When the Witness Woofs

When a New York teenager had to testify against her father, claiming he raped and impregnated her, she shared the witness box with a helper.  According to The New York Times, that helper was Rosie, a specially trained golden retriever who comforts and encourages traumatized or stressed individuals.  Rosie has a highly developed sense of empathy, and will nuzzle, snuggle or lean against someone who is experiencing stress or trauma.  Psychologists sing the praises of service dogs like her, and courts in several states have ruled that witnesses who are especially vulnerable, such as children in sexual abuse cases, may be accompanied by canine helpers.

As you might imagine, approval of Rosie and dogs like her is not universal.  Everyone agrees that Rosie is adorable, but therein lies part of the alleged problem.  Defense attorneys fear that Rosie gives credibility to the child witness that may or may not be justified.  One of the public defenders in the case, David S. Martin, protested that each time the child witness stroked the dog’s fur, “it sent an unconscious message to the jury that she was under stress because she was telling the truth,” adding “There is no way for me to cross-examine the dog.”  Although the lawyer for the prosecution in this case refused to comment about Rosie for the article, Ellen O’Neill-Stephens, a Seattle prosecutor who is a proponent of dog-helpers in court, said “Sometimes the dog means the difference between a conviction and an acquittal.”

The past several decades have seen a great deal of discussion about the difficulty of dealing with child witnesses in a criminal trial, and there have been many judicial experiments – some effective and some not. 

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Custody Concerns

A custody dispute that has recently been in the national news illustrates the convoluted nature of custody law which has led in this particular case to a very troubling outcome.  (I submit that this case is also Exhibit A as to why the public has such a bad impression of law and lawyers, but that is a topic for another day).

The New York Times reports that mother Trisha Conlon was thwarted in her efforts to obtain a custody order keeping her 13 and 14-year-old boys out of the home of her ex-husband and his current wife Kristine.  Why did Ms. Conlon request this order?  Because the current wife, Kristine Cushing, killed the two daughters she had with the father (and Trisha’s ex-husband), John Cushing Jr.  The killings occurred in 1991.  Mrs. Cushing was found not guilty by reason of insanity allegedly caused by an adverse reaction to Prozac.  She was hospitalized in a mental facility for four years, and was monitored for almost ten years after that.  In 2005, the state of California gave her an unconditional release.

Ms. Conlon learned that her boys were in the same household with Mrs. Cushing in 2007, but her ex said not to worry, he and Mrs. Cushing were splitting up.  They didn’t.  She recently discovered (with the help of a lawyer and a private investigator) that the boys have been in the home with Mrs. Cushing since 2008 – hence her request for a new custody order.

The Court Commissioner deciding the case declined to alter the existing order, which places one boy with each parent during the school year, and keeps them together in one or the other household for holidays and vacations.  The Commissioner’s reasoning was that, since the boys had been spending time with Mrs. Cushing since 2007 (even though their mother did not know of it), there is not now any significant change in circumstances that would warrant a change in physical placement.  Mrs. Conlon is appealing the decision.

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The Right to Violent Video Games

This week, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down a California law banning the sale of violent video games to children.  In Brown v. Entertainment Merchants Association, 564 U.S. 1 (2011), the Court held that the First Amendment right to free speech protects the video games.  As I predicted last November in a blog post on the oral argument in this case, Justice Scalia did not favor upholding the law, and indeed he wrote the majority opinion, which was joined by Justices Kennedy, Ginsburg, Sotomayor, and Kagan.  Justice Alito and Chief Justice Roberts wrote a separate opinion, concurring in the judgment, while only Justices Thomas and Breyer dissented.

So what’s to like – or at least protect – about violent video games?  The opinion is clear that video games are protected by the First Amendment.  Although the Court notes that the Free Speech Clause exists primarily “to protect discourse on public matters,” it has long been “recognized that it is difficult to distinguish politics from entertainment, and dangerous to try.”  The Court notes that there are plenty of examples of political commentary or even propaganda to be found in fiction.  The Court goes on to state that last term’s opinion in United States v. Stevens controls.  Stevens struck down a statute that criminalized the creation, sale, or possession of specified types of depiction of animal cruelty, and Scalia summarized the holding thusly: “new categories of unprotected speech may not be added to the list by a legislature that concludes certain speech is too harmful to be tolerated.” (564 U.S. at 3)  Here, the California legislature tried to characterize the regulation of violent video games as dealing with a type of obscenity, and the majority states that violence is different from obscenity, and therefore it is irrelevant that Ginsberg v. New York allowed the state to apply an age-adjusted standard for its restriction on the sale of obscene materials to minors.  The Court says that California tried “to create a wholly new category of content-based regulation that is permissible only for speech directed at children.”  “That,” says the Court “is unprecedented and mistaken.” (564 U.S. at 7)

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