“It’s PTSD that all of us in this sort of fraternity suffer,” Herman Atkins told NBC News, in a story this week about the lasting trauma of wrongful convictions on Black men convicted of crimes they didn’t commit. Black Americans make up half of all exonerees, despite being only about 13% of the nation’s population.
In 2000, DNA evidence cleared Atkins of a rape conviction. Even two decades later, he told NBC News, he’s constantly seeking to establish alibis, hoarding receipts and staring into security cameras, just to avoid being wrongfully accused of a crime again. “Being in prison when you know you shouldn’t be there is hard to describe. It’s crushing,” Atkins said. “You are fearful of death almost every second, conditioned in ways that bring on paranoia and anger.”
“Former NH detective James McLaughlin, the shady detective who was instrumental in pursuing lie after lie about Fr. Gordon MacRae sending him to a long prison term in 1994, was prominent on the Laurie List for “Falsification of Records” and/or evidence. Over 28 years of wrongful imprisonment in the New Hampshire State Prison, MacRae has consistently asserted that the case against him was built on lies, cheating and distortions aided and abetted by a dishonest police officer.”
“How to account for trauma’s creep? Take your corners. Modern life is inherently traumatic. No, we’re just better at spotting it, having become more attentive to human suffering in all its gradations. Unless we’re worse at it—more prone to perceive everything as injury. In a world infatuated with victimhood, has trauma emerged as a passport to status—our red badge of courage?”
Far too many people get their scientific “information” from best-selling novels and popular movies and TV shows. As a result, there is a vast misunderstanding of trauma and a concurrent belief in baseless theories, such as repressed memory. The consequences have been disastrous. For example, many innocent people are rotting in prison for committing crimes that never occurred.
In this essay, literary critic Paruh Sebgal argues that the reliance on trauma as a plot device has also led to a lot of over rated literary and theatrical fiction Read the entire article in The New Yorker.
Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Off on The case against the trauma plot
Friends of Justice is a personal blog. Here I speak only for myself.
“Public and political support for registries remains high. There is little evidence that attitudes have been impacted by a growing body of research showing that public registration, community notification, and residency restrictions do not decrease the incidence of sexual offense. Rates of sexual re-offense have been low both before and after registries, and sex offenses have lower recidivism than almost all other crimes. Further, decades of data consistently show that the majority of sex offenses involve non-strangers and those without prior sex-offense convictions. In other words, there’s scant proof that sex offender registries make us any safer.”
On April 13, 2022. this important conference was held via Zoom.
Susannah Karin is a licensed social worker with over 20 years of experience in NYC’s criminal justice system. For the past nine years, she has been coordinating re-entry services for clients of the Center for Appellate Litigation, a public defender law firm that represents people at Sex Offender Risk Assessment hearings as well as people appealing their criminal convictions in New York and Bronx counties.
Journalist Judith Levine is author, with Erica R. Meiners, of The Feminist and the Sex Offender (Verso, 2020), which grapples with two interlocking problems: sexual and gender violence; and the state’s unjust, ineffective, and soul-destroying response to it. The book explores how to hold sexual harm-doers accountable without recourse to a criminal justice system that redoubles injuries, fails survivors, and retrenches the conditions that made such abuse possible. How can social justice movements work together to end all violence, both by individuals and the state?
Levine is also a board member of the National Center for Reason and Justice, as well as the author of four other books. She is currently a frequent contributor to The Intercept and Boston Review.
Sponsored by the St. Francis College Departments of Sociology & Criminal Justice
+ Women’s & Gender Studies
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Friends of Justice is a personal blog. Here I speak only for myself.
Jimenez wrote that the diagnosis of Shaken Baby Syndrome, also known as Abusive Head Trauma, is “an assumption packaged as a medical diagnosis” and “lacks scientific grounding.”
Read the article by Elizabeth Weill-Greenberg in The Appeal.
Posted in Innocents | Comments Off on Judge calls BS on “Shaken Baby Syndrome”
Friends of Justice is a personal blog. Here I speak only for myself.
Bill Dobbs of The Dobbs Wire sent us links to videos of a conference that took place in St. Paul, Minnesota on April 8, 2022: the eighth annual Understanding and Responding to Mass Incarceration (URMI) Conference. This year’s conference focused on the Minnesota Sex Offender Program — almost certainly the worst in the nation.
People convicted of sex offenses in Minnesota, regardless of the offense, receive life sentences. Supposedly they can be released if they successfully complete “treatment.” But no one ever does.
Treatment that can’t be completed is treatment that doesn’t work. And treatment that doesn’t work is not treatment.
“Former NH detective James McLaughlin, the shady detective who was instrumental in pursuing lie after lie about Fr. Gordon MacRae sending him to a long prison term in 1994, was prominent on the Laurie List for “Falsification of Records” and/or evidence. Over 28 years of wrongful imprisonment in the New Hampshire State Prison, MacRae has consistently asserted that the case against him was built on lies, cheating and distortions aided and abetted by a dishonest police officer.”
“Public and political support for registries remains high. There is little evidence that attitudes have been impacted by a growing body of research showing that public registration, community notification, and residency restrictions do not decrease the incidence of sexual offense. Rates of sexual 
