. The the prosecution uses a domestic violence expert to testify that the woman is just trying to protect her man, and that the state needs to bust up an unhealthy relationship.

The lone dissenter was Janice Rogers Brown, who is now a federal appeals judge in DC. The name of the case, "People v Brown", is based on a defendant named Brown. By a coincidence of names, it was also "People v Brown" because Judge Brown was the only sensible judge we had in California.

I do not know whether Arizona has a law like California's. Apparently Arizona does allow bogus domestic violence expert testimony.

Update: I have previously mentioned Supreme Court cases on the right to confront witnesses here and here, and Justice Scalia's skepticism about psychologists.

Update: Here is LaViolette's exact testimony:

Defense lawyer (after objection): Why is that important to you, Ms. LaViolette?

LaViolette: It's important to me because there is a saying in the -- I don't know if it's all the world, but in the clinical world that 90% of all the communication is nonverbal. One of the things we're looking at is a communication apparently by Mr. Alexander that although he says it's okay for her to date, ...

Prosecutor: Objection.

So she managed to testify that her expertise allows her to figure out that Travis Alexander's non-abusive email was actually controlling somehow. She later cited an email Jodi wrote to other boyfriend, saying she is loyal to Travis even tho they are in a non-exclusive relationship. Jodi forwarded the email to Travis. So maybe Jodi did not want to maintain multiple sexual relationships at once, and told the man she wanted to be her main boyfriend. How is this abuse? Don't most women do this?