The journal of Juror #5 in the case of The People of Alameda County v. Charles Arnett Stevens and Richard Clark.
...Which brings us to today. Dr. Cooper came back to the stand to continue his testimony. Mr. Burr began by detailing all of the sources used by Dr. Cooper in formulating his opinion that Richard was inclined to be compliant in the face of authority. First, Richard met with Dr. Cooper on two occasions for three hours each. He was given the MMPI, the TAT, and a Rorschach at the first meeting and the MMPI-2 and a Babcock Story Recall test the second time. They only spoke about the circumstances of his arrest and questioning for an hour at most. The doctor "skimmed the notes" and transcripts of the interrogation. He read the reports of a private investigator from five people who had known Clark and he used the data from six published articles dealing with alleged false confessions.
From the articles, Cooper found that false confessors can be broken down into three groups: the "kooks", (a very scientific term), who call or come in to confess to high-profile crimes for attention; people who are essentially brainwashed, believing they in fact committed the crime after being programmed or forcibly coerced into thinking so; and finally the people who are "compliant passive", who will follow the flow of a perceived dangerous situation and do or say things against their best interests in order to avoid conflict or harm. As expected, he feels that Clark fits this mold due to the abuse suffered at the hands of his father, the father figure looming large in the mind of this good doctor as the atypical symbol of authority.
Mr. Burr began his attack on the credibility of this theory and its application to Mr. Clark by asking whether Dr. Cooper had studied the notes and transcripts from the actual questioning sessions of August 2-3, 1989. "I did skim them" was the reply. ("Skim" them!) Then Burr discussed the five people spoken to by the private investigator hired by Mr. Zimmer. Turned out that four of them had only known Clark in his per-adolescent years. He is now twenty-five, so they are no more than faint background noise. The fifth person was Richard's godmother, who lives over at 740 27th street, right at the scene of Loquan Sloan's death. She was the one who confirmed that Clark came to see her three or four times a week right up until his arrest, hardly something useful in the proof of innocence.
Then the real show began, One by one, Mr. Burr picked up the six articles used as research by Dr. Cooper and picked them apart. First, we found that only two of the articles were written and published in the U.S., one was the result of a French study involving their methods of interrogation, and the final three were written by the same author concerning a British study of false confessions.
Mr. Burr picked up the first U.S. study. It dealt with a 22-question test to determine a person's predisposition to falsely confess. Though over four hundred people were tested, only fifty of them were actual criminals. And of the fifty, none of them was found in a court of law to have given a "true" false confession, under duress or otherwise. The rest of the people were students, school faculty at UC Berkeley, student nurses, etc. So Mr. Burr held up the Xeroxed packet and said: "So this study really doesn't have any relevance to this particular case, does it?"
"No, I suppose not", said the doctor.
Mr. Burr deftly tossed the report to the side of his table with a soft "plop", like the showman he is.
The next article was. of all things, highly critical of the use of psychologists and psychiatrists in legal cases to determine predisposition to false confessions. It stated outright that "one should be skeptical of any claim of false confession, considering the nature of the criminal to recant in order to escape punishment." While there might have been some useful information in the study, I can hardly see why the doctor would use it to the extent that a copy would have to be provided to the DA. Didn't they suspect that any reasonable person would use its very words against them? I've given up second-guessing, preferring to be surprised...it's much more interesting.
Plop...as that one bit the dust.
Next Day
I'm a little rushed this morning, so I'm going to shorten up my notes here and expand on them later. Today I expect to hear the first closing arguments and I don't want to let this slip away with whatever else goes down'
(1) French - 48 hours limit
- sleep deprivation
- physical abuse
- American system geared against
"plop"
(3) British
- client tells barrister he committed the crime, must plead "guilty"
- British system the model by which we offset our system to counter exactly that
kind of coercion
- No evidence in these studies of somebody "true" false confessing
- Just theoretical model, not applicable to this case
"plop. plop, plop"
3/10/93
continued...
Mr. Burr then looked over the results of the MMPI and discussed the results with the doctor. Mr. Zimmer wasn't very happy about it, as none of the data were used in his claim of coerced confession. The independent analysis of the report indicated that Richard Clark was "prone to using others hedonistically for his own ends irrespective of their welfare." He has higher highs and lower lows than the norm and is said to have a "borderline" personality. Truth to tell, with all the objection to this line of questioning by Mr. Zimmer I didn't really change my opinion of Mr. Clark or his ability to kill. Mr. Selvin got a hold of Dr. Clark briefly, just long enough to imply that the part in the MMPI about using other people might lead to Clark accusing Stevens of crimes he himself had committed.
Mr. Zimmer tried to do some spin control to counter the damage done by Mr. Burr's cross. It wasn't very effective, given the masterful mix of theatrics and painstaking homework done by the man. He was able to converse intelligently and concisely in the language of the specialty to turn the testimony of this defense witness into a flaming wreck.
Judging by most of the reactions I observed amongst the jurors, (a lot of) doubt about the idea that the state of mind Clark was under was not adequately addressed was confirmed. In other words the "expert" helped shoot bigger holes in the defense than some of the prosecution witnesses.
Getting down to the wire....
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